For All Mankind: Peristroika

January 11, 2024 8:31 PM - Season 4, Episode 10

It's a FAM finale. You know the sort of things that happens during those. Actual description below the spoiler cut. Be forewarned before you click if you haven't watched yet.

Actual description: Team Asteroid Steal gets a last minute team member. Miles is an idiot. Chekhov's gun goes off. Surprisingly, nobody died?!?! Next season: Goldilocks.

My snarky commentary written while watching:
Tuttle finds Chekhov/Danny's gun. (P.S. Who is Tuttle?)
Miles is tortured with air. I rather enjoy this.
Aleida just yelling FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK except muted to music.
'I didn't do this to your family, Miles. You did." This is why I can't stand Miles.
The show has us not hear how Margo hears it, though the captions point out what she's mouthing.
Uh-oh, Margo, that was a terrible idea to lose it in public. She doesn't quite yell YOU MURDERED SERGEI, but it's thisclose.

"Then I wouldn't have a tether." "You said you wanted to be an astronaut, didn't you?"
OH FUCK YOU ED NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

"Let me talk to Ed. I know he's in here." "Ed not here." "DON'T START WITH ME." "Hi Bob."

And there goes Sam.
WELL, AREN'T YOU GLAD YOU HAVE A TETHER
Dead. Silence.
Margo: hey, I'm already dead, right
And there's Chekhov's gun.
Aw shit, there goes Dani. Proving everybody right about last week. And every other dumbshit stayed alive. Ed. Miles.
"The Russians withdrew her diplomatic immunity."
Wow, one last hug.

And yet....somehow Lee got his wife back? HOW?!?! Someone please explain to me how this happened since I saw literally no way to do this at any point during the season.

DANIELLE'S STILL ALIVE THANK YOUUUUUUUUUUUU

Next season: 2012. Kuznetsov Station on Goldilocks.

How is Ed still alive?!

COME WATCH KRYS MARSHALL SAY THE THINGS SHE’S NOT SUPPOSED TO SAY! AMA 1/12 @12pm!

posted by jenfullmoon (51 comments total)

Danielle dying would have legit made me cry. She got what she truly deserved at the end and I love it.
posted by azpenguin at 8:58 PM on January 11 [5 favorites]

I am unreasonably relieved that fictional character Margo Madison is safe (relatively speaking) in American prison.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 9:09 PM on January 11 [3 favorites]

Yeah, Margo made the right play. Better to be on trial in America than dead in Russia.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 9:21 PM on January 11 [3 favorites]

All of us here: This season is much better, there's no Danny!

Miles, Ed, Dev, Sam, dude with the gun, Ilya, all of the lower decks workers, the CIA, the KGB, Margo, and Aleida:

WE ARE ALL DANNY NOW


- What happened to all of those guns? A whole troop of soldiers with guns approach the NK compound, they get attacked by Miles's friends, and they start a fistfight? As far as I could tell not a single gun was fired. Except Chekhov's.

- Well done suspense for the most part.

- Ed is THE WORST. If he's alive and not in Mars' first prison next season I'll go insane.

- How is Dev not in space prison himself?

- Longest wait for Checkhov's Gun ever!

- I was disappointed in Aleida. I figured she would turn Margo in. But I guess she's always had a weak spot there. (I'm pretty sure I made this identical comment last season.)
posted by mmoncur at 4:36 AM on January 12 [4 favorites]

Link to deleted duplicate post in case anyone else needs to rescue their comments.
posted by mmoncur at 4:37 AM on January 12 [3 favorites]

Margo can also trade information about her time/experience at Roscosmos for some leniency in whatever her sentencing turns out to be. She will of course have to be wary of tea/windows for the rest of her life.
posted by mikepop at 4:38 AM on January 12 [4 favorites]

Alan Sepinwall does a brief (free Substack, he isn't changing over yet) recaplet of the show.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:35 AM on January 12 [1 favorite]

P.S. Who is Tuttle?

Brazil was last episode.
posted by nathan_teske at 7:03 AM on January 12 [4 favorites]

Brazil was last episode.

[insert Captain America "I got that reference" meme]

This ended better than I expected and with a lot less people dying. Like no one died, which was amazing. Though what's her name in charge of Roscosmos may be on her way to dying or at least, a gulag somewhere in Siberia.

