Is it just me, or are this season’s unfolding plotlines on Earth far more riveting than those on Mars? “Leningradâ€â€™s scenes in the titular city include crucial character moments and plot developments; the high-stakes negotiations for a new M7 treaty and executable plan to capture Goldilocks crackle in conversations among Aleida, Irina, El, and eventually Margo. Margo’s decision to come forward, knowing she’ll face public fury and censure for having defected to the USSR is no small thing, and it’s significant that the opportunity to collaborate once more with Aleida is what prompts her to do it. Meanwhile, the inheritors of the consequences of Margo’s decision are up on Mars, deciding to take risks of their own, as Massey (with an assist from Ed, of all people) leads the charge for a union drive of Helios workers.
The unionization plotline itself feels inert and poky at the moment, which is bizarre because the stakes are incredibly high, and as Massey correctly points out, they may never have a better opportunity or more powerful leverage to successfully make their (eminently reasonable) demands. Time is on their side, thanks to the swiftly closing window to capture Goldilocks and the fact that “they can’t just shitcan us and fly in a bunch of scabs†as they did when Moon workers went on strike a few years ago (a detail that leapt out at me in the first episode’s opening time-lapse montage). Massey has compelling facts at the ready — workplace safety is about to decline rapidly due to likely forced overtime and insufficient rest periods, and everyone at Happy Valley has already been reminded recently that their line of work isn’t just risky, it’s dangerous — but it’s not until Ed drops key details about the sweet overtime pay everyone is hoping will make the reward worth the risks they’re likely to take.
Thanks to Palmer requiring Ed’s sign-off on the new pay-and-bonus tables (he’s still Happy Valley Project Manager, even though he’s been fired as XO), he can tell everyone that Helios’s calculations for bonus tiers and amounts have drastically reduced all of their financial prospects. Getting to the first bonus tier will take ten times longer than previously, and the bonus itself is dropping from $20,000 to $5,000? What remaining shreds of get rich or die trying anyone’s been clinging to disappear altogether when they learn (again, from Ed) that the M7 has announced that the asteroid capture plan will send the valuable rock to be mined in orbit around Earth, not Mars, so those crummy bonuses will only be available for a few months rather than years. That’s the last straw, even for the most strike-skeptical folks in the room. Strike!
My For All Mankind BINGO card has never once included a square for “Ed Baldwin Embraces The Power of The Collective,†and it’s making me feel like I’m experiencing narrative whiplash. In one episode, he’s grousing about Helios workers — a group that counts him among their ranks — being on Mars for the wrong reasons, and a few weeks later he’s saying things like, “they gotta pay the people who do all the dirty work, and if they refuse, let’s shut this place down!†When did this king of acting unilaterally develop class consciousness? How much of this is sincere, and how much of it is driven by his desire to mess with Dani and Palmer?
The CO and XO are up to their elbows in drafts of asteroid capture technical specs from Helios. When Palmer voices reasonable doubts about Happy Valley’s capacity to manage the required pace of the operation, Dani firmly declares herself an adherent of the sunk cost fallacy. Her entire reason for being at Happy Valley is “to prove that this base was worth the years of blood, sweat, and tears it took to establish a Mars operation.†In the names of their friends and colleagues who worked so hard to make Happy Valley a viable endeavor, she is going after Goldilocks no matter what. It’s hard to believe that Dani, who is so gifted at seeing the big picture and at managing people and who was sent to Mars to course-correct following a tragic workplace safety event, isn’t making workplace safety her top priority. As much as I understand her ambition and eagerness and know all too well the seductive allure of For a Limited Time Only-ness, it’s a mistake to go full steam ahead rather than take the time to engage with the idea that they’re simply understaffed for this mission.
Elsewhere at Happy Valley, Ilya and Miles are making mistakes of their own in what I’m calling the Great Obsidian War. Rather than confronting Miles about his pursuit of a side hustle to his side hustle even after Ilya rejected the idea, Ilya revokes his access to the loading dock through Faisa and drives the message home by enlisting Petros, a massive chiffarobe of a man, to hoist Miles up by the neck and nearly strangle him while instructing him “not [to] fuck with Ilya’s business†and never to return.
What’s an entrepreneurial fellow like Miles to do but turn Lee Jung-gil’s desperation to be reunited with his wife against him? Once Lee learns that Ilya had dropped his efforts to help his wife escape North Korea and secretly defect to Mars, he immediately dispatches several of his colleagues to beat the tar out of Petros. Retaliation rather than recourse doesn’t work in Ilya’s favor at all, and by the episode’s end, he finds himself out of business entirely, left only with the breadcrumbs of being permitted to visit his own bar whenever he’d like. This plotline is so detached from everything else happening at Happy Valley that the one element of it that remains of interest is what role the DPRK guys will play now that Lee has lost hope of seeing his wife again.
