User Reviews

I watched the finale last night and WOW, I am still thinking about it even today! This was truly such a suspenseful and outright emotional episode of "For All Mankind."

You knew somehow that Dani is gonna go for it and dock Apollo with Soyuz anyway. You knew the entire world is gonna be on the brink of nuclear war and it's up to Margo, Ellen, and company down on Earth to figure out the right moves. And yet, that fear and dread for these characters remained and what they're going to do in order to make a difference.

But, man, oh man!

Gordo and Tracy! The dagger! Really that's how I felt. We all knew somehow it was suicide mission for Gordo, yet Tracy (never to back down from a challenge) declares "Don't you dare make me tell our boys their daddy didn't have to die." That's all we needed to know. To see them go out there together was such a brave, defining moment. When the Jamestown crew finally opens the door hatch at the end and finds them together, it just hits you deep knowing somehow that was what happened. Definitely two of the saddest deaths in the show's history, next to Shane and Deke's.

I rarely give 10/10s for episodes, but this one just deserved it! I am so excited for what's next in Season 3! After all, this is really where it has been leading to. And what a perfect way to segue into the nineties than "Come As You Are" by Nirvana! Oh, I am ALL IN!!!

Wow, just wow. The previous episodes of the season have been pretty lackluster but they really hit their stride with this last one. This might be the most emotional episode of the series, we lost two of our favorite characters as well as a few others. But we also got that beautiful Apollo-Soyuz handshake in a time that the world needed it the most. Tracey and Gordo's death was tragic, and I'm going to miss both of them from here on out. But that might be the best send off possible for their characters, they both went out together saving the world. But I'd be lying if I wasn't balling my eyes out at the funeral.

Oh yeah and BOOTS ON MARS! Who got there first? Us or the soviets? Can't wait to find out next season!

Wow is all I have to say. This show just knocked it out of the park with its second season. They improved upon the formula and made the show even better. This episode hit me hard with the sacrifice of Tracy and Gordo. I can't say enough good things about this show. This show is a hidden gem and more people should be watching it.

Perhaps not as pulse pounding as the first but very suspenseful nevertheless. As usual flawless acting and great effects make this a winner. MAJOR SPOILERS: Didn't go the way I thought it might though it was inevitable once Dani made that decision. Sad unforeseen deaths of two great characters. And that final shot was jaw dropping. Why isn't this show more talked about is incredibly mystifying because it's probably the best show on TV. Superb drama.

For a moment I thought Ed and Danielle were going to say "goodbye Bob," I would have cried like a baby. A grand finale for a turbulent season, who will arrive at Mars first? My guess: Soviets and Americans, I think they're going to work together for this one.

As ever, the high points in this season are both the production and the quality of the cast, all of whom are excellent.

Unfortunately, this episode highlights just how far For All Mankind has gone from being an authentic and riveting alt-history show in season one, to becoming a show which jettisoned authenticity at the altar of modern political expedience. We had a great cast reduced to token roles, in order to tick off boxes on a check list. And as another reviewer said, everybody in this episode was disobedient, and yet somehow this was given a thumbs up by their superiors. All occurring during scenes where the Third World War could break out, but hey - somebody with no experience and little knowledge of what's happening gets to influence the story through their virtues and kindness.

If NASA was truly inhabited by such undisciplined and disobedient employees, they'd surely never get a rocket to the launchpad. A particularly jarring and nonsensical scene involved Ed in the state-of-the-art Pathfinder, bringing a ship loaded with nuclear weapons to the moon. The Russians, which have already taken over Jamestown, killing Americans and setting up a blockade to keep them from the moon, aim their weapons at Ed's ship. Ed orders a female astronaut to target the Russian ship with missiles. She refuses, and he explains to her why it's necessary. He's correct in his evaluation, but of course, she's sentimental and eventually pulls a gun on him. They have a stand off and Ed wins, only for us to discover that he'd locked in on his own nuclear cargo and blown it to pieces, watched by their dangerous enemy.

