For All Mankind Season 5 Episode 8 Review: Brave New World

It’s good news and bad news for the Marsies this week on For All Mankind Season 5, Episode 8 “Brave New World”. The success of the Titan mission — and an uplifting communication from Kelly Baldwin — has brought a new sense of hope and unity to the little independent planet that could. It’s a much-needed bright spot in the wake of their diminishing food stores and the M-6 nations’ refusal to send supplies to the struggling populace. 

Plus, if Irina’s intel is anything to go by, there might be a light at the end of the tunnel — a new Soviet president seems likely to be elected in the wake of the economic collapse caused by Mars withholding iridium shipments, and that could completely reset the board in terms of the Red Planet’s future. Unfortunately, like so many things on For All Mankind, that hopeful light turns out to be more like the front of an oncoming train. 

Perhaps the most shocking thing about the revelation that the M-6 has sent a stealth spaceship full of laughably young soldiers to forcibly reclaim the Goldilocks asteroid is that it took them so long to do so.

On the plus side, this mission finally makes the addition of Avery Jarrett (a.k.a. Stevens) to this season’s already stuffed cast make a bit more sense.

Of course, Danny Stevens’s daughter was going to end up on a mission to Mars despite her best intentions, forced to confront her family history in an uncomfortably immediate way.

Ines Asserson is a remarkably expressive performer, managing to walk a fine line between youthful bravado — so many of the folks on this mission are just so damn young — and deeply understandable fear, both of the mission ahead of her and what it may ultimately prove about who she is.

Is she, despite her best efforts, unstable like Danny? Is she a hero-in-waiting, like Gordo and Tracy? Avery is the product of all the Stevenses that have come before her, but she’s also never lived outside of the shadow of her family. Sure, she’s cagey about who she reveals her past to. She’s embraced a different last name.

But she’s still never managed to truly escape where she comes from, and she’s (quite fairly, I think) living under constant anxiety about which side of her family tree she’ll turn out to be most like. And let’s just say these events of this episode probably don’t help either way. 

Miles and the rest of the Mars leadership team are genuinely shocked by the impending attack — and the fact that the ship was completely hidden from their radar until Irina told them to look more carefully for it — which is kind of funny when you consider this is the most obvious move that any of them should have considered.

Okay, maybe not this specific scenario, but the idea that they wouldn’t at some point try to reclaim the iridium is kind of laughable. These sweet summer children. (On some level, it’s amazing they’ve been as successful as they have been.)

Desperate to keep Goldilocks out of M-6’s hands — and keep the leverage of iridium shipments firmly on Mars’s — the gang decides that they’ll blow up the docking platform at Kusnetsov Station, thereby making the asteroid impossible to access. 

Boyd’s decision to risk herself by flying the hopper full of homemade explosives is perfectly in keeping with her character, but that former cosmonaut Lenya Polivano steps up to go with her is a more shocking twist. Sure, he’s personally invested in the Martian independence movement at this point, as it’s likely the only way his family will ever be safe from Soviet threats, but he’s hardly the self-sacrificing type. 

Still, they make a strangely charming team, and are the sort of offbeat pairing I wouldn’t mind seeing more of in the season’s final episodes.

Despite Boyd’s desperate attempt to warn the M-6 soldiers — who, of course, have arrived early and unbeknownst to the Marsies — about the impending explosion, the bomb detonates, ripping the docking platform apart. While we don’t know precisely what’s happened to Marcus or the other members of the M-6 team, Ruiz and Avery are jettisoned into space by the blast. Ruiz (RIP) appears to be killed instantly, and the artful spray of frozen blood from his head is horrifying and strangely beautiful all at once.

Avery survives (What, you thought they were going to introduce this kind of legacy character to kill her off a few episodes in?) But the final shot of her tortured, silent scream is the sort of imagery nightmares are made of. (And the kind of thing that For All Mankind has always been so good at crafting.) 

In the end, much like Hell, the road to a free Mars is paved with good intentions. The Sons and Daughters of Mars have been fairly diligent about not harming any of their hostages and generally seem like reasonable people just trying to protect the homes that many of them have come to love.

But with the destruction of the mining base — and the deaths of multiple American soldiers in the process — they now look like the very terrorists they’ve been insisting they aren’t. And there’s no way that President Bragg and the other M-6 nations won’t take the opportunity to strike back in a wildly disproportionate manner. 

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• Surprise Connor Storrie!! 
• At some point, I’m going to stop getting emotional every time there’s an Ed reference, but the idea of Kelly taking the plaque he never got to use on Apollo 11 to Titan with the Soujouner team is the most perfect tribute.
• Genuinely how is Marcus even on this mission to take Kuznetsov? His friend just got killed on Mars, and there’s every chance he’ll be asked to point a gun at people he personally knows?
• This episode genuinely made me feel bad for Walt. Yes, he’s been a huge jerk, but he still doesn’t deserve to be essentially going crazy over a mistake he didn’t make. At the rate he’s mentally crumbling, when the truth about what Kelly did does come out, it’s going to be very, very bad.

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

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