Margo 100% did the right play. I honestly thought withdrawing immunity was kind of lenient when they could have tried to drag her back to Russia for torture and/or death as a Soviet citizen or whatever her status was. I'm at a loss at how her story about inputing the code is going to hold up since someone reviewing the video, I ASSUME there's video of mission control will show her chilling off to the side while Aleida is busy typing away. You'd think they could source the code to her console and all.

I appreciate that Tuttle's gun was hidden inside a compartment in a wall.

Miles did it, and I don't know how, but he did it with Lee's wife. It makes no sense, and the fact that there were multiple people, who were these people? It wasn't clear if they were also North Koreans or just other people, family members of other people at Happy Valley or?

All I could do was to sit there and seethe about the Company Man (Michaels?), god, he went from anonymity to the jerk I hate the most in record time. I knew the torture was going to backfire, but how kind of the US government to blame it on NASA rather than covert CIA/KGB agents hanging out on Mars.

Good ol' Ilya, back from obscurity to save his wayward student.

I am not sure what laws there are for Mars rocks being sold on earth. I know Moon rocks are controlled under federal law, but unless they updated it for Mars rocks I'm a bit confused as to what crime Miles' wife was an accessory to. Maybe misuse of government resources? Eh. Believe it or not, but I was all up for the popular uprising.

Based on the placement of the wound, I figured Danielle would be okay, but I'm glad we got to see her hold her grandbaby.

Expectations for next season in 2012...

Happy Valley now has a population in the thousands. Alternatively, there's a Helios run town operating on its own, even. Kelly Baldwin discovers life, which clashes with growing suggestions of terraforming Mars (this would be an incredibly hard thing to do, fwiw). Self government grows as a factor in the storylines (difficult so far as Mars colony relies on supplies from Earth).

Danielle is head of NASA, unless somehow its Aleida. Margot will be shown just getting out of prison after the thoughtfully suggested reduced time for cooperating on sharing Roscosmos secrets and may or may not return to NASA or Helios or will go to Mars. Miles' family may make it to Mars or Miles returns home a "billionaire." (this makes me laugh).

Too many thoughts oof.
posted by Atreides at 7:49 AM on January 12 [1 favorite]

In addition to the bunch of North Koreans arriving on Mars—which reminded me a lot of the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when people that had disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle or whatever walked off the alien ship—I was downright befuddled by the jump in time to Kuznetsov Station. Like, no hint of consequences for the saboteurs on Mars. Really? Just going to gloss right over that?
posted by adamrice at 8:27 AM on January 12 [2 favorites]

how kind of the US government to blame it on NASA rather than covert CIA/KGB agents hanging out on Mars.

I am not above pausing the video to read a news paper article when the audience is expected to only read the headline. Well, the paper Eli puts down says that the CIA did it and has been doing it elsewhere that nobody knew about, and Congress is having hearings about these blacksite operations.

Does "Abu Graib" translate to "Happy Valley" in Arabic?
posted by pwnguin at 8:27 AM on January 12 [2 favorites]

God damn what a banger! Love the double fakeout where you think it's Ed who was shot, then Dani dying – then they're both still alive – you love to see it. Also they absolutely got me with the North Korean dude's wife finally arriving, hell yeah.

I like how they are finally breaking free of the Cold War shit and now there is a new player in town with Mars as an economic and political entity...
posted by adrianhon at 8:41 AM on January 12 [2 favorites]

Look, this is fiction so I get to wish for whatever I want. Just once, just once I would like to see a shitty man -- mainly Ed or Dev -- get their due comeuppance.
posted by danhon at 8:55 AM on January 12 [3 favorites]

Fabulous summary, cardboard!

Space Mistakes:

- the placement of the engine shutoff was technically a mistake made on 🌍

- as was hugging a notorious traitor on her perp walk

- failure to secure hatch cover that even warned about drive exhaust

- messing with the workers!
posted by sixswitch at 9:25 AM on January 12 [1 favorite]

I am pasting in cardboard’s episode summary because it was frakking hilarious:

Chekhov’s lug wrench finally makes its appearance. Sam tries to tie up some loose ends. Mr. Black Market caves under enhanced interrogation techniques and Team Heist gets burned, seeking refuge from oppression in Little North Korea.

After four seasons, space designers still put critical controls in inaccessible locations. NASA doesn’t check their mission critical code, and the override to the override gets overridden. The People of Happy Valley rise up against the police state and take crowbars to a gun fight. If there’s one thing Ilya hates more than someone muscling in on his territory, it’s a KGB mole.

