For All Mankind Season-Premiere Recap: When Teamwork Doesn’t Make the Dream Work

Never let it be said that For All Mankind’s season premieres shy away from intensity or complexity. “Glasnost” hews to FAM’s long-standing first-episode formula while bringing us up to speed on where things stand after a time jump from 1995 to 2003. (For those who want a more detailed refresher, we’ve got a primer on each decade too.) Oh, and we can’t forget the lavish catastrophe set piece! Among the series’s catalogue of first-episode heart-rending calamities in space, the Kronos disaster ranks above the second season’s high-radiation solar flare on the moon and below season three’s misadventure aboard the space hotel Polaris. Thanks to its feeling of inevitability, it’s awful, but dramatically, it’s more successful as an illustration of the season’s key themes of mission and group success versus the needs of individuals; the limits of good-faith collaboration when untold sums of money are involved; increasingly stark and seemingly unavoidable class conflict; and the ways that time and the past shape people.

It’s 2003, and as we learn from the lead-in alternate-history montage, following the remarkable, long-term camaraderie among NASA, Roscosmos, North Korea’s space-exploration agency, and Helios astronauts during their first Mars mission, France, Japan, India, and the United Kingdom have joined the M-7 Alliance. Quite a few familiar faces are back, including Ed Baldwin — now the long-serving XO of Happy Valley — as the lead pilot aboard Ranger I, on a mission to secure Kronos, a mineral-rich asteroid, and drag it into Mars’s orbit to extract its bounty. Ed is hiding a hand tremor, knowing full well that he shouldn’t fly anymore, let alone exercise his prerogative to take plum assignments like this mission.

Fellow returning champion Grigory Kuznetsov is on hand, too, to lead the on-asteroid team tethering Kronos to Ranger I. Once he’s jumped onto Kronos, becoming the first human to land on an asteroid, Kuznetsov strokes it as if it were a treasured thoroughbred’s flank. Everyone is living their dreams now, full of pride in their harmonious and collaborative work. Everyone involved on Mars and on Earth (including Aleida Rosales, leading the Thrust team at Mission Control) is filled with pride and hope for Happy Valley’s future as a self-sustaining colony and business venture!

Following a speech straddling the line between heartfelt and rah-rah, new NASA administrator Eli Hobson (Daniel Stern, in an avuncular and shrewd performance) leaves Mission Control staff to their work. As is often the case in an unfolding disaster, everything is going fine until it isn’t. While Kuznetsov is deeply committed to the Kronos mission for professional and scientific reasons, the two Helios technicians working with him, Parker and Massey, are there for the far more practical hefty bonus they’ll receive when the asteroid is safely in Mars’s orbit. Both types of motivation are valid, but given the quiet way Parker and Massey talk about their pay relative to the risks of the mission, it’s clear that they don’t speak candidly about that stuff with the astronauts. It’s equally clear that they have Kuznetsov’s respect too, regardless of why they’re participating; once the cables and anchors in the asteroid start to strain and fail, Parker volunteers to go back out with Kuznetsov, who is grateful to have another pair of steady hands working on a fix.

The risky 30-minute window Ed grants them for a last-ditch effort (ignoring an order from Happy Valley’s commanding officer) becomes irrelevant almost immediately, as the tower connecting Ranger I and Kronos fails structurally. Parker and Kuznetsov are pinned between struts, and Parker is impaled by another piece of metal that’s sheared off. Kuznetsov waives off a rescue offer from Ed, pointing out that his oxygen will run out too quickly, and besides, “Your duty is to the ship; you must do what needs to be done before everyone is lost! Tell my wife and daughter I love them.” It’s largely a credit to Lev Gorn’s performance that these cheesy lines land as devastatingly well as they do. The other element making the scene work is the weight of history and love between Kuznetsov and Ed as they bid each other farewell. Let’s pause here for an ugly-crying break.

The ripple effects of the failed Kronos mission are profound and far-reaching for all of the survivors on Mars and on Earth. Watching the disaster unfold in Mission Control triggers a traumatic flashback-laden panic attack for Aleida, who not only leaves her post but doesn’t return to work for several weeks, dodging calls and lying to her family that she’s working from home.

Danielle Poole learns the devastating news — which refers to Kuznetsov by name but mentions Parker only as “another man” — while attending Avery Stevens’s birthday party, a function she tells Amber that she “wouldn’t miss for the world.” (No Danny to be seen at this party or in the opening montage photos of the Happy Valley crew’s return to Earth. Hmm.) The loss of one of her closest friends hits hard, and she finds herself going back to the Molly Cobb Space Center (NASA renamed JSC to honor Molly’s years of brilliant service and heroism on the day of the bombing) to meet with Hobson.

Hobson comes right out with his big ask: Would Dani agree to come out of retirement and take over as commanding officer at Happy Valley? Pretty, pretty please? They need a steady hand on the tiller up there, and there’s none steadier than hers. Plus, they need a strong counterweight to Ed, whose tour as XO has gone on several years too long.