Back on Earth, all the action is in Leningrad, where the nations of the M7 Alliance are meeting to negotiate a new agreement focused on capturing, extracting, and profiting from the unprecedentedly vast quantities of iridium Goldilocks contains. Irina chairs the big first meeting, but it’s really the Aleida Show. Aleida’s direct, un-showy presentation of what the post-capture mining operation will require to be a success proceeds from her assumption that there’s no point in trying to candy-coat the scale of the land vehicles, spacecraft, ore transport, and buildings necessary for success. All in all, the basic costs hover around $2 trillion, which is both an unfathomably huge price tag and also a very reasonable amount, considering that the total value of the asteroid is at a minimum $200 trillion. Still, the announcement sets off a round of concerned murmuring among all of the M7 signatories who are not the U.S. and USSR.
Margo is watching all of this unfold via a massive bank of surveillance cameras in a file storage room. It’s odd and a little tantalizing to see these two interacting in a multiply-mediated way, through camera lenses, physical separation, and Irina herself, who listens to all of Margo’s real-time commentary and follow-up questions. The strength of Margo and Aleida’s relationship was always rooted in what excellent collaborative problem-solvers they are, and it’s nice to see them get to do that again, even if, for now, Margo is the only one who knows it’s happening. As the meeting attendees break for some casual midday Champagne and hors d’oeuvres, Eli and Irina gently school Aleida (and Margo) in the stickier ways of treaty negotiation. The more experienced agency heads have seen things like this unfold many times — good projects fail, even when all of the partners agree on them in principle, when they can’t reach an agreement on money. Sure, the U.S. and USSR could foot the entire bill together, but as Eli puts it, “everyone needs to have skin in the game to benefit.†Philosophically, this isn’t a million miles away from what Massey and company are talking about, but their conversation is taking place in a literally sparkling and golden room, as they drink actual sparkling wine rather than in a tiny, poorly lit, clandestine bar while drinking moonshine strong enough to degrease an engine.
Aleida is on stronger footing as a problem-solver once Irina and Eli explain that time isn’t just of the essence in the eight-week timeline they need to nail down for capturing Goldilocks but is also crucial to satisfying the economic and political expectations of every signatory. Politicians want to be able to run for re-election on the riches of Goldilocks, but they can only do so once there are riches to claim credit for. Waiting decades for substantive ROI? That dog won’t hunt. Once Eli wonders aloud about what might happen if the asteroid could be mined from within Earth’s orbit, though, they’re briefly off to the races. This is an idea with tremendous promise: it could be implemented using already existing technology and infrastructure and could deliver iridium and profits within five years instead of 40 years. The timing for hammering out a viable agreement, however, stinks, even with massive simplifications, and it looks once more like they’ll have to throw in the towel.
I love that this is the moment, seven years into her exile, Margo decides to reveal herself to the world. Irina misinterprets it as an opportunistic and careerist lunge for power, but that just highlights her incomplete understanding of Margo’s priorities and character. As Margo puts it, her drug isn’t potential power but the thrill and satisfaction of solving complex engineering problems. This is a chance to get her and Aleida’s two-woman band back together, and their reunion is rich with every shade of their shared history. Aleida’s shock, flowing right into a bear hug of disbelieving relief and wracking sobs, is such a satisfying moment, highlighting once again what a constricted life Margo has been leading since her secret defection. As the two debrief, Margo has to receive Aleida’s fury and grief at Margo’s betrayal, and we hear the awful details of Aleida’s experiences on the day of the JSC bombing for the first time right alongside Margo. It’s a strong, effective narrative choice to have held back on those details until this moment, as they, too, reflect the strength of Aleida and Margo’s bond. Aleida’s first thought, as soon as she could stand, was to find Margo, and Margo confesses that some part of her has long wished she’d been at her post when the bomb exploded.
Aleida manages to set aside her intense, multifaceted, and 100 percent fair anger with Margo to work the problem as a team once more. That conversation is far from over, but it’s impossible not to feel a little glow of joy watching them slide so smoothly back into their element together as the sound begins to drop out and the camera pulls back by degrees.
Houston, We Have Some Bullet Points
• At last! A truly substantive contribution to the season by Ed Baldwin! Bravo to Joel Kinnaman for his incredible delivery of the line about Ilya’s hooch having “the aftertaste of … cinnamon mouse ass.†Ed Baldwin, space-moonshine sommelier!
• One more Ed-prompted thought: when nobody at the union meeting appeared to get his “shaken, not stirred†reference, it triggered a cascade of James Bond concerns. Did Pierce Brosnan never get to play 007 in the FAM timeline? If not, what does that mean for his life and career? Is he still one of our most famous and beloved Instagram Dads and Wife Guys? Does the now-classic GoldenEye 007 Nintendo game exist in their timeline? We need answers.
• It’s clunky, but I do appreciate the exposition about how company-friendly arbitration would be for Helios. It’s an important point and integral to understanding one aspect of labor organizing that isn’t common knowledge.