For All Mankind Season 5 Episode 9 Review: Sons and Daughters

For All Mankind Season 5 Episode 9, “Sons and Daughters,” is a mixed bag. On the plus side, it’s an action-packed hour that injects life-or-death stakes into the fight for Mars’s future. It’s surprisingly bloody, and sets up several key plot threads for a potentially shocking (and likely devastating) finale. 

That said, it’s also an episode that leans too heavily into table setting for next week without giving us anything resembling a payoff this week. We don’t need but so many scenes of Marines killing Happy Valley residents to understand that the Marsies are badly outmanned.

Even the hour’s B-plot on Titan feels like a lot of running in place, with every potential positive development overshadowed by the looming spectre of Kelly’s betrayal. The finale is going to have a lot of work to do, is what I’m saying.

“Sons and Daughters” continues For All Mankind Season 5’s bizarre pacing choices. For some reason, we skip right past the aftermath of last week’s explosion — sorry Ruiz is dead, points to whoever managed to snatch a floating Avery out of the wreckage of Kusnetsov Station? — and move right on to straight-up invasion. 

(Apparently, last week’s episode did not make it clear precisely how many soldiers and landing vehicles the American forces brought with them. Because this is a lot. Although I have to assume their hovercrafts are absolutely meant to make you think of Star Wars destroyers.)

For All Mankind finales are known for their big, sweeping set pieces, but they very rarely include violence. At least, not violence like this.

The bulk of an hour is a straight-up shootout; a lot of people are killed, largely because the M-6 troops are not overly concerned about whether or not the folks they’re targeting are MPK officers, Marsies, medics, or somewhere in between. 

The scenes are well choreographed, but there’s a point at which they start to feel repetitive, and a bit like the episode is trying to pad its run-time in order to get to the dramatic confrontation that closes the hour.

Boyd and Lily are captured, but almost immediately manage to escape, thanks to Celia’s former partner allowing them to do so. (RIP, Fred.)

Governor Polianov is also captured, but he seems surprisingly eager to cooperate with the M-6ers for someone who was insisting that topping that alliance was the only hope to save his family.

Is it a fake-out? Maybe? Or maybe he’s just hoping the M-6 soldiers won’t find out about his role in the Kusnetsov bombing.

Suddenly, it makes sense why Marcus Haskell was allowed to come along on this mission, even though his presence represents about twelve kinds of conflicts of interest all sloshed together in a blender. 

Like Alex, he too grew up in Happy Valley. He knows the hallways, secret passages, and air ducts. He’s — or should be — the M-6 group’s secret weapon. Of course, he’s the catalyst that brings about “Sons and Daughters'” most satisfying moment.

It feels inevitable, in a way, that Alex Baldwin and Avery (Stevens) Jarrett were on a collision course with one another. In another timeline, they’d probably have grown up together. In this one, I’m not sure his grandfather ever really got over his guilt about his involvement in her father’s death. 

Is it all a bit…convenient? Absolutely. Does it make for great drama anyway? Sure does! Neither Alex nor Avery has much in the way of folks they’re close to, and Marcus is one of the few each counts among their inner circles. 

The prospect of genuine interactions between these two legacy characters is so intriguing that it’s actually a bit disappointing that their storylines are only intersecting now, with a single episode left in the season and the prospect of a massive time jump looming ahead. (Assuming, of course, that they both survive the finale, which I think seems likely.)  

Meanwhile, on Titan, Walt, Kelly, and Elena are essentially on a road trip to find interstellar life, but their cute found family vibe has an uncomfortable undercurrent. (Still, it’s a refreshing enough return to For All Mankind’s space exploration roots that it’s easy to wish we spent more time on this and less on all the shooting.) 

No one knows what Kelly did to get the Sojourner to Titan after KOSMOS-1 essentially crashed into Saturn, and that uncomfortable truth is going to be a hard enough sell even if they do find legitimate proof of life on this moon.

It’s obvious why she’s so reluctant to give up on the search, but unbeknownst to her, her little ragtag science team is probably the safest group on this show right now, trying to stay alive on a hostile moon hundreds of millions of miles away from any home they’ve known. 

What kind of Mars will be left for them to go back to? 

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• The double meaning of this episode’s title is surprisingly effective — yes, it’s the name of the independence group that ultimately took over Mars (and has been branded as terrorists by the M-6). But it’s also a reminder that all of these people shooting at one another are someone’s sons and daughters themselves. 
• Genuinely not sorry that Palmer is dead, though. That guy was a monster.
• Wish we’d gotten to see a little bit more of Lily’s reaction to the fact that her father ratted out his friends during the Season 4 riots.
• It was a bit strange to realize that we haven’t seen Dev in…weeks, I think, now? What’s he been doing all this time, just sitting on top of a mountain of medical supplies? 

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

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