Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this 80-minute season finale, and what a ride it is! For All Mankind’s fourth season has been a bumpy watch at times, as some characters were underserved (Kelly and Dani, in particular), others were given too much screen time (Ed and Miles, I’m looking at you), and undercooked plotlines were forced to unfold before their time (Happy Valley strike, we hardly knew ye). “Perestroika†takes some big swings at wrapping up season four’s core themes of the pluses and minuses of pursuing progress, class struggle, and the use of excessive force. Not all of them connect, but I always appreciate bold attempts. Where this episode succeeds, it does so by encouraging viewers to ask questions about all of its themes in between its major story beats, which are thrilling, horrifying, irritating, and genuinely sweet and uplifting by turns.
For All Mankind loves to write its characters toward extraordinary accomplishments in each season and then spend time the following season questioning the value, meaning, and consequences of those accomplishments. NASA established Jamestown Base on the moon? Great, Roscosmos set up a base of their own! What if mistrust between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. turns the theoretically neutral moon into a literal battlefield in an increasingly hot Cold War, leading Gordo and Tracy Stevens to die preventing a nuclear disaster? We thank them for their service and wonder what their sacrifice means for their kids (and eventually for a lot of mankind) in the long term. This season has asked us to consider the consequences of Happy Valley’s scientific and exploration missions taking a backseat to its success as a mining colony. By pulling at the threads of the interplanetary financial boom, we’ve seen economic inequity and power-hoarding intensify as the separation between the haves and the have-nots has grown to be a chasm. Who benefits when a bonanza such as Goldilocks is discovered and a financial boom becomes a full-blown gold rush? Are the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and Helios the best stewards of the riches and progress Goldilocks promises?
Just before Margo and Aleida join forces to help Ayesa’s 8 (up from seven after recruiting Rich, another of Miles and Massey’s friends) keep Goldilocks in Mars orbit, Margo tells Aleida that Werner von Braun believed progress is never free, there’s always a cost. (I’d forgotten that this was his shamefully inadequate response to her question about his awareness of the Holocaust in season 1. Gross.) It’s good for us to know that in order to make us question the necessity and desirability of progress. Sometimes, progress is the wrong thing to pursue.
In theory, the M7’s Goldilocks mission is a for-the-good-of-all-mankind proposition — progress of some type! Unspecified technological advances! — but over the course of the past few episodes, it’s seemed more as if the M7 nations were really under the spell of FOMO and Mount Everest syndrome. Goldilocks’s resources are important, but the urgency of its brief availability is just as significant. The window to capture and exploit Goldilocks is small and closes more with each second, so everyone’s been falling all over themselves to devise plans for iridium-mining operations without bothering to think through the consequences of those plans.
When he learns that the missing equipment at Happy Valley has been stolen in aid of a planned asteroid heist, Eli’s indignant howl of “Don’t these people understand, we’re trying to change the world!†isn’t incorrect, but it’s also incomplete. Is it good to change the world if doing so destroys Mars exploration programs among the M7 nations’ space agencies in the process? Eli’s fury about Ayesa’s 8 being motivated “to line their goddamn pockets†is absurd on its face: of course that’s one of their goals, just as it’s a goal for people who are already rich and wielding massive power.
This season has been, in part, a ten-hour cautionary tale about the dangers of not taking unionization and labor actions seriously. During the strike, the powers that be on both Mars and Earth drew the wrong lessons and have been choosing countermoves from the best seller Bad Faith Disproportionate Response Handbook as a result. The worst and least accurate of their beliefs are that the strikers were motivated by greed and that the sublevel-dwellers are always just a hair’s breadth away from violence. Those incorrect beliefs reveal so much about the people in charge and scarcely anything about the workers themselves. They also furnish the justification for violent measures to crush dissent. In “Perestroika,†quarters searches by the unregulated, undertrained space Pinkertons continue, and Happy Valley’s resident CIA and KGB agents escalate their torture of Helios employees. These are the violence-prone people Eli, Irina, Dani, and Palmer should be worried about.
Bishop and Avilov are leveling up after beating the hell out of Miles in the previous episode. Their next tactic is oxygen deprivation/carbon-dioxide poisoning, an unconscionable move that doesn’t even yield their desired results. What does work, finally, is their threat to prosecute his wife for receiving Mars rocks and then reselling them to jewelers. Poor Miles is still too out of it to ask questions such as: Under what laws would he and Mandy be prosecuted? (Does Mars itself even have laws? If not, isn’t that a problem, too?) In any case, poor Miles, having withstood close to a full day of physical torture, confesses the location of Alt-OppsComm down on Sublevel 4 and immediately regrets doing so.
Ayesa’s 8, closely observing events on base and on Ranger and taking their own steps to extend its burn time, are narrowly rescued from being busted thanks to Dev’s speedy Morse code warning. These scenes, and those that unfold between the team’s backup location in the North Korean module and Massey up on Ranger, are the most effective and engrossing of the entire episode. It’s a pleasant reprise of one of FAM’s strengths and season-finale traditions: the high-stakes set piece. Massey’s solo EVA to engage Ranger’s manual override switch and zero-gravity tussle with Palmer is the (very tense but ultimately zero-fatality) mirror image of Kuznetsov and Parker’s ill-fated EVA in the season premiere — a satisfying, elegant bookend.
