For All Mankind’s antepenultimate episode of the season features chess pieces moving into place: On both Mars and Earth, teams are preparing for the asteroid-capture mission, and on each planet, secret teams are working on unsanctioned missions of their own. It’s a real mishmash of Ayesa’s Seven and the Magnetic Ms. Madison!
“Crossing the Line†concluded with Dev and Ed teaming up to steal Goldilocks, which will, in accordance with FAM’s long tradition of inventive space disasters, definitely go wrong somehow. But before things can go wrong, many things have to go right, which makes “Legacy†the most fun episode of the season so far, especially if you’re a heist appreciator. Turns out Dev being an engineering genius and Ed being a first-rate project manager makes this devious little plan of theirs come together pretty smoothly.
We get to enjoy many of the best bits of any heist plan as laid out in the second-greatest Heist Text of our era, the 2001 feature film Ocean’s Eleven: explaining the plan as clearly as possible to the full team of recruits, identifying and executing tasks featuring increasing degrees of complexity and ever-higher stakes, cleverly exploiting flaws and/or arrogance in security systems, and, of course, the Kid. (For those who may feel their curiosity piqued by my ranking of Ocean’s Eleven, the actual greatest Heist Text of our era is, of course, Ocean’s 8.)
The expository scene in which we learn both the intended asteroid-capture plan and Dev’s alternate scheme is really well done, cutting and weaving together elements of three meetings on Mars and Earth. This could have been very dull and confusing, and instead it’s lively and just a tiny bit confusing, because it is quite literally rocket science and I am a humanities girlie who last took a physics class about 25 years ago. The asteroid-interception team aboard Ranger will be receiving and responding to instructions from Happy Valley’s operational communications center, or OppsComm, regarding when to fire up and power down the nuclear engines, using carefully timed bursts of burn time to temporarily bring Goldilocks into Mars’s orbit and then nudge it to a trajectory toward Earth. Ayesa’s Seven will need to get Ranger to accept their slightly different instructions to extend the burn time just enough to make sure Goldilocks stays in orbit around Mars instead. Once Happy Valley figures out what has happened, it’ll be too late to readjust the asteroid’s trajectory and they’ll have to either abandon mining it altogether or accept the longer timeline originally under discussion in “Leningrad.â€
Putting the team together is pretty straightforward — once Ed recruits Massey, all the other die-hard strikers trust her enough to agree to participate too. The most challenging to get onboard is Miles, who, once in charge of Ilya’s former black-market business, has grown to appreciate his former mentor’s cautious, risk-minimizing approach. He just wants to have a nice nest egg for his family to enjoy when his tour is over. Fair enough, but these concerns are no match for Dev’s “C’mon, man, this is a dare-to-be-great situation!†persuasive pep talk; Miles is in. Not a moment too soon, because Miles is the key to acquiring all the equipment Ayesa’s Seven will need to build their own OppsComm. All of NASA’s built-in equipment-redundancy inventory is up on Phoenix, and though Miles has smuggling imports to Happy Valley down to a science, sneaking it past the newly deputized security officers is a whole other kettle of fish.
Fortunately, Miles is crafty enough (and, more important, cool enough under pressure) to devise a workable strategy that relies in part on letting the security officers think they’ve won. Moments throughout the episode both show and tell how intense Happy Valley and NASA leadership have become about operational security. Eli no longer professes even a tiny bit of skepticism about excessive force; Dani emphasizes the secure communications network Happy Valley will use to communicate with Ranger during the asteroid-capture mission; Palmer shuts down Ilya’s former bar; Massey notes that security officers are constantly checking people’s bags and IDs; and on top of everything else, access to sublevels four and five is cut off — allegedly “for crew safety,†but the leading practical effect is to reduce the number of spaces workers can use to organize. All of these are the actions of leadership resorting to draconian control measures because they’re no longer confident in their ability to lead by example and persuasion.
I’ll acknowledge feeling some Schadenfreude upon seeing the team get its cables and monitors and everything past security. Well, nearly everything. The reason they all need to bother at all with Miles’s guy up on Phoenix packing all of this equipment in innocuous goods like cereal and toilet paper is that the entire operation rests on bypassing Happy Valley’s OppsComm. The most important element of making sure Ranger accepts and enacts orders from their OppsComm is an item called a data discriminator, which will check that the orders it receives are from Happy Valley. No discriminator, no plan to execute, and owing to a packing error, the discriminator winds up in the secure equipment lockup at Happy Valley.