Margo and Irina are the cost of progress, while Ed seems to get off scot free. Lee gets the girl. Eli keeps on Eli-ing.

2012: Martians are busily strip-mining Goldilocks for Iridium while Dev looks on approvingly, and maybe John McCain is president.
posted by sixswitch at 9:26 AM on January 12 [3 favorites]

man though i am trying so hard to not bag on this episode and this season because it had some quite nice bits, but well my being-honest-with-myself reaction is that it had a ton of momentum right up until the moment that ghost ops got raided and then it all dissipated and never really came back.

a lot of the whole season came down to how this episode wrapped everything up, and i think the episode ended up not resolving or explaining any of the important things. the season is playing with the right concepts: it's got a revolution on mars with shitty little acts of worker oppression leading to skilled organizers making tactical alliances with opportunists from the ruling classes (ed, dev) and the lumpenproletariat (crimelord miles) to seize control of resources but also set the table for knives-out shit as the three factions struggle for post-revolutionary control, it's got politics on earth evolving in unpredictable ways, it's got little hints that the cold war's big two are losing their geopolitical/arespolitical relevance and emergent powers (the other spacefaring nation-states, that goddamned corporation, the well-positioned happy valley mutineers) are beginning to sideline them, etc. etc., but in practice it felt like someone very clever had written a quite nice skeleton for the season, but all of the people who turned that skeleton into episodes were either novices or just careless. like eventually i was watching the season with a weird double vision: i was watching both the show as actually aired and also layered over it i was imagining the show it would have been if, like, for some reason ron moore called me up and asked me to script-doctor all the episodes.

like i couldn't ever quite get over how all the details were just hot nonsense, and that the plot was ultimately driven by that hot nonsense + a desire to reach a certain end goal. basically, like, whenever more tension was needed a new macguffin was invented, with no prior hint that that macguffin existed or mattered. this happened all over the place, but was most glaring with everything related at all to ranger 2: oh, there's this discriminator macguffin that makes no sense but whatever let's go with it the story needs a football for the players to fight over, oh, the discriminator thing didn't work so now there's this whole other manual override macguffin in the back of the ship for some reason, oh, but wait everyone on earth can macguffin the macguffin by macguffining the ship's computers with some macguffin code!

but also that sort of "the plot gets what it wants" business badly affected the characterization of a bunch of the characters (miles is stupid! miles is canny! miles is stupid again! miles is canny again! massey's a union organizer! massey's just a big mars fan! massey's a spy on a suicide mission! ilya loves miles! ilya hates miles for good reason cause he broke his still and exposed his crime ring and stole his bar! ilya loves miles again and will fight for him for some unclear reason!)

and like okay if you want this whole thing to be meaningful you gotta explain why earth can't just steal the asteroid back

and like if you want this whole thing to be meaningful you gotta explain how the mutineers plan on staying alive and unbrigged after the heist

and like if you want this whole thing to be meaningful you gotta explain why so many seemingly sensible people (i'm thinking once again especially massey here) are willing to run what is in the absence of an exit plan a suicide mission in order to ensure the survival of a mars colony that seems, i dunno, pretty shitty and miserable, and why people think it'd be a bad thing if the commercial mining operation picked up sticks and left the planet to the researchers who actually have business being there (which is to say kelly, who as i see it should have been the main character this season instead of just, like, the space mom who wanders into frame every so often.)

at the very least when they're planning the heist they should have had some sort of conversation about the stakes and about the methods and about the desired goals and oh yeah probably that would have been a good time to observe that the plan was structured such that dev and only dev — the biggest narcissist on two planets — would walk away with clean hands and plausible deniability vis a vis his role in it all.

i dunno, it's a fine show for what it is and i'm going to keep watching until apple pulls the plug, but the part of my brain that remembers how it felt to watch bsg fall to pieces is shouting "no!!! don't do this to yourself!!!!" as loud as it possibly can. and i find myself hoping against hope that someday someone (hell, maybe even ron moore!) might make the tense tightly plotted psychologically complex politically complex space show that i really want to see, with no wasted scenes and with every beat heightened by the inherent terrifying claustrophobia of life in space and by and the terrifying vertiginous vast emptiness of space itself, where no one has to carry the idiot ball for "you gotta carry the idiot ball else the plot doesn't work" reasons, where every detail is thought through and every detail matters and where the plot is something that emerges from the details rather than something that extravagantly summons details around it in order to get to the desired destination.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:33 AM on January 12 [8 favorites]

or as i said on the deleted thread:

meh.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:33 AM on January 12 [3 favorites]

oh also it was shitty that the base on goldilocks ended up getting named after kuznetsov instead of after the other guy who got killed, cause the stuff from the early episodes about how devastated and angry the workers were about how everyone else thought of the two people killed in the first episode as 1: kuznetsov and 2: the other guy was powerful
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:45 AM on January 12 [2 favorites]

The correct response to "Hi Bob" is "Don't you fekkin' 'Hi Bob' me."

