For All Mankind Season 4 Episode 4 Review: House Divided
The overthrow of Gorbachev puts Happy Valley at the center of a global and interplanetary political struggle on For All Mankind Season 4 Episode 4, “House Divided,” as the gulf between the astronauts and workers on the base grows deeper.
Where last week’s episode showed us the on-the-ground perspective of Fyodor Korzhenko’s takeover of the Soviet government via Margo’s abduction and interrogation, this hour focuses on the broader geopolitical impact of the sudden change in power.
According to Korzhenko and those who support him, the coup is about getting the Soviet Union back to the principles of Lenin and Stalin, turning away from the more Western ideals promoted by Gorbachev and his close ties to America. Some are pretty happy about that and make sure to say so.
A Helios worker named Vasily is particularly ugly about it, rubbing Svetlana’s face in the changes that will surely be coming to the mother country now during a surface repair mission. (Vasily has family in the new Russian regime and is as smug as you might expect.)
Things get heated after Vasily calls Svetlana a traitor and a whore, a shoving match ensues, and Vasily’s suit winds up punctured on a rock. The medics ultimately save his life, but he’s placed in a hyperbaric chamber and the extent of his injuries are as yet unclear.
The fallout from this incident affects almost every storyline on the show, from the future of the asteroid mining program to the global M-7 alliance that keeps the Mars colony functioning.
Plus, it provides another flashpoint in the increasingly tense situation between the underpaid Helios workers and the more comfortable officers above ground.
Krys Marshall and Joel Kinnaman in “For All Mankind” Season 4 Episode 4 (Photo: Apple TV+)
Her initial discipline of Svetlana, a suspension from flight duties and a 60-sol docking of pay, satisfies no one. The Soviets are unhappy — Vasily, after all, is the nephew of a powerful man in the new government — and orders Svetlana be sent home to stand trial for alleged “crimes against a patriot.”
To her credit, Dani immediately understands that sending Svetlana back to Moscow is probably a death sentence, with an outside shot at life in a Siberian gulag. She can’t return her, but keeping her on base is a choice that could ultimately threaten the whole global M-7 alliance.
Because while new head of Roscosmos Irina Morozova may be Margo’s sudden BFF, she’s also a shrewd and calculating tactical leader. And not for nothing, but she is petty as hell. She orders her team to revert the base-wide operating system at Happy Valley to be reverted to its original Cyrillic, meaning that none of the NASA employees can use it, refuses to allow Roscosmos to recognize Dani as the commander of the base, and threatens Eli with pulling all her personnel from the project altogether.
But those are hardly the only problems Dani is facing. The Helios employees — already pretty darn disgruntled thanks to the inequalities both perceived and real across the base — see Svetlana’s punishment as another example of the two-tiered system that exists on base.
To them, she’s basically getting away with (almost) murder, solely because of her elite status as a cosmonaut. If the situation were reversed, Tassey argues, there’s no way that Vasily or anyone like him would be getting off so easily.
This all makes for such compelling television precisely because everybody is a little bit right. Dani and Tassey and Eli and Ed all make great points, but because everyone is talking past each other no one can manage to actually hear them.
And then there’s the Ed of it all. He’s furious that one of his best pilots is being pulled off the flight team for the asteroid mission and completely rejects the idea that Svetlana should be sent back to Earth for any reason He even argues that Dani should let him smuggle her to the lower decks and hide her there, send her to a neutral location for a “trial” in India.
To be fair, Ed is obviously closer to Svetalana than probably anyone else on base is, and after their sweet scene together last week, it certainly felt as though For All Mankind was testing the waters of a genuine relationship between them. (Heck, Ed’s been alone for a long time.). His desire to defend her is, in its way, very sweet.
But Dani’s also completely correct when she calls him out on his different standards when it comes to how he treats people he cares about.
I mean, we’ve certainly seen it before. Not to take anything away from his Season 2 sacrifice alongside Tracy, but Gordo never should have gone back to space after everything that happened at Jamestown. And he likely wouldn’t have — if it hadn’t been for Ed. Baldwin was also instrumental in coddling Danny Stevens in a variety of ways last season and ignored all the signs that pointed to how much trouble he was really in.
Ed’s intense loyalty to the folks he cares about is certainly admirable, and maybe one of the best things about his character, honestly. But it’s not clear that it makes him a particularly good leader either, and should have us all questioning whether he still belongs on Mars.
Stray Thoughts and Observations:
- Hate to break. it to Dev, but I feel like the behavior of the alleged professionals on Mars is making a pretty strong argument that we are not ready for regular civilians to be out there colonizing space.
- Ed and Dani came sooooooo close to revealing What The Heck Happened to Danny Steven, and I think we can all agree that whatever it is…it’s bad. (It’s been clear since the season premiere that he’s dead, but it now seems pretty darn likely he never made it back from Mars.)
- Ed and Dani’s big Mom and Dad Are Fighting vibes hurt so much more than they have any right to, and it’s all because For All Mankind has put literal years into building their relationship in both good times and bad. My heart.
- At some point all those chairs in the Roscosmos cafeteria are just going to collapse because all their parts are
- I want to believe that Margo is too smart to get drawn in completely by Irina Morozova’s very obvious long con, but she’s lonely and feeling purposeless and I just…don’t know that she’s going to take the right lessons from Semenov’s arrest. Wrenn Schmidt and Svetlana Efremova have some blazing chemistry though, and I have to admit…I kind of ship it?
What did you think of this episode of For All Mankind? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Lacy Baugher
Lacy is a pop culture enthusiast and television critic who loves period dramas, epic fantasy, space adventures, and the female characters everyone says you're supposed to hate. Ninth Doctor enthusiast, Aziraphale girlie, and cat lady, she's a member of the Television Critics Association and Rotten Tomatoes-approved. Find her at LacyMB on all platforms.