At last, the Kid comes into play. The Kid is literal child Alex Poletov, who is available to earn his stripes in this ragtag crew because Kelly has gone to Korolev Crater for a few days to set up the seeker robots with her team. The strike and heist-planning plotlines have been so infuriating and engrossing that I did need a reminder that her team’s quest to discover life on Mars is the reason for her and Dev’s presence there and for Aleida’s participation in the Goldilocks-capture project. I’m not the only one — Ed agreed to babysit Alex while Kelly’s away, and he forgot about it, too, which is embarrassing, but it turns out to be a blessing in disguise. You know who’s small enough to crawl through the air vents John McClane–in–Die Hard style to the secure lockup to retrieve the discriminator? Despite his fear of Ed — “You look like a bear,†he tells his grizzled and gruff granddad — Alex is keen to take on this absolutely harebrained task and pulls it off, earning the highest praise Ed can bestow on his reserved grandson: that he’s “such a brave boy.â€
Having acquired all the necessary technology, they can proceed to the next phase of the plan by starting to build their own OppsComm on one of the now theoretically inaccessible sublevels because they’re unlikely search targets. Turns out inaccessibility is not a meaningful concept to first-rate electrician Sparks, who builds a secret work-around into one of the elevators. Meanwhile, Dev pivots to working as a mole and saboteur on the official asteroid-capture mission, successfully encouraging Dani and Ranger commander Ravi to assign Massey to the mission on the basis of her experience and his aversion to “massive lawsuits and a PR nightmare.†Dani’s inclination to trust that Massey is acting in good faith, as she has always done, is now tempered by extra caution, leading her to assign Palmer to the mission to keep his watchful eye on everyone’s behavior.
Back on Earth, Sergei — whom we last saw at the end of season three picking up a newspaper in his new neighborhood somewhere in the U.S. — has been living a nice-enough life since Margo had him extracted from the USSR. He has settled in a small town in Iowa, has married a woman who is blissfully ignorant of the key details of his past life, and teaches physics at a local high school. Like Aleida, he thought Margo died in the bombing at the former JSC and, like Aleida, is shocked to learn that Margo has been alive and reasonably well in Moscow all this time. Unlike Aleida, he has no one to help him process this information. He knows he should stay put and continue on as if Margo were dead, but at a literal crossroads on the way to work, he decides to turn in the opposite direction to risk it all in Houston.
It’s not just that Sergei can’t resist being pulled back into Margo’s powerfully strong orbit; he feels a moral obligation to try to rescue her as she rescued him. Aleida is skeptical and continues to struggle with the many feelings she has about Margo, but the new-to-her knowledge that Margo surrendered her entire life and career to save him has some effect. Her assistance with a bit of mathematical skulduggery yields a late-night meet with Margo, during which he breaks the news that before she recruited Margo to work at Roscosmos, Irina Morozova was his KGB handler. She’s been the architect of their grief from the beginning, and for her own safety, Margo must not go back to Moscow after completing her work on the Goldilocks mission.
Sergei’s impulse to protect Margo is lovely and in keeping with the faith they’ve always had in each other, but the entire thing is sloppy and ill-advised in every way. He has seemingly abandoned his wife and job, and his plan to reach out to Margo includes showing up at Aleida’s house in broad daylight to ask for her help. The circumstances demand quick and decisive action and the ability to improvise, but a little more tradecraft on Sergei’s part would go a long way toward making any plan executable. He should probably take lessons from Margo, who manages — heaven knows how — to get past her security-detail double act to meet him. I hope there was a brief scene showing how she did so and that it just didn’t make the final edit, because popping out of the hotel and meeting Sergei in a restaurant parking lot at 10 p.m. doesn’t seem like an achievable goal for her right now.
Not that Ayesa’s Seven have it any easier. Sure, they’ve set up their own alternate OppsComm and gotten Massey assigned to the Ranger crew. And sure, things are going fine so far: Dani lets them know they’re 100 percent on track to intercept Goldilocks, and Massey appears cool as a cucumber as she does her job. A final zoom in on the original discriminator reminds us that the entire rest of the season is going to hinge on a piece of equipment that looks like an old removable car stereo.
Houston, We Have Some Bullet Points
• Some details of Sergei’s life in Iowa are touching (his best student is, like Margo, an enthusiastic and preternaturally gifted engineer in the making), odd (the school he works at is named after the apparently not-disgraced former vice-president Spiro Agnew), and odder still (the TV show he and his wife are shown watching is the NBC sitcom Just Shoot Me!, starring Laura San Giacomo, David Spade, and Enrico Colantoni). I have questions.
• Another week, another first-rate needle drop, reminding us that Sergei is a guy who knows how to carry a torch. He may not have realized it, but some part of his heart had been standing there ready to race to Margo, a quality Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris nail with devastating brevity in “That’s All It Tookâ€: “I tried so hard / to let you go, but look / How I still tremble at your name / That’s all it took.â€
• Kelly Baldwin gets the best line of the episode this week. After Ed scoffs at the helpful how-to-babysit-your-own-grandson CliffsNotes she provides, she asks, “You’re going to chime in on parenting techniques at this point?â€