This was kind of a jump-the-shark moment. It made no sense and served no purpose. The Russians would have perceived it as cowardice and surrender.

The episode was occasionally dramatic, well made, had a great send off for Gordo and Tracy, but was also utterly silly and lightweight. They avoided increasing the drama to logical and terrifying heights because they preferred a sentimental though totally implausible ending.

It's a misfortune for this show, that it's become woke and so watered down the potential of what it could become. An alternate history of 1983 should still somewhat reflect the tensions and realities of the real 1983, so that we're presented with a workable what-if. Instead, the alternative reality they chose was to insert modish political into a landscape that wouldn't have recognised them, thus creating an unrealistic story and destroying whatever tension there could be in their original idea...

Fantastic finale. I found a fatal flaw upon re-watching.

*SPOILER*

Gordo and Trace could have both cooled the nuclear reactor and survived.

Instead of going outside to the lunar atmosphere with the improvised protection, they simply needed to enter the inner corridor where there was a firefight and retrieve the Russian body as he was only shot once. Bring him inside the galley, patch his suit, suit up, go outside, fix the coolant system and survive.

Great episode. Great season. Great show. I'm not crying, you are.

This was a very fitting end to the season. Some of it took my breath away..and the part were Tracy and Gordo giving their lives to save the crew was so sad but very heroic. I loved Ed's decision also Dani going for the handshake...A great fitting end. Even the stepping out on Mars wow this show was awesome.

Episodic TV is in a bit of a weird place right now. You have the streaming services putting out prestige projects, and the networks largely producing week-to-week treacle trying to scoop up the remnants of eyeballs. A show like "For All Mankind", especially considering the tone of this second season, gets caught square in the middle: on the low end of the big streamer projects, but would be one of the best over-the-air shows if that was its format. This inconsistency is also mirrored in the show's general direction.

For a very basic overview, the second season of "For All Mankind" does another time jump--into the 1980s. Ed (Joel Kinnaman) and Karen (Shantel VanSanten) now have an adopted daughter--Kelly (Cynthy Wu)--while Gordo (Michael Dorman) and Tracy (Sarah Jones) are separated. Ellen (Jodi Balfour) sees her status in NASA elevated (but constantly thwarted by her sexual orientation), while Margo (Wrenn Schmidt) recruits a familiar face back into the fold. Outside of the space program, the Cold War continues to simmer, with new battle lines being drawn on the lunar surface, of all places.

There are enough things that "For All Mankind" does in this sophomore effort which keeps it entertaining. Its pulls at the heartstrings (while perhaps a bit saccharine) do hit home enough to draw out some real emotion at times, the acting is great across the board, and the alt-history component is entertaining (the use of Ronald Reagan's visage throughout this campaign is certainly unique). One would be hard pressed to call the material "boring" in any way.

Yet, the show suffers from a few key speed-bumps that prevent it from gaining serious dramatic momentum:

-In keeping with Apple's family-based image, "For All Mankind" never really "goes for it" in terms of the hard-hitting material. Even though the emotions may, at times, be very real, and the setting quite literally out of this world, it seems to do a surface-level reckoning with such themes instead of really digging in. Like I said, this formula would be much more well-suited to weekly airings on broadcast TV.

-To me, any show that keeps jumping forward in time as much as this one does is covering up for some writing/storyline weaknesses. Perhaps this is a crutch of all alt-history shows: changing one event but then having to keep spooling outwards to track the repercussions. Multiple episodes of this season are spent simply "filling in the blanks" between S1 & S2, a process I found quite stilted.

-What put me off the most about this season two, however, is how self-important this show thinks it is. Despite a "shelf life" of about a year and a half and 20 episodes, "For All Mankind" treats certain events (some of which may have even happened off-camera) as emotionally or story-wise earth shattering. Perhaps some fans hold the series in such high esteem, but I found it over-reaching. In short, the series projected a gravitas that I felt it hadn't yet deserved.

