For All Mankind Season 3 Episode 4 Review: Happy Valley

The space race becomes very literal in For All Mankind Season 3 Episode 4, “Happy Valley,” as NASA’s Sojourner, Helios’s Phoenix, and the Soviet Union’s Mars-94 chase one another toward the Red Planet in one of the show’s most tense and entertaining hours of the season.

Initially, that tension is more of the fun, happy variety, as each crew tries to one-up one another and have a little fun in the vastness of space. 

Kelly Baldwin is running a radio station via her iPod (which, personally, I am very relieved to know that Apple exists in this reality). Danielle and Ed check in via video calls fairly regularly, and everyone does a whole lot of math, attempting to figure out one another’s speed, trajectories, and who is most likely to reach Mars first.

As the episode begins, it looks like that’s going to be Helios, thanks to their special patented engines. But NASA deploys some (honestly extremely cool looking) solar sails and soars into the lead, counting on the fact that their ship’s smaller size (remember Phoenix used to be Karen Baldwin’s space hotel before it got retrofitted) will mean Ed’s crew has no chance of catching up.

Everybody takes this news with a variety of emotions. Ed is clearly heartbroken at the thought of coming in second again, even if it is to one of his best friends. Helios founder Dev Ayesa is furious, slamming monitors to the ground and insisting that all that matters is being first. (Gone, weirdly, is his belief that community and togetherness is all that matters. I wish this show were doing more to explore the whole “benevolent billionaire” facade.) 

And suddenly things look kind of grim for President Wright, who’s already trying to push through a budget and protect NASA’s ability to control its own profits from its moon mining operations. She says it’s what’s funding their Mars missions, but the Congressmen from her own party are pretty eager to get their hands on that cash for other spending priorities.

Elsewhere, protests are breaking out all over the country, as those working in the oil and gas industry continue to lose their jobs thanks to the helium-3 that’s rapidly making those sorts of energy sources obsolete.

Gordo and Tracy’s son Jimmy attends one of these protests because he’s nothing if not incredibly contrary. I suspect his seemingly bottomless hatred for NASA is simply a place to put all the big feelings he still doesn’t know what to do with about his parents’ deaths, but the show seems strangely reticent to draw those parallels.

At an afterparty, Jimmy meets one of the Marines who served on Jamestown when his parents were there, and the years have not been especially kind to him. He’s become something of a Jamestown truther, convinced that the government’s account of events isn’t what happened and that there’s more to the story of what happened to the Stevenses than they’ve been told. 

I’m sure Jimmy is going to handle that great, aren’t you?

Back in space, the Russians are desperate to get back into the race to Mars so they decide to burn their nuclear engines in an incredibly dangerous move to try and catch up. This, completely unsurprisingly, causes a meltdown, and both the NASA and Helios crews debate who will have to abandon Mars to save the lives of the cosmonauts.

Ed and the Phoenix crew initially agree to step up—they’re unlikely to catch up to Sojourner anyway, plus the literal sky hotel they’re flying in has more room and supplies to take on extra passengers.

Unfortunately, Dev is not about this whole saving others public service thing and essentially manipulates the Helios team into voting to leave the rescue mission to NASA. Ed tries to mutiny (because once a captain always a captain) and go save the Russians anyway, but Dev has essentially remote locked the controls of his ship, so its Mars or bust for them. 

I mean, I guess this is all Dev’s supervillain origin story or something, but watching his disregard for the cosmonauts’ lives and his insistence that it was NASA’s problem was really uncomfortable.

Perhaps the most interesting moment of the episode is between Margo and Ellen, in which the former tries to convince the latter to figure out a way to force Dev to do the rescue mission. I don’t think Margo would have argued to just leave the Russians to die, because that’s really harsh even for her, but also I’m not sure she wouldn’t have either and that’s disturbing. 

Thank goodness Ellen was there on her self-serving press tour right? 

The NASA astronauts take it all in stride, because of course they do, though Danielle has dreams of siphoning fuel from the ship so that maybe they could all get to Mars anyway. (Given the fact that the ships collide at the end of the hour, that doesn’t seem likely, but it does feel like a bit of a letdown that we won’t get to see Dani and Ed there together.)

Stray Thoughts and Observations:

• Watching an astronaut get rolled over by another spacecraft and crushed in the vacuum of space is one of the most disturbing images we’ve yet seen on this show.
• I have…questions about Ellen’s political affiliation. I mean, I assumed she’s supposed to be a Republican since she ran against Bill Clinton, who still seems to be a Dem Arkansas governor in this timeline. But she’s fighting with her own party about shutting down the government over her desire to raise taxes? I guess this really is an alternate reality.

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

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