For All Mankind Review: Every Little Thing (Season 2 Episode 1)

As its second season begins, For All Mankind Season 2 Episode 1, “Every Little Thing,” catapults the show in the 1980s, over a decade after the events of the Season 1 finale.

A quick jump through history shows the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union not only still in full bloom, but bringing about world-changing consequences.

The Three Mile Island nuclear explosion we remember is thwarted using technology first pioneered on the Moon’s Jamestown colony. The USSR chooses not to invade Afghanistan and redirect its resources toward the stars instead. John Lennon lives, as does Anwar Sadat. Pope John Paul II, however, is assassinated.

In case anyone needed a reminder: This is a world that’s very different from our own. 

And these characters have undergone some fairly significant changes since the last time we saw them. But then again, so has the space program itself. 

Margo is now the director of the NASA Johnson Space Center. Ed now heads up the astronaut office; his wife Karen now runs the Outpost Tavern, and they’ve adopted Kelly, a Vietnamese girl who’s now looking at colleges.

Gordo and Tracey are divorced; she’s doing the talk show circuit — Johnny Carson! — when she announces she’s married a new man named Sam Cleveland. Meanwhile, Ellen is at the Jamestown colony, preparing to come back to Earth.

Shuttles and other spacecraft run between Earth and the moon like clockwork, and backroom deals are bartered about everything from launch schedules to crew rosters. It’s honestly exciting, and often enough to make you more than a little sad that our own space program hasn’t really achieved any of this, decades later. (Sigh.)

A gigantic solar storm provides this week’s life-or-death tension, driving a wave of radiation at the astronauts on board the space station Skylab and the Jamestown colony. 

As season premieres go, “Every Little Thing” is something of a slow start. There’s so much catch-up to do, both with the series’ characters and the world that it exists in that it’s hard to know exactly what Season 2’s larger focus will be, beyond the consistently escalating military situation between the U.S. and the USSR.

This is perhaps best evidenced by the scene in which the Pentagon is concerned that the Soviets will use the confusion and chaos caused by the solar storm — which will knock out most satellites — to initiate a first strike against the U.S. all because they’re afraid the Americans could possibly maybe do so first.

Everything is high tension and vaguely conspiracy theory-esque and there’s very much a sense that anything could happen. (Reagan is apparently concerned the Russians could attempt to take over new territory on the moon.)

Given everything we saw Molly accomplish — and risk — last season, no one should be shocked that she decided to risk her life to save a fellow astronaut endangered by the solar storm. That is just who she is, and it’s one of the reasons she’s so compelling as a character. 

But the real question is what it will mean for her — and for new character Wubbo — as the season goes on. Each astronaut is equipped with a bracelet meant to determine how much radiation they’ve been exposed to, and given that both she and Wubbo were unprotected for a significant amount of time during the solar storm, it seems fairly certain that both bands should be red.

That Molly took hers off and left it in a more protected area indicates that she not only knew what she was risking, but she was also prepared to hide it, both from her superiors and her fellow astronauts. Will she simply claim she rescued Wubbo before the storm hit? Will she try to hide conceal any sickness she herself may feel?

The way Margo talked – and given the fact that the moon doesn’t exactly have much of an atmosphere — this is an extremely dangerous level of radiation and the odds of both surviving are pretty grim. 

But For All Mankind wouldn’t actually kill of Molly — would they?

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• The imagery used in this episode was beautiful from start to finish, from the astronauts’ sunrise hike to the creepy waves and disappearing footprints in the moon dust caused by the solar winds. 
• You’d think people would know that any episode where a group sings the “Every little thing is gonna be alright” chorus from Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” means something will definitely not be alright by the end of it.
• The symmetry of Margo once again starting the series by waking up in a pseudo-bedroom she’s created at work — even if she has a much nicer office now — was great. 
• The music this season! Is already so good! 
• Ed fully strikes me as exactly the kind of man who’d prefer the fake Kraft Parmesan cheese powder over actual real-grated cheese.

What did you think of this episode of For All Mankind? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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New episodes of For All Mankind stream Fridays on AppleTV+.

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