Overall, I liked this season less than the first, largely because that first slate of episodes took a few more risks and produced a few dynamite episodes as a result. Though not necessarily lacking in outright thrills, season two tracks much more as a family-type show instead of one really interested in unlocking the truest potential of its plots and characters.

This episode.was a strange mixture of greats and duds.

Dud: I'm sure the public narrative on the Seadragon is that it was destroyed in a malfunction, sure, but why exactly doesn't Ed get court-martialled for destroying it? "Oh, but all of this happened on the far side of the moon, NASA doesn't know about it," doesn't work - you can't hide the two missing missiles from Pathfinder.

Dud: Why did Pathfinder destroy the Seadragon in the first place? Just so you can say the Russians didn't do it? It's the far side of the moon, if you want them not to take credit (if you're worried that's what they want), surely you should at least do it in the open. It seems to me there was nothing gained by destroying Seadragon, except maybe admitting to the Russians that you had something to hide in the first place. Good writing should have at least explained this briefly. (It's nice that they pursued a third choice, but that third choice made no sense.)

Dud: There's a coolant malfunction on the base and no one thinks the invading Russians might also be interested in not being blown up, and tries to reach them? I get we're not on speaking terms, but this is kind of important for the lives of your people, and you can still reach Jamestown. Try putting on your best convincing tone. Fine if it fails, but at least give some kind of indicator that you tried.

Minor dud: Each section of the base is individually pressurised, but there are no space suits even in the larger areas? Seems like an oversight. What happens if galley-adjacent sections are depressurised while the crew is socialising in the galley? Do they just wait until backup comes from Earth? Seemed odd.

Dud: Various shots are fired during the base takeover, but only one makes it through three layers of wall/metal/something? AND just happens to land in the exact location necessary to take out the primary coolant controller? AND you have a secret nuclear reactor that isn't connected to the backup coolant loop? I'm usually very tolerant of artistic license, but I've got to admit I actually rolled my eyes at this and checked out of taking this side-arc seriously.

Great: A variety of negative reviews here negatively call out the insubordination - and I agree with them that there would and should have been consequences for those. But history has had a variety of real situations in which people refused to perpetuate the cycle of violence and neglect to good outcome, and so I enjoyed the stubborn handshake moment immensely.

Great: Similarly, that the Pathfinder crew decided to break the cycle of violence was great.

Dud: The *way* they decided to break the cycle was bizarre. It's unforgivable to pull a gun on someone in a pressurised space ship - the script briefly mentions this in dialogue, but the scene itself understates it sharply. And once Ed changes his cowboy mind about where to fire, does he share his change of heart with his crew before steering the missiles? Nope, leaves them guessing. I get he didn't think he was actually going to be a bullet to his brain, but why risk it? Why not coordinate with the rest of your crew? (That said, I'm unsurprised that, having changed his mind, he didn't tell on his crew mate for pulling her gun on him, which explains why she didn't get in trouble.)

Great: I'm glad Gordo and Tracy died for their hard vacuum stunt. To clarify, I didn't want to lose them as characters, but I think I might have found it even more painful if they had somehow survived their twenty second hard vacuum excursion.

Minor dud: I would have preferred they die on the lunar surface the first time someone tripped and fell. They were already over time and it seemed implausible that they'd be able to get up from that. Letting them actually reach the airlock and repressurise it stretched my suspension of disbelief.

Minor dud: As much as I enjoyed the handshake, the political waves it made seemed exaggerated. I don't think a president would go from DEFCON 2 to an impromptu landing in Moscow just because of that.

Overall, I had the impression someone badly wanted to show off their cool duct tape and air filter mask impromptu space suit idea (and it is very, very cool, but it would have been even better if there had been a solid reason to use them) and steamrolled over plausibility in the process. I don't necessarily need plausibility in fiction, but narrative pieces taking a hard sci-fi angle by talking about the effects of hard vacuum exposure and Lunar surface temperatures feel out of place when they're embedded in so much artistic license.