For All Mankind Season 4 Episode 1 Review: Glasnost

Apple TV+ alternate history drama For All Mankind jumps into the 2000s, as Mars colony Happy Valley is growing, a fight for resources is brewing, and several of the series’ original characters struggle to figure out where they belong in an expanding world of space exploration that’s irrevocably shaped by capitalism over science.

This is a lot to say that I doubt any of us expected to this emotionally attached to Ed Baldwin at this point, and yet, here we are. 

The first episode of any new season of For All Mankind spends a lot of time on table setting, and “Glasnost” is no different.

Catching us up via an expansive opening flashback that summarizes everything that happened in the eight years since Season 3 concluded, we see Ellen win reelection and legalize gay marriage before passing the White House to Democrat Al Gore, marrying Pam, and retiring to a farm in Texas. (Jodi Balfour won’t be part of Season 4, but it’s nice that her character got such a sweet sendoff.) 

Elsewhere, France, Japan, India, and the United Kingdom have joined the United States, North Korea, and the Soviet Union in the M-7 alliance, with the goal of expanding the collaboration that has built the Mars colony thus far.

Helios plasma propulsion technology has shortened the time to travel to the Red Planet to just over a month, and the booming job market on Mars means more people are heading to Happy Valley than ever before. Hilton’s even opened its first Mars hotel. 

In pop culture news, Ellen Degeneres’s popular sitcom has just been renewed for a sixth season, Bill and Hillary Clinton are divorcing, Harvey Weinstein is arrested for being a sexual predator, and Clint Eastwood is playing Ed Baldwin in the blockbuster film Race to Mars. (Personally, I’m really pleased to learn that both Tom Hanks and his movie Castaway still exist in this universe.)

Most of our faves are still thriving. (Or, at least, surviving.) Ed, despite the obvious tremor in his hand he’s busily hiding, is the XO at Happy Valley and assigning himself to key missions when he should be riding a desk. Kelly, back on Earth after having given birth in space, is now raising a three-year-old and nagging her dad to come home. Ed, being Ed, keeps putting it off, because he’s never going to be content to a life of quiet diminishment in his daughter’s guest room. 

Ed’s currently the lead pilot on Ranger I, a ship sent to capture a giant asteroid called Kronos and drag it back to Mars so that it can be mined for the rich minerals that will make everyone involved in this project very rich. (And tangentially help the Red Planet colony become self-sustaining.)

If you’ve watched For All Mankind before, you’re well aware of the series’ tendency to kick-start its seasons with a disaster the rest of the episodes will have to recover from, and “Glasnost” is no different. 

The slow-motion collapse of the Ranger mission — tethers break, the asteroid threatens to break the ship in half, men are sent to try and fix the problem, they don’t make it back — is perhaps less grand in scope than last season’s Polaris catastrophe, but it is personally just as devastating, and the death of cosmonaut Grigory Kuznetsov (RIP to a legend) will almost certainly reverberate throughout the season in Ed and Danielle’s arcs.

(Ed and Grigory’s goodbye scene is devastating, precisely because of the well-established history and love between these characters.)

The impact Ranger disaster also reverberates back to Earth, as well. New NASA Administrator Eli Hobson uses it as an excuse to tempt Danielle Poole to head back to Happy Valley. He wants her to take charge, insisting that she’s still the best they have and will provide an important counterbalance to Ed, who really probably just should have come home already.

(No shade to Dani but if a retired legend is still NASA’s best hope after all this time they really need to work on their recruitment pipeline.) She waffles about it, but it’s apparent fairly immediately that she’s going to say yes, and the episode ends with her on one of those fancy new Helios propulsion transports.

She’s not alone, however. With her is new recruit Miles Hand, an often unemployed oil rig worker from Louisiana who’s signed up for a two year stint on Mars as a Helios mining technician.

He’s not super psyched about being in space for two years — he originally wanted to work on the moon but the wait for an open position was extensive — but he’s determined to provide for his family, if only because he thinks a steady paycheck will prevent his one foot out the door wife from finally leaving him. 

In the season’s opening montage, a newspaper headline, we see a reference to a strike on the moon, indicating that — like last season’s focus on working-class resentment surrounding the impact of the rise of clean space energy on blue-collar jobs — labor issues will be an ongoing them of the season.

This is also reflected in Parker, one of the characters killed on the Ranger, who was willing to risk his life for the hefty bonus that was meant to be attached to retrieving the Kronos asteroid.

One of the shifts in the For All Mankind timeline compared to our own is the success of the Soviet Union. In our timeline, the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the USSR was essentially disbanded in late 1991. Here, the Soviets are thriving — boasting a booming economy, a modernized country, and a close relationship with the United States. (The fake magazine covers detailing Al Gore and Mikael Gorbachev’s BFF status are kind of hilarious.) 

This is a lot to say that the Soviet Union Margot lives in is actually nicer than you might expect, but her days unfold in a boring, lonely routine, save for her regular interactions with a newspaper agent and and the baker who always slips her extra pastries. She’s clearly feeling her age — she’s got to be in her sixties at this point — something that’s obviously made worse by her seeming irrelevance. 

After all NASA’s progressed in leaps and bounds from where it was when she was there, and her extensive knowledge doesn’t extend to any of its new systems, making her increasingly less useful to her Soviet contacts and counterparts. All this means that of course Margot — or Margaret Reynolds, as her code name turns out to be — is especially susceptible to the mysterious woman who pops up in the park to hand her a business cared and encourage her to bide her time.

One might think her previous negative experience with randomly accepting things from Russian operatives might prove useful here, but as we’ve seen multiple times in this episode, time doesn’t really change us as much as we think it will. 

Stray Thoughts and Observations:

• It is truly a testament to how good this show is that we’re all willing to ignore the ridiculous old age makeup on some of these actors. I love you Joel Kinnaman but that wig is atrocious.
• NASA has renamed the JSC after Molly Cobb, in honor of not only her illustrious career but for her sacrificial determination to save lives during the terrorist attack that closed last season. Sniffff.
• Almeida’s flashback-laden panic attack at Mission Control not only makes me wonder whether her future still lies at NASA but how badly she’s going to react when she inevitably discovers that Margot is still alive.
• So, because we’re all surely thinking about it: What happened to Danny Stevens? Television’s worst character was jettisoned from the Happy Valley colony to live on his own at the end of last season. It’s clear from this episode that he didn’t return to Earth, but outside of a few pointed references that indicate something went down, the details of what occurred are still pretty murky. Did he kill himself? Try to force his way back into the colony? Who knows! 

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

Critic Rating:

User Rating:

 

New episodes of For All Mankind stream Fridays on Apple TV+. 

 Follow us on Twitter and on Instagram!

Want more from Tell-Tale TV? Subscribe to our newsletter here!

18 Best TV Dramas of the Year So Far