The Film Experience

by Lynn Lee

If you’re old enough to remember the Challenger explosion – my earliest memory of watching a national disaster on TV – you may, like me, see it as the de facto end of the Space Age. Not that NASA abandoned its mission or that space ever completely lost its grip on the public imagination. One need only look to the Mars Rovers and the recent advances made by SpaceX and Blue Origin for evidence to the contrary. But even the most exciting breakthroughs no longer command the universal attention that the Apollo missions or, yes, the Challenger debacle did back in their day. There’s also a growing sense that space travel has become the province of the ultrarich, and that as a species we should– taking a page out of Gil Scott-Heron – maybe think about fixing our problems here on Earth before laying claim to other worlds.

For those who hold onto the ideal of outer space as a gauntlet for human progress, there’s a tendency to look back wistfully at the golden age of space exploration, notwithstanding the more uncomfortable facts underlying the myth...

The space race was, after all, a product of war – albeit a “cold” one. One of the key figures in getting the U.S. to the moon was a former Nazi. Notwithstanding the behind-the-scenes contributions of women and persons of color, the public face of NASA remained overwhelmingly white, male, and heterosexual. And yet, movies and TV shows about this period of history, even those that engage with its problematic aspects, still evoke a grandeur of purpose, singularly focused ambition, and sense of wonder that we crave and seldom see in a contemporary context.

For All Mankind, which concluded its second season on AppleTV+ earlier this year, is a gift to Space Age nostalgists that essentially allows us to have our cake and eat it, too. Created by Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar Galactica), it posits an alternate history in which the U.S.S.R. reached the moon first, and as a result, the space race never ended. In this world, [SPOILERS, sorta] the Soviets also send a woman to the moon, prompting the U.S. to open its space program to women; the moon is colonized by both sides; a gay (though closeted) woman becomes the head of NASA; and humans have set foot on Mars by the 1990s. In short, it’s a fantasy with one foot planted in historical reality. To that end, the show boasts impressive production values and does a fantastic job melding archival footage and audio of historical figures with its fictional revisions. It also incorporates ingenious twists on historical events and spotlights a few that, while mere footnotes in our timeline, become major watersheds in FAM’s (the “Mercury 13” program in season 1, the Apollo-Soyuz “handshake” in season 2).

Season 2 raises the dramatic stakes and kicks the action up several notches while continuing the world-building of season 1. It’s 1983 – roughly a decade after the end of the first season – and Jamestown, the U.S. moonbase, has gone from tiny shack to full-fledged station and mining operation. The Soviets have similarly expanded, and over the course of the season, the moon becomes center stage for escalating Cold War tensions, with NASA’s ostensibly civilian mission becoming increasingly coopted and militarized by U.S. defense priorities. Yes, this means literal guns and possible nukes on the moon, which is both as absurd and not as absurd as it sounds. However, running concurrently with the MAD-on-the-moon narrative are other storylines on Earth that explore opportunities for genuine scientific cooperation and camaraderie, as well as subtle espionage, between the Americans and Soviets. All these threads are painstakingly interwoven and come together satisfyingly in a nail-biter of a season finale, before a final shot that leaves the audience eager for season 3. [/SPOILERS]

For All Mankind isn’t without flaws. It works better at the broader historical big-picture level than as an individual human drama. While the cast is quite strong, the script wastes time on soapy subplots that do little to advance the larger narrative or provide insight into the characters. This is especially true for two of the leads, Ned Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and his wife Karen (Shantal VanSanten). The writers really didn’t seem to know what to do with Karen this season (too bad, since VanSanten is terrific), while Ned still reads flat as a character (less Kinnaman’s fault than the way he’s written).

The Baldwins’ best friends, astronauts Gordo (Michael Dorman) and Tracy (Sarah Jones) Stevens (loosely based/inspired by real-life Mercury 7 astronaut Gordo Cooper and his first wife Trudy, a pilot), fare better, although I wouldn’t have minded a tad less of their angst in favor of more time with the delightfully prickly, awkward, yet brilliant Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt), now head of the Johnson Space Center, or the unsinkable Molly Cobb (Sonya Walger), first American woman on the moon and resident Calamity Jane of the space program. Season 2 does spend more time developing Ellen Wilson (Jodi Balfour), astronaut turned fast-rising NASA official, and Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall), first black woman on the moon, to generally good effect. It also does a better job integrating Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña), the undocumented Mexican immigrant girl with personal ties to NASA, into the main narrative, even though her character still feels shoehorned in and it’s never explained how she got through the intervening years between seasons 1 and 2.

Still, overall, the series has only grown stronger and richer in its sophomore season and deserves wider recognition for what it’s achieved. It’s the rare show that’s simultaneously educational, thought-provoking, and entertaining, as it revisits both important and forgotten chapters in U.S. history and invites us to ponder the paths not traveled in that history, all the while keeping us riveted with white-knuckle scenes of daring space rescues and literal moon wars. Its Emmy chances are admittedly low to nonexistent: AppleTV+ is still a niche service, and the show lacks Ted Lasso level buzz outside its small though passionate existing fanbase. But there’s no doubt that for both originality and execution, For All Mankind deserves to be in the conversation.

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