For All Mankind Season 5 Episode 1 Review: First Light

It’s clear from the very beginning of For All Mankind Season 5 Episode 1, “First Light,” that this is going to be a season of transition.

At this point, Ed Baldwin is one of a mere handful of characters from the show’s first season that are still around in its present day, and poor Joel Kinnaman’s old man make-up is becoming fairly cumbersome if not outright laughable.

(No shade to Kinnaman intended, to be clear — if it were up to me, Ed Baldwin would live forever, and it’s honestly amazing how much achingly subtle acting he still manages to do under all that stuff.)

Like most of For All Mankind’s season openers, much of “First Light” is about catching us up on everything that has happened in the decade that’s passed since Season 4 and establishing a new baseline for where this run of episodes is headed. 

Even Mars itself is changing. Happy Valley has transformed over the past decade. It’s a thriving community in more ways than one — it now boasts a colorful marketplace, real bars and restaurants, even an underground independence movement that wants the planet’s interests taken more seriously by those back on Earth.  

One of the more entertaining elements of any For All Mankind premiere is the quick catch-up that speedruns through all the major events that have taken place in the gap between seasons.

It’s confirmed that Breaking Bad and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby officially still exist in this universe. John Lennon is still alive and making music with Jaz-Z, of all people. Washington, D.C., still doesn’t have a baseball team — the Montreal Metros relocate to Portland in this timeline.  

And most importantly for our purposes, the theft of the Goldilocks asteroid essentially wrecked Al Gore’s presidency, allowing Ellen Wilson’s horrible former VP, James Bragg, to run on an Earth First agenda that promised to bring Mars “back under control.”

The folks back home are feeling the financial cost of space exploration, which has led many to believe that those in Happy Valley are siphoning up resources and taxpayer dollars that could be rightfully helping those still on Earth. 

This is all exacerbated by a growing refugee crisis —  people known as “cratrers” are illegally smuggling themselves to Mars by hiding in pressurized boxes — and rising political tensions as several nations (China, Pakistan, Brazil) form a new treaty alliance (the ISN), in an attempt to make iridium distribution more fair.

Samantha Massey is convicted and jailed for her part in the asteroid heist, but although Ed Baldwin is tried as a co-conspirator in absentia, age-related health concerns mean he’s placed under house arrest — ankle monitor and everything! — at Happy Valley, presumably for the rest of his life. 

A lot has changed, but much is the same. Many of these people remain as familiar as blankets, and it’s honestly really good to see them all again. 

Ed’s still as crochety as you’d expect. (He uses his ankle monitor to annoy Mission Control by setting alarms off on purpose.) Ilya’s slinging vodka, albeit in a much nicer joint. Kelly Baldwin is as dedicated to her scientific work as she’s ever been. 

But as Kelly’s son Alex graduates high school, she’s struggling with how best to parent a teenager who’s both unsure of his place in the world and under immense pressure because of his last name. (Love him or hate him, Ed’s basically achieved folk hero status around much of Happy Valley at this point.) 

It’s a situation that becomes much more complicated when it’s revealed that Ed’s lingering cough is a sign that his cancer, already Stage Three, is getting worse.

Of course, he hasn’t told Kelly or Alex about it; depending on others has never been how he rolls. But the prospect of Ed Baldwin’s mortality casts a long shadow — what is Happy Valley, or heck, For All Mankind, at this point, without him? 

It’s perhaps because of this that “First Light” spends quite a bit of time introducing new characters and establishing their relationships, including a whole new generation of young people. There’s Alex, of course, the very definition of a legacy character in this universe. 

His classmates include Lily Dale, the daughter of Miles, who seems to have become much more of a team player in the wake of last season’s strike. There’s also Marcus Haskell, who is planning to join the Marines, and Gulsora Akilmatova, a Russian film student. 

The four are tight friends, in that way that kids with limited other options for companionship are, but it’s also obvious that Alex has a serious crush on Lily. Aww, Martian young love. 

Elsewhere, Celia Boyd is a hardworking cop  — or “peacekeeper” as the rather authoritarian force is called — who seems to want to be a pilot, but now spends her days doing curfew patrols around base and chasing graffiti artists. She’s called in to investigate when Alex discovers a dead body while joyriding around on his new spacebike (a graduation present from Dev).

Initially presumed to be a suicide, it looks more and more like the man — a crater with connections to OG North Korean ujunaut Lee Jung-Il — was killed.

It doesn’t feel like this is Mars’s first-ever murder, or anything, but you definitely get the sense that it’s not something that happens all that often. (In fact, the odds of someone choosing to end their lives by racing suit-free across the Martian dust actually seem more likely.) 

This is admittedly something of a smaller-stakes kind of crisis than For All Mankind traditionally tends to open its seasons with: Season 4’s premiere featured the slow-motion space collapse of the Ranger mission and the death of Grigory Kuznetsov, while Season 3 featured a disaster aboard the space hotel Polaris.

But murder, and one that takes place in such a claustrophobic space where social trust is one of the only things keeping the residents from going crazy while tensions are already high, is a very different kind of horror. 

Lee’s arrest closes the hour — something Ed seems likely to respond to very rationally and normally — leaving us all to wonder whether or not he might actually be guilty. It seems impossible, but if he’s not, who is? And what does it mean?

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• If we’re dealing with Ed’s mortality this season, it feels like we’re going to have to address Margo’s, too. Granted, Wrenn Schmidt’s old-age look is much more flattering than Kinnaman’s, but it’s fair to ask what purpose she serves in this story, now that she’s in jail for treason for the rest of her life. Don’t get me wrong, I love that Aleida visits her and that the two still seem so close. But it’s honestly going to be kind of sad if this is how Margo’s story really does end.
• Ed continuing to be the primary rabblerouser about Mars Rights will never not be funny to me, but it’s also perfect. 

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

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