For All Mankind has returned for its fifth season of Apple TV+, and the premiere episode is as slow, steady, and rock solid as fans have come to expect. For All Mankind has reached what passes for old age among big-budget TV shows, but it’s still pushing new boundaries, still unpredictable, and is still made with a high level of craftsmanship that makes each episode easy to watch. It’s good to be back.
“First Light” starts how every new season of For All Mankind starts: with a montage that catches us up with what’s happened over the past several years of fake history. In this alternate reality, Al Gore became president but was supplanted by James Bragg (Randy Oglesby), the vice president in Season 3 under Ellen Wilson (Jodi Balfour), whom we get only the barest glimpse of before she presumably once again sits out a season. President Bragg has an “Earth comes first” agenda; he’s had it with what he sees as everyone on Mars draining Earth’s valuable resources, which will surely cause headaches for our heroes down the road. (Other details worth noting: Hurricane Katrina never happened and we have robots helping us at home by 2012, when this new season is set. Talladega Nights and Breaking Bad still exist in this reality, thank goodness.)
For All Mankind has never been in a show in a rush, and a lot of this premiere is dedicated to setup. We get elaborate, sweeping shots showing us the expanded Happy Valley settlement on Mars. They have domed farming enclosures now, and a public market where people bustle to and fro selling their wares. Perhaps most importantly, there’s now a Domino’s Pizza on the Red Planet. That felt important; you know Martian settlement isn’t just a fad when corporate America sets up shop there.
As for our characters, everyone is present and accounted for. Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) is searching for alien life in the Karolev Crater, but she’s not having much luck, setting up a funding battle in the future. That’s one of many plotlines the show introduces in this premiere and then puts a pin in. Her son Alex, just a little boy in Season 4, is now a teenager played by Sean Kaufman. He graduates high school in this episode alongside his three classmates, but unlike them, he seems to have little idea what he wants to do with his future, preferring to cruise around the surface of Mars on a high-tech motorcycle he crashes after getting way too much air on a jump in the low Martian gravity. On Earth or Mars, teenage listlessness is a problem. Put a pin in it.
Miles Dale (Toby Kebbell), the oil rig worker who came to Mars for work in Season 4, has now established himself as part of the community along with his wife Amanda (Shannon Lucio) and teenage daughter Lily (Ruby Cruz), who may have some romantic tension with Alex. Of all the teenagers we meet in this episode, Lily has the most invested in the future of Mars; she secretly goes around tagging “Free Mars” on walls, which will surely become a rallying cry later in the season (hopefully you brought a lot of pins). Obviously, Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), one of the few characters who’s been around since the start of the show, loves her rebel spirit. Ed played a key role in making sure the iridium-rich “Goldilocks” asteroid remained in orbit around Mars at the end of Season 4, ensuring that the nations of Earth would have to keep funding this Martian colony and space exploration in general. He’s now a cantankerous old man whose growling snickers and grumbling asides are equally endearing and hilarious. That said, it’s very hard to imagine him living beyond this season, especially after we learn he has Stage 3 cancer, but hopefully, he goes out with a bang. Knowing him, he won’t be able to avoid it.
Seeing a character like Ed with liver spots and a halting stagger underscores how far this show has come since Season 1, when he was a hotshot pilot in the late 1960s. But we only feel the full impact towards the end of the episode when Helios CEO Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña), another OG member of the cast, visits her mentor Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) in prison, where she’s been ever since getting arrested at the end of Season 4 for her part in the Goldilocks incident. Unlike Ed, who’s never had to slow down long enough to think about the long arc of his life, prison has forced Margo to get contemplative. She’s still always thinking and tinkering, offering Aleida some advice on a scientific problem almost the instant their visit starts. But she also looks back on her life and gets honest about some of the things missing from it. It’s very moving to see Margo, who was always driven to the point where she could seem cold and distant, now wise and still enough to offer Aleida some kindly advice. It’s the best scene of the episode.
As far as the show has come, it feels like it could still go just about anywhere. During the high school graduation ceremony, we see some young children in the crowd. Presumably, they’re the first people born on Mars, which makes them the first Martians. Who will they grow up to be? The show is teasing a Martian independence movement of sorts this season, which feeds into the idea that the series is a kind of spiritual prequel to the fantastic Prime Video sci-fi show The Expanse. Miles presides over a group called the Sons & Daughters of Mars, which recalls the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution organizations. What will this show’s version of the Boston Tea Party be?
We’ve spent precious little time talking about the plot, because this episode is so busy introducing (and re-introducing) characters, setting up conflicts, and establishing tone that it barely has time for any. However, while on his joyride, Alex stumbles across a corpse, and while the Soviet representatives on Mars seem eager to downplay it (how very curious), it soon becomes clear that the man’s death was no accident. This is the first-ever murder on Mars.
Suspicion falls on Lee Jung-Gil (C. S. Lee), the North Korean astronaut (technically an ujunaut, which is to North Korea as cosmonaut is to the Soviet Union, FYI) with whom Ed has gotten chummy these past several years. For All Mankind leaves it to next week for us to discover the details and to see what the reaction will be on Earth. It seems likely that President Bragg will use the murder to paint Mars as wild and lawless and then try to bring it under firmer control, and Ed and the rest of the Mars faithful won’t like that at all.
First Look at ‘For All Mankind’ Spin-off Brings Us Behind the Iron Curtain
Sci-fi fans will soon be able to embark on a new mission, as Apple TV’s companion thriller has officially set a date for launch.
You could call this episode slow, but the better words are “stately” and “deliberate.” For All Mankind is coiling itself up to spring into what could be a spectacular season. It’s never let fans down and there’s no reason to believe it’ll start now.
For All Mankind
- Release Date
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November 1, 2019
- Network
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Apple TV
- Directors
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Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, Andrew Stanton, Meera Menon, Dan Liu, Allen Coulter, Craig Zisk, Dennie Gordon, John Dahl, Lukas Ettlin, Wendey Stanzler, Seth Gordon, Sylvain White, Michael Morris, Maja Vrvilo, Sarah Boyd
