User Reviews

I've been looking forward to For All Mankind since its announcement. I've been a fan of alternate history since watching the Star Trek "Mirror Mirror" episode and subsequently with shows like Sliders and The Man in the High Castle.

The alternate history here, of course, is that the Russians beat the Americans with the moon landing. I watched a few space race documentaries before the show aired in order to get a greater understanding of the real timeline.

In this first episode, following the Russian moon landing, the U.S. still goes ahead with the Apollo 11 moon landing mission. However, will NASA or the astronauts make a mistake in their rush to compete with the Russians?

The show features real historical people such as Apollo 11's Armstrong, Aldin, and Collins. It also includes Nasa Chief Deke Slayton and former Nazi rocket engineer Wernher von Braun.

However, the main characters are fictional astronauts Edward Baldwin and Gordo Stevens (and their wives Karen Baldwin and Tracy Stevens). There is also a female engineer named Margo Madison attempting to compete in the male dominated NASA.

I thought the first episode was good, but not amazing. I found the pacing to be a bit slow and I would have also liked to know what changed in history that allowed the Russians to achieve the first moon landing.

In real life, the Russians lost their lead engineer Sergei Korolev in 1966 when he died unexpectedly during an operation. Perhaps he survived in this alternate timeline? Hopefully they explore that in a later episode.

Whatever the case, I am still curious to see where this alternate history leads.

Well produced show, but it's a little bit too much "American propaganda" for me, where the world is reduced to America and an antagonist country - Russia in this case.

Country, God, duty, American flags and a lot of pride. Do we really need that? Where's Europe and Asia? Why are we seeing everything from a US perspective?

The other thing that bothered me is that when they crashed on the moon, the NASA guy said: "all systems are down. They are independent systems. So it's unlikely that they all go down at once unless a catastrophic event occurred.".

That felt like a realistic deduction of events that occurred based on how these systems actually work.

If that's the case, writers can't just end it with a weak "gotcha! They are still alive anyway!" event at the end, and not explain why all systems went down.

And let me guess, there's going to be a Mexican migrant turning into the hero in a few episodes? Probably female. It feels a bit like a contrived woke agenda happening, but I hope it's just my stupid bias.

I hope the show will improve over time - I'll give it a few episodes for sure.

It was a male-dominated field, yep...more than likely it still is (weirdly, they don't tend to release those statistics). Although, you'd think that the PR field was exclusively female in those days (wives of soldiers apparently). All that aside, I've seen one episode and (feel free to tell me I'm wrong), but it looks like we're also squeezing immigration into this storyline, and I believe a young Hispanic woman will end up (somehow, when immigrants were welcomed at the highest level) being on a ship in this series.