Ed isn’t just too entrenched in his job; he’s also deeply avoidant to returning to Earth, having put it off in 1998, 1999, 2001, and now in 2003, despite promising Kelly and Alex that he’d be back with them soon. That’s got to play out more fully throughout the season, and I suspect it’ll be ugly.

If Dani has been retired for seven years and is still the top choice to lead Happy Valley, that doesn’t speak well of NASA’s talent-development pipeline. Still, the combined call to service and adventure is a siren song Dani can’t ignore, and the closing moments of the episode see her on the super-speedy plasma propulsion-powered shuttle to Mars.

With Dani on that shuttle ride is new character Miles Hand, whose experiences as an often-unemployed oil-rig worker lead him to take a two-year stint working for Helios as a highly skilled mining technician on Mars. A lifelong hopeful dreamer, all he wants is to provide for his (maybe soon-to-be-ex) wife and daughters, and if he has to go over 140 million miles away to accomplish that, that’s what he’ll do. This feels — aptly! — like a direct echo of the 1849 Gold Rush, and after last season’s half-baked dramatization of working-class dissatisfaction with the jobs impact of clean-space energy, I’m looking forward to a far more compelling version of that aspect of FAM’s universe. The opening montage briefly mentions a strike by workers on the moon that lasted at least two weeks. Jobs are great and all, but this whole interplanetary colonization and resource exploitation isn’t benefiting everyone equally.

In my recap of the season-three finale, I wondered how 2003 Aleida will have processed her grief for Margo — would she know that Margo was extracted from the U.S. by the Soviets, or does she (and everyone else) think she’s dead? Is her mourning tempered by a belief that in death, Margo won’t be subject to federal charges and likely considerable prison time? We’ll have to wait for a future episode to know more about those questions.

Regardless of what folks in Houston and on Mars may believe about Margo, we know she’s alive and well in Moscow, if not exactly thriving. Her opening montage reveals that she has a limp, needs to have a tooth looked at, takes a bunch of medications, wears what looks like toasty compression socks, and tucks a hot water bottle into the inner pocket of her coat. In other words, like all of the characters who were adults in FAM’s first season, she’s aging. A wunderkind around age 25 in the first season, she’s got to be around 60 years old in 2003 — far from old age, but old enough to really feel her age, especially when bored.

Additionally, her days unfold according to an entrenched, lonely-looking routine. Sure, she’s spoiled by the baker who insists on giving her an extra pastry and is greeted warmly by the grizzled, politically opinionated guy who runs the local newspaper kiosk, but they might be the only people Margo speaks with regularly (unless she also exchanges occasional small talk with the KGB agent who keeps an eye on her from a car across the street from her building).

The Kronos disaster furnishes a golden opportunity for Margo to do her favorite thing, working on the problem, and she’s in utter disbelief when informed by Roscosmos Director Catiche’s assistant that she’s made a note of Margo’s many messages. Make that Margaret Reynolds’s messages, and kudos to the writers for finding a way to introduce that bit of exposition about Margo’s assumed identity without including a big old flashing EXPOSITION sign. Not even schlepping out to Roscosmos HQ in Star City by bus is enough to gain access, as Catiche’s assistant frostily instructs her to leave.

We last see a dejected Margo sitting on her usual bench in the park when an unassuming-looking woman feeding the birds strikes up a conversation. She tells Margo to have patience and refrain from making any further waves at Star City. Be like the birds, Margo — those northern bullfinches “know they have to wait for the sun for the flowers to bloom.” She leaves behind a business card containing just a phone number, which Margo squirrels away in her handbag. You might think that she’d be once bitten, twice shy about information passed to her secretly by the Soviets, but this moment seems like a strong argument for the notion that moving on from the past may be an impossibility, that time doesn’t really change us much at all.

Houston, We Have Some Bullet Points

• While we continue to wait for an acknowledgment that For All Mankind takes place in the same universe as The Americans, I’d like to note that in addition to Lev Gorn and (very briefly) Vera Cherny, this episode also gave us moments with Irina Dubova (alleged Nazi collaborator Anna Prokopchuk) as the late Alexei’s mother, and Svetlana Efremova (fake defector Zinaida Preobrazhenskaya) as the bird-feeding woman Margo meets in the park.

• Margo’s Russian is pretty good, though her Alabama accent comes out with a vengeance when she’s making her frantic calls to Roscosmos. Still, it’s unclear how much she understands of the rapid-fire conversation between the newspaper kiosk owner and his friend. They’re arguing about domestic politics, dissatisfied with Gorbachev (the friend refers to him as “the Marked One who thinks he’s a Westerner” and grumbles about inflation and taxes), but are also aware that the bad old days were far worse. Let’s keep an eye on that.