I can't help feeling that this dropping of the ball on the characterisation and history of two of the leads is a microcosm of what I felt has changed in the show. Sure, soap operas have always been there, but there was a richer layer of complexity and accuracy. And while some of that can be handwaved away, you can't cheat the laws of physics such as lightspeed for radio communications.

14 minutes left on burn (as on-screen in Houston), 12 minutes to code the hack (really?), the hack uploaded at 2m04s left on screen, 5 minutes at lightspeed to the Ranger, and then five to get any result back... it just doesn't work. And if FAM stuck to its ethos, it could be made to work.

If Monty Python can get its songs scientifically accurate, then there's no excuse for For All Mankind.
posted by ewan at 9:50 AM on January 12 [4 favorites]

i was weirdly less bothered by the speed coding thing than most people, due to how there was prior art from the apollo missions of folks in flight control having to write insane patches on the fly. the main thing i'm thinking of was apollo 14, where as a result of an electrical short or something like that the abort button on the lem started unpredictably activating without anyone touching it, and so under extreme time pressure folks back in houston bashed together a set of assembly commands that, once toggled in by the astronauts, would trick the flight computer into ignoring the unwanted aborts. it was a v. clever hack; iirc the way it worked was by making the flight computer think that there was already an abort in progress, and so therefore it didn't need to start the abort sequence.

but also that patch was, like, five lines of assembly, rather than the big silly pile of do-while loops that we saw margo scribbling out on paper, and the apollo programmers had a few hours to devise and implement it rather than just 15 minutes.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:06 AM on January 12 [2 favorites]

okay okay okay i'll shut up now but jeezy pete how come aleida had to write an obviously hostile line of code rather than just making a couple of easily overlooked plausibly fatfinger-derived typos? because in practice it was totally possible/likely that one or more of the people in that high-stakes livecoding game would have, i dunno, typed 3 where they were supposed to type 2, and one error like that is all that'd be needed to make the whole shebang not work.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:17 AM on January 12 [4 favorites]

Copying my post from the other thread:

I liked the plotting this season more but had a way harder time turning off my brain thinking about the technical details.

The whole heist plan is pointless. Once the asteroid is in orbit it would take exactly the same amount of delta-v in the other direction to put it back into the earth trajectory. They could do that whenever. Not that NASA's plan for it made much more sense. Also everything about the burn planning, no local overrides, the big decryption box in the CIC labelled "plot device do not tamper", the coding scene by gods the coding scene.

I know not every show can be The Expanse but I can't help but think they could have worked some more logic into the script and kept the same plot beats.

I'm all in on the Space Union though, and establishing an independent political entity on Mars could be an interesting direction for the story to go in. I was glad that for all the intrigue and drama, they keep things mostly optimistic. I was half expecting that rock to get accidentally dropped on Earth, but this isn't that show.

As always the ending teaser gave me goosebumps. M83 was a solid choice.
posted by davidest at 10:26 AM on January 12 [7 favorites]

Once the asteroid is in orbit it would take exactly the same amount of delta-v in the other direction to put it back into the earth trajectory. They could do that whenever.

Yeah, I thought the same thing. It's like the writers have never even played Kerbal Space Program. Even if they missed the transfer window, at most they have to wait two years for another one. (It's clear from the frequency of resupply missions that they aren't using minimum energy transfers to get people to Mars, but maybe they need that for the asteroid?)

