I have mention this a few times but this series is what got me thinking back on 2019 that AppleTV had some quality, back then you only got Netflix and AppleTV was basically starting with a small catalog and they kick the door with For All Mankind, but as any other series it has been dragging the more seasons it gets but it is still good enough to watch and also creates this sense of nostalgia too. Season five has been something I have been waiting on for a while but with everything going on irl I had no time to watch so now Im catching up, but S05E01 gave me that mix of dread and excitement you only get from a show you have been watching for a while. I have been riding with this series since episode one of season one and what made it so good back then was the feeling that space was enormous and indifferent and that every single decision these characters made could get someone killed in the coldest possible way. So you can imagine what it was like to sit down and spend the first few minutes watching Mars Peacekeepers do corridor curfew patrols and chase down a young woman named Lily Dale for spray painting free Mars on a wall. You get the usual alternate history to kick things off, JFK Jr still walking around, Blockbuster Video still a thing in this timeline, which is a nice little does of nostalgic to remind you this is not our world, not our reality and then you land on Happy Valley and immediately something feels off. Not scary off but more wrong in a place that has already gone bad kind of way. I was trying to get confy after a long day and instead of getting that familiar rush I usually get from this show, I found myself leaning forward almost like I dont recognize it, because what I was watching was not a colony of explorers reaching for the stars anymore, it was a society already rotting from the inside out, so this is really something different although I was not sure yet if it was for better or worst.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7772588/
- Platform: APPLETV
I want to give credit where it is due, the episode plants seeds all over the place without spelling everything out for you. Alex Baldwin, Kellys kid, is out on his spacebike doing taking a ride on the Martian surface and crashes, and finding Yoon Tae Min dead out there shifts everything from a graduation day story into something much darker very fast. There are several scenes out on that red surface, Kelly going out to Korolev Crater for her EVA work, the hopper retrieval, all of that, so it is not like we are stuck inside a building the whole time. What is missing is the scale, the terror, the sense that space itself could kill you at any second and that absence is the real key factor missing. The discovery of Yoon is shot in this cold and clinical way, focusing on what depressurization does to a person and it completely shakes off what the episode look like at first, almost like the "hold my beer" meme because you know something drastic is going to happen, you go from a graduation party vibe to a homicide investigation with no warning at all. For most of the hour the murder mystery stays in the background while the Peacekeepers piece things together, and it is only in the final minutes when DNA evidence under Yoon fingernails leads them straight to Lee Jung Gil, the first human to ever walk on Mars, that the episode drops its real gut punch. That final arrest lands hard because of the history and the weight of who Lee is to this show and to Mars itself and it is the one moment in the premiere that actually got my blood pumping the way the early seasons used to.
If I get to compare this first episode to the earlier seasons is almost painful, because those other episodes as I have mention where not much about society drama, they used to hit you with some massive setup disaster, a solar flare, an equipment failure, some terrifying reminder that space does not care whether you live or die. Here we swap all that out for a murder investigation and a series of quiet rooms and there is a huge contrast that slow things down dramatically. The one character moment that actually cut through all of it was Ed Baldwin, who is under house arrest with an ankle monitor but still moving around Happy Valley, showing up in his Navy dress blues for the graduation, picking on the crew almost like showing them he still kicking and use to be the boss of this entire thing, and then having this quiet scene at the doctor dealing with stage three cancer that somehow made me feel bad for the guy, at least the episode got some feelings out of me, I have explain many times that for content to be good it has to make you feel something about what the characters are going through. Ed used to be this guy who stared down death on a daily basis and found it kind of funny, after that episode where he miss the oportunity to be the first to touch the moon he said NO MORE, so he never ever back down from an oportunity and now watching him with an ankle monitor and a cancer diagnosis while still trying to help the people around him is moving. The show is trying to make you feel the weight of decades passing and the cost of everything these characters sacrificed and with Ed it absolutely succeeds, it is just surrounded by material that does not match that same emotional level from the first three seasons I would say.
At this point you got a clear idea of what my opinion is about this opener and I do not want to sugarcoat this, because the pacing of this first episode feels all over the place that made me really impatient just watching boring regular life stuff. We spend so much time doing catch up with every single character that the episode starts to feel like a long list of status updates rather than an actual story moving forward, but I get it, thats how most episode 1 of every season fells. Aleida is dealing with Dev blowing past her completely by announcing the Meru city project publicly in an interview without getting any clearance from her first, leaving her scrambling to deal with the financial and corporate fallout, venting to Gene, venting to Margo, and yes the tension is real and it says something about how little Dev actually respects the people around him, but it all plays out in conversations rather than confrontations and it drags because it all political drama. There are no extended interrogations, no rooms full of people pointing fingers, just a lot of people being quietly miserable and tired in separate locations, its just boring compared to what other seasons have come up with, S04 had those sick scenes on episode 1 trying to push the asteroid and everything going to hell real quick, with people dying for good, flying through the space because a tension cable broke off. The show has turned into something that feels more like a workplace drama about exhausted people fighting for scraps of authority than the life or death space adventure that made it great, and I understand that is partly the point but understanding something and enjoying it are two very different things.
I gave this episode a very low rating of 6 out of 10 and I want to be clear that this is not a bad show. For All Mankind is still doing things no other science fiction series on television is attempting, specially with an alternate universe story, the world building is insane and the performances across the board are solid, but as the opening for season five this spends an hour making you feel defeated and drained when it should be making you feel like the next chapter is something you cannot miss. The free Mars graffiti on that corridor wall stays in your head because it is doing exactly what the writers intended, telling you this planet is just another screwed up human colony now with the same corruption and inequality and quiet desperation we left behind on Earth and that is a interesting story to tell. What I need from the next episodes is for the show to remember that outer space is still there, that there are ships and missions and the terrifying beauty of the the cold space still waiting to be part of this and not just a backdrop for political cover ups and office politics. If the Lee Jung Gil situation leads somewhere actually unexpected and if the show can find a way to mix that human drama with the sense of scale and danger it used to own completely, then this season could still recover everything it feels like it is currently leaving on the table. Right now though, it mostly just made me want to go back and rewatch the season four episode one, where the show reminded you why being in space is the most terrifying and beautiful thing a human being could ever try.
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