For All Mankind Season 4 Episode 6 Review: Leningrad
As a global negotiation for the Goldilocks asteroid begins, For All Mankind Season 4 Episode 6, “Leningrad,” proves that old dogs can still learn new tricks.
As political wrangling intensifies on Earth and class struggle deepens on Mars, it’s the unlikely duo of Ed Baldwin and Margo Madison who make game-changing choices that will likely radiate outward well past this specific episode.
It’s unlikely any of us had “Ed Baldwin: Man of the People” on our For All Mankind bingo cards this season. And, in fact, it’s not even 100% clear that he particularly cares about the lower-level Helios employees at this moment beyond the fact that they’re a convenient weapon for him to get back at Dani and Palmer for canning him as Happy Valley XO.
Yet, there’s something deeply familiar about the Ed who barges into Ilya’s speakeasy and has tips for homemade still upkeep, and who immediately sides with the Happy Valley workers who are being exploited once he has proof that they’re being purposefully wronged by Helios’s new policies. Ed wasn’t always the guy that was in charge, and he has plenty of history breaking rules and rocking the proverbial company boat in his own right. And he’s never been a guy who was willing to tolerate something he knew was wrong — and the idea that Helios is slashing bonuses and reworking the bonus structure to make it deliberately harder for the folks who specifically came to Mars for the chance to improve their financial prospects to do so is the kind of [expletive] move it seems as though he’d dislike.
Given that he was just lecturing Helios workers about not being on Mars for the right reasons like three episodes ago, there’s certainly a bit of a disconnect when it comes to how specifically he got from point A to point B on this issue, but it’s a twist that feels like it makes sense for the man Ed has always been, underneath.
Elsewhere on the making unexpected but actually completely in-character choices beat, Margo Madison finally decides to out herself as a Soviet defector, alerting the world (and most especially Aleida) that she’s not as dead as previously presumed and is now working for America’s major geopolitical rival. But while Roscosmos head Irina believes Margo’s choice is the product of a desire to regain some of the power she lost when she left America, it’s truly just that Margo could never resist the thrill of solving a complex engineering problem. That she gets to do it with Aleida one last time is just the icing on the cake.
And, to be fair, their reunion is phenomenal, trading on years of built-in emotion and character development, as well as the haunting specter of the JSC bombing, all while bringing Margo back into the series’ larger storylines for the first time this season. The MI-7 summit in Leningrade is testy, as the U.S., Soviet Union, and other signatory countries argue over how, exactly, they’ll manage to fund the ships and infrastructure needed to capture and mine the Goldilocks asteroid, and whether anyone is willing to wait decades to claim their share of the profits.
Thanks to Aleida and Margo, the group comes up with a plan to bypass Mars entirely and bring Goldlilocks into Earth orbit, so it can be mined and processed using existing tech and infrastructure. That this is another blow to the workers of Happy Valley — they’ll be overworked and put into dangerous situations for mere months of bonuses rather than the years they were initially promised — is only one of the problems with the whole setup. (Another is that Dani and the rest of Mars leadership just aren’t staffed up to handle a project of this size, particularly if any number of their existing workers strike after learning of the changes in pay and bonus structure.)
Elsewhere, Ilya catches wind of Miles’s on-going clandestine side hustle involving sending Martian obsidian back to Earth and selling it for insane profits and proceeds to bar him from his illicit organization. He can’t have anyone rocking the boat, Miles has already lied to him, and his side project could potentially bring down Ilya’s business if he’s caught. That he sends a goon to physically threaten his “Milosh” is…perhaps taking things a bit too far, but it’s hardly the only extreme reaction we see in this particular subplot.
Perhaps it’s that we haven’t had a tremendous amount of time yet to really get to know Miles, or the fact that his one and only personality trait appears to be his obsession with sending money home to a wife we’re not even sure actually wants to be with him anymore. But it’s often hard to find a lot of sympathy for Miles, and very little about this particular subplot feels especially connected to the rest of the show. Stealing Ilya’s business out from under him by siccing the North Koreans on him and his cronies doesn’t seem as though it’s going to help that plot much, either. If only because I’m unclear why apparently we’re meant to be rooting for Miles in this face-off. His behavior is pretty darn monstrous!
Though it’ll probably be fun once Lee Jung-gil figures out that Miles isn’t any more capable of bringing his wife to space than Ilya was. (Or once Ilya realizes there are benefits to his newfound friendship with the admiral who likes his toilet vodka.)
Stray Thoughts and Observations:
- I kind of hate that I feel like I know Massey better as a character than I do Miles. He’s clearly meant to be our major audience window into the struggles of the lower deckers in Happy Valley, but also he….kind of sucks?
- Dani’s sudden determination to get Goldilocks no matter the cost is narratively necessary but makes no sense for her as a character. This is the woman who understood immediately that there was unrest on base because lower-level Helios employees couldn’t get their vidmail, but she doesn’t sense that the drastic structural changes in terms of work and pay are going to be a problem?
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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.