My headcanon is that there must be a space treaty that prohibits moving moons, and as soon as Goldilocks got into orbit around Mars, Dev's lawyers got to work filing lawsuits.
posted by surlyben at 11:28 AM on January 12 [2 favorites]

omg i love that though. dev owns a multi-trillion dollar corporation with a fleet of spaceships, multi-trillion dollar corporations with fleets of spaceships don't steal asteroids by arranging unnecessarily complex heists carried out by scrappy bands of criminals, they steal asteroids by telling their employees to put the asteroid where the ceo wants it and then dropping an avalanche of litigation on anyone who says it should be anywhere else.

on edit:
> (It's clear from the frequency of resupply missions that they aren't using minimum energy transfers to get people to Mars, but maybe they need that for the asteroid?)

there were references made early on this season to helios engineers having invented a lightly science-fictional ion drive technology that's used on all their ships now, and that these ion drives are efficient enough that they don't have to worry about mars windows anymore. seems to suggest that moving the asteroid from mars orbit wouldn't actually be that difficult.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:58 AM on January 12 [4 favorites]

heh, Krys Marshall's last response on the AMA was "That was fun. I love you guys. Thank you for coming. Danny tastes like chicken."
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 1:51 PM on January 12 [7 favorites]

For All Mankind's Krys Marshall unpacks season 4's frenzied finale
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:15 PM on January 12 [3 favorites]

Well that was fun and satisfying. Also ridiculous and pretty dumb, the story does not bear close examination. I'll just focus on the beats.

I liked all the tension. All the last minute typing and cutoff pulling and fist fight on the skin of an accelerating spacecraft. It's ridiculous but highly entertaining, I enjoyed it.

I also liked the thing where there were two separate attempts to steal the asteroid happening in parallel. Interesting plot device. And having Margo decide at the last minute to sabotage the mission felt meaningful to me, like a real moment for her and the story.

Was not happy to see more torture porn on screen. It was slightly redeemed by having the torture not really work, then the torturers facing some swift justice at the hands of their victims. (Also shout out to Billy Lush playing the CIA agent torturer. He was good in the role.)

The North Koreans are sure in a complicated situation now. It was their gun that shot Dani, their quarters that were sabotage HQ, their radio talking to their agent that was a crucial part of the heist. None of it planned by the nation and barely even planned by Lee. But do you think the US or Soviets are going to believe that?

Boy that Kelly Baldwin / l'il Alex story just went nowhere didn't it? What a waste.

Ed's speech proclaiming himself an OG Martian was ridiculous. Mars isn't your home. There's no water, no food, no air. At least they have good weed. Maybe that explains Ed's awfulness this whole season, he was just blazed the whole time. He sure better be dead in 2012.
posted by Nelson at 7:20 PM on January 12 [4 favorites]

How is Dev not in space prison himself

I took it that, like Danny before him, Dev was exiled with a little capsule far from Happy Valley; on the ring of that crater where I believe Kelly found that special bacteria.

But, I guess his "capsule" is actually one of those little Mars lander things, so maybe he's free and just visiting from Happy Valley...

(or he agreed—in exchange for not be extradited to Earth to face charges—to live out his days on the crater ring with a flight-disabled lander as long as they kept shipping him supplies?).
posted by blueberry at 8:27 PM on January 12 [1 favorite]

This prequel series is ok, but the writing gets a lot better in The Expanse season 1.
posted by whir at 9:44 PM on January 12 [5 favorites]

Beltalowda!
posted by Nelson at 10:22 PM on January 12 [1 favorite]

The shot of the asteroid at the end gave me some serious Eon vibes. And then I wondered why the hell they haven't put the habitation on the damned inside, where it belongs. They must have some seriously good cancer treatments in this alternate history.

And now I'm sad nobody has made Eon into a show.
posted by wierdo at 5:01 AM on January 13 [1 favorite]

davidest: "Once the asteroid is in orbit it would take exactly the same amount of delta-v in the other direction to put it back into the earth trajectory. They could do that whenever."

I suppose that if the Mars partisans got control of Ranger and were adequately resourced (/me waves hands), they could keep an asteroid-diversion mission from getting a foothold on the asteroid. They'd certainly see the mission coming well in advance.
posted by adamrice at 9:30 AM on January 13 [1 favorite]

For All Mankind Bosses Talk Finale Time Jump, Who Will and Won’t Be Back in Potential Season 5

I do not so much agree with the choices with certain people.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:44 AM on January 13 [1 favorite]

Is it really Chekov's Gun if they hang it on the wall in the third act and then tell the audience they did it two acts earlier?

I'm guessing the Ranger is a one-off ship, so as long as the Martians have that then the asteroid stays above Mars. Earth only wanted it next to the Moon to speed up the processing timeline, but as long as it's been captured and being processed, there wouldn't be much political will to launch a retake mission.