Far less elegant is the inevitable and deeply disappointing return of space guns, hot on the heels of torture. Dani’s sincere, if naïve, ignorance of the “interview†techniques Bishop and Avilov were using goes up in smoke the moment she sees Bishop apprehend and nearly choke Gerardo to death using a small pipe. She wants to know the location of the scattered saboteurs every bit as much as he does and didn’t realize that she’d unintentionally authorized the use of torture when she agreed to let Bishop and Avilov take the investigatory lead on Ayesa’s 8. The situation devolves further when Bishop learns that Commander Cho has been in the med bay all day, correctly deducing that his prey must be in the North Korean module. He’s requested permission from the Department of Defense to breach it, and despite her best efforts to prevent him from doing so, he’s soon handing out the “standard attenuated energy projectile systems†first mentioned in “Crossing the Line†(a.k.a. “high-pressure nitrogen weapons firing nonlethal roundsâ€) to the space Pinkertons. It’s so interesting that armed agents of the state make such an effort to use unintelligible euphemisms to describe weapons or violent actions of their own and plain language when describing the tools and actions of others. Just something to think about! The last-act showdown pitting the space guns against the fists and improvised weapons — in which Ilya and pals rescue Miles and Gerardo to join the fray and Dani is nearly killed by a real bullet from Lee’s old service gun — is a mess. As a story beat, it exists to furnish a “You say we’re violent? Okay, we’ll show you violence!†moment, but that rationale falls apart quickly. How did Ilya know where Miles and Gerardo were? How did they all know to go right to the North Korean module? Why are we being forced to endure the red herring of Dani’s near-death experience, and is it really necessary for FAM’s moral and morale center to be seriously injured for everyone to stop in their tracks and clear out the mob-mentality cobwebs?
On Earth, the shocking act of violence that shifts Margo and Aleida’s perspective and purpose is the news of Sergei’s death. The use of dropped sound when Aleida breaks the news to Margo that he’s been assassinated is very effective, giving them a moment of privacy that also reminds us just how much of a world unto themselves these two have always been. It also gives more power to the moment we’ve all been waiting for, a confrontation between Margo and Irina where each woman drops her mask as they go briefly toe to toe. Irina tells Margo to get ahold of herself, unwittingly providing an opportunity for Margo and Aleida to have another turning-point conversation, the heart-to-heart when they decide to smuggle in some code that will prevent Ranger from completing the Earth shot and keep Goldilocks in Mars orbit. I love it when a show dramatizes something that would probably feel intense and nerve-racking in real life but is challenging to make look urgent onscreen. After the dead silence that follows Aleida’s sneaky feat of math-and-code derring-do, Irina correctly susses out that she’s the culprit, but Margo hurls herself on that grenade, claiming all the blame to save Aleida. Irina’s warning that Margo will face terrible consequences for her choice is not predictive. Sure, the FBI arrests Margo the instant the U.S.S.R. withdraws her diplomatic immunity, but Irina is the one who has to live with the worst consequences she can think of — an implied end to her powerful role in Karzhenko’s regime. If only she’d stayed in Leningrad!
Margo looks almost relieved as she’s led away in handcuffs, and her episode-concluding voice-over suggests a woman at peace with her actions. Her experiences at NASA and Roscosmos, and her relationships with Aleida, Sergei, and Irina, have given her a more nuanced understanding of humanity: Our flaws, unpredictability, and contradictions are what “make us so resilient†and give us reason to hope. She also gets to be the one to say out loud something I’ve been waiting to hear all season, that however inconvenient and progress-delaying feelings may be, they are crucial to our understanding of what is and what could be in the future. Fortunately, that future includes Dani surviving to relish grandparenthood (her little granddaughter is the cutest, and I wish them many hours of intergenerational joy watching Star Trek together!), and Miles somehow figuring out how to smuggle Lee’s wife, and many relieved people up to Mars. Hooray for Ed’s good dumplings; they deserve this happy reunion!
Also possible, some nine years later, in 2012, is Dev in his space suit, strolling along the edge of what looks like a water-filled crater (!) to gaze at the stars and Goldilocks, whose Kuznetsov Station (!!) is a hive of activity. As the camera pulls way out to the strains of M83’s “Midnight City,†we see just how big that operation is. Did Ayesa’s 8 save Mars programs and prove a mining station could be successful in Mars orbit? And is that water in the crater? Only a new season will reveal the truth!
Houston, We Have Some Bullet Points
• Remember how the asteroid in the season premiere was named Kronos, which means time? Which is what’s running out to capture Goldilocks? If not, the Rolling Stones are here to remind us with their catchy-yet-slightly-threatening song “Out of Time†as the opening needle drop. Why is this song less well known than its album mate “Under My Thumb�
• Massey’s fight with Palmer outside Ranger also calls back to Danny Stevens’s heroic EVA in the third-season premiere.
• For my final comment on the return of space guns (I hope!), I am borrowing from a favorite John Mulaney bit. I don’t care for these new space guns, and you may quote me on that.