How safe is it to be that close to the engines while they're firing? It seems to be following the Floor Is Lava rules, but those things are glowing in the visible spectrum so I'm guessing there should be a serious radiation hazard there.

Best episode for Miles. He gets to be a hero doing what he does best, acting dumb. Ilya gets to be the true hero though, doing a rescue of his former protege.

What is the chain of command on this base? Danielle is Commander and wears a NASA patch, but the CIA guy says his orders come from DoD so he can do what he wants. How does that all work?

I'm going to assume that Korean Commander died peacefully in his sleep, and Lee took over so he could book a flight for his wife. I don't understand why she looked surprised to see him though. Surely she knows he's on Mars, and her spaceship just landed on Mars... is she gonna be the new Miles or something?

Did Administrator Eli give up Sergei? He was looking pretty sus during Margos confrontation.

As for Season 5? I'd like to see a final season that catches us up to the present day.
posted by WhackyparseThis at 8:59 PM on January 13 [1 favorite]

I guess the comparisons to The Expanse are inevitable, and I enjoyed both the books and the show immensely, but I feel like For All Mankind is being graded on a different curve.

Which to a degree is fair since it's presenting itself as a more or less contemporary alternative history and harder SF, whereas The Expanse has incredibly efficient fusion drives that are just sort of handwaved away as the product of a miraculously innovative invention by Epstein, with a few hundred years of technological progress assumed. Also there's alien stuff that's basically completely magical, ignoring any known physics.

And realistic nuanced characterization is also not The Expanse's forte, even if the characters are mostly a ton of fun (albeit with some truly mustache-twirling villains as well).
posted by Pryde at 11:03 AM on January 14 [2 favorites]

WhackyparseThis: "What is the chain of command on this base? Danielle is Commander and wears a NASA patch, but the CIA guy says his orders come from DoD so he can do what he wants. How does that all work?"

CIA guy has guns.

As for Season 5? I'd like to see a final season that catches us up to the present day.

Supposedly, RLM has a 7-season story in mind. I have to imagine that with this sort of optimistic SF, he'll want to end showing us a bright and shiny possible future.
posted by adamrice at 11:40 AM on January 14 [3 favorites]

I have to imagine that with this sort of optimistic SF, he'll want to end showing us a bright and shiny possible future.

He did the BSG reboot, I’m betting on Cylons in S7.
posted by billsaysthis at 7:33 PM on January 14 [3 favorites]

Season 7 opens on a surprisingly young Margo getting dressed on Earth. Cut to Margo getting dressed on Mars. Voiceover: "There are many copies. And they have a plan."
posted by mmoncur at 10:47 PM on January 14 [7 favorites]

CIA guy has guns.

That makes it easier, but doesn't make it legal. One of my favourite plotlines from Babylon 5 is when a soldier realises his orders are illegitimate because they didn't come from a legitimate military authority, but from a civilian office. As far as I know, it goes the other way and the Department of Defense can't give orders to CIA or NASA.

Maybe the writers haven't seen Bab5, or in this timeline it was cancelled after one season.
posted by WhackyparseThis at 12:15 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]

how much involvement does rlm even have on the show at this point?

like, i know "this started off very good but the wheels seem to be falling off season by season" is not a sign that rlm isn't involved in the production, but there's still something about the last coupla seasons that feels off — like, there's still the simultaneous interlocking space crises, key elements of the plot are still about the relationship between the military and the civilian institutions they nominally report to, there's a bunch of scenes that start with a long shot of a spacecraft that suddenly zooms in too quickly to a closer shot of the spacecraft and then after a half-second pause zooms right up against it, but none of the elements seem to be used right.

apparently upon reflection i'm way dissatisfied with how this season turned out, because that module in my brain that automatically starts generating "this is the better way to do the thing the writers couldn't figure out how to do" fanfiction has turned on and can't turn off. i'll spare you most of the details, but the thrust is that all of the various political struggles that happy valley inherited from earth should build up over the course of the season to the base developing a quasi-cold-war feel, and then resolve with all the tensions collapsing together/dialectical reversal-ing in the last couple of episodes, with the big political question becoming not "m7 against the strikers" or "u.s. against the u.s.s.r." or "north korea against the universe," but instead "are you an earthling or are you a martian?" some of the best moments (i.e. "will you help me steal an asteroid?") tried to highlight this question, but the show as written never quite managed to focus on it. like, dev's "crossing the line" scene was presented as "are you a dirty dirty greedbag who just wants to *checks card* make a good living for your families back home" vs "do you think mars bases should exist" instead of "are you a martian or are you an earthling", which is a (unlike dev's) a straightforward question that actually makes sense.

like in my headcanon, the crossing the line scene wasn't dev doing his weird silicon valley guy who talks like he's doing slam poetry routine, it was massey telling the assembled strikers something like "anyone with a reason to go back to earth should get on the shuttle home — no judgment, please go, this isn't your fight — and everyone who wants to never go back home stay with me, cause once we do this no nation on earth will ever let us back in. earthlings to the shuttle, martians to the barricades, let's go."

the great thing about this piece of dissatisfaction-derived fanfiction (god okay i'll stop typing soon i swear) is that it presents a clear line to the "no, seriously, don't do a space war, space war is stupid, space is too deadly to war in" theme that the show very very very nicely hit in the endings to seasons 1 and 2, the thing that's kind of the main thesis of the show. if the political cleavage in happy valley is "are you an earthling or are you a martian", this highlights internal political-slash-personal splits on the non-striker side, as some of the people tasked with enforcement/strikebreaking would themselves identify as martians and want to therefore join the strikers/defect to the martian side of the split. this could result in a total chaotic hot mess where everyone is on the verge of pulling guns on everyone else, and this hot mess could be resolved at one minute before metaphorical midnight by danielle defecting to the martians. that would be a plausible, logical and emotionally-logical resolution to all the tensions — it's universally acknowledged that danielle is the most level-headed person on two planets and one moon and no one wants to shoot at her — and since we've established so clearly that she is not a martian and wants very very much to go back to her people on earth, it's a emotionally-and-logically plausible way to keep the "right before it all goes to hell danielle saves everyone through acts of heroic self-sacrifice" thing going.

anyway, i'll leave it there.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 6:15 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]

oh wait one last thing: a very short, incomplete list songs they really should have used:

1. seven nation army. because come on it's the early 2000s and some scrappy strikers are going up against a group of nation-states called "m7" and you don't use seven nation army??
2. yoshimi battles the pink robots. because, like, whatever, it's fun, it's got a scifi vibe, and it tastes exactly like 2002-2004.

posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 6:16 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]

This season is much better, there's no Danny!

Season 5 tagline:

100% Danny-free since '23!
posted by fairmettle at 2:56 AM on January 21 [3 favorites]

Sadly technically not true due to the flashbacks though. But close!
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:12 AM on January 21

Ugh, poor Dani. She has gotten screwed over time and time again despite being the most competent, logical, and compassionate person around. Ed doesn't see any point to family until he realizes little man Alex can be their Ocean's 11-style grease man? Meanwhile Dani mourns the time she has missed with her son, his family, and the birth of her grandchild.

Thanks, Ed. Thanks, Dev. Thanks, DoD. Thanks, CIA.
posted by cocoagirl at 9:00 AM on January 21 [2 favorites]

Is RLM the other enantiomer of Ronald D. Moore?
posted by biffa at 2:40 AM on January 25 [1 favorite]

biffa: "Is RLM the other enantiomer of Ronald D. Moore?"

That was a slip on my part. There was a building where I went to college called RLM and I guess it stuck.
posted by adamrice at 5:57 AM on January 25 [1 favorite]

I liked it. More thoughts later. But I suspect the reason that Lee’s wife was surprised and relieved to see him is that she wasn’t sure they actually WOULD ship her to Mars, or that he’d be alive when she got there.
posted by rednikki at 5:25 PM on February 1 [1 favorite]

For All Mankind world map.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:25 AM on March 15

very short addendum to list of songs they really should have used: such great heights
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:49 PM on March 16 [2 favorites]

Apple renews globally acclaimed, hit space drama “For All Mankind” for season five and announces new spinoff series “Star City”

"A robust expansion of the “For All Mankind” universe, “Star City” is a propulsive, paranoid thriller that takes us back to the key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race — when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward. “Star City” is created by Wolpert, Nedivi, and Moore. "

posted by mikepop at 8:37 AM on April 19 [1 favorite]

I'll watch Star City, because, but to be honest, I'd just take something with more perspective from the every day people, like our workers on Mars, than what will basically be a Soviet political drama, half of which I guess we already know?
posted by Atreides at 11:13 AM on April 19