This Land is Our Land
Season 5
Episode 10
Editor’s Rating
5 stars
*****
Photo: Apple TV
For All Mankind has some narrative traditions it returns to at least semi-regularly — the season-opening montages with all the painstakingly created fake newspapers and tv clips; the daring-to-horrifying set pieces; acts of noble self-sacrifice; the concluding voiceovers laid over a montage leading us into the next season’s time-jump — and while I look forward to them, I also live in abject dread of what devastation the writers are going to unleash on their viewing public (who probably should know better by now). While the second-season finale featuring Gordo and Tracy Stevens saving the Moon from millions of years of radioactivity in their ersatz duct tape space suits is my forever favorite among the high-stakes set pieces, I think the whiplash of the Marsies incinerating the M-6 Command HQ, followed by Kelly Baldwin’s discovery of the solar system’s grooviest lake, all capped off with the mysterious Russian message lighting up the screen in the Saturn-adjacent floating hulk of the Soviet Mars-94 craft from season three all the way in 2020 will be the ones I think of and puzzle over the most often as we wait for season six.
Taking them in order, using Lenya as a one-man Trojan Horse to turn the tables on the M-6 is as brilliant as it is brutal. Of course the M-6 would buy his image as a carefree, slick operator, too in love with his own power to ever think of working alongside the rebel Marsies! Of course they’d be happy to learn every detail he has to share with them, as Miles & Co. back at MOCC are ramping up the oxygen levels in the command center pod! Despite Aleida’s best efforts to convince Miles not to push the button that would cause all that O2 to ignite, hers is the only voice arguing against perpetrating mass murder.
I know that this is what the season has been building to by pushing Happy Valley residents and leadership to the brink. The M-6 embargoing their supplies while Dev and the MPKs sabotaged their agricultural domes and killed a literal child in the process was not going to go unanswered, and Happy Valley’s destruction of the landing areas on Goldilocks was never going to be the end of it. Aleida is right that killing everyone in the Command center is something they won’t be able to come back from, that it will destroy their humanity and any moral high ground they might want to claim. Irina is right that the M-6 are there to subdue and/or kill all of the residents of Happy Valley, and Miles is sort of right that, absent more arms and more fighters on their own side, killing all of the M-6 military leadership on Mars is paradoxically a way to cling to what humanity they still have.
In a recent interview with Coral Peña, she told me that this was a scene where she didn’t need to act because her own feelings were so closely aligned with Aleida’s. The weight of it is particularly heavy, knowing how often Miles has sought out Aleida’s advice and assistance. Peña said in our conversation that “something Margo, Miles, and Aleida all have in common is that people really didn’t believe that they could do [all that they accomplish], and Aleida sees that in people. I think those people tend to be attracted to each other.” In the past, Miles has been “a little bit bumbling” and often “trying really hard to just look like a presentable man” who “doesn’t have all the answers,” but here, he’s very assured. This Miles is not being cocky or flip in his response to Aleida’s objections; he’s thought this through and has arrived at what he thinks will be the best course of action overall. She’s aware that she’s played a role in bringing Mars to this moment, and is arguing for a least-bad solution.
Across the entire season, For All Mankind has highlighted many thorny historical resonances, old and new. I’ve seen a bunch of viewer comments on these recaps and elsewhere drawing parallels between the struggles of Happy Valley vs. the M-6 and the American Revolution, and likening the M-6 embargo to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Miles himself has referenced the siege of The Alamo and the Vietnam War (the massacre at My Lai, elements of Apocalypse Now, and the poster design for Full Metal Jacket) in the same breath. The chapter of American history that kept calling to me as I watched this season is the colony-within-a-nation relationship between the United States and its mineral-rich states like Montana and the Dakotas.
Historian Colin Woodard has written at engaging length about the distinct regional cultures of North America, and his conception of the Far West has informed my understanding of Earth’s relationship to Mars over the last two seasons. In Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America, Woodard describes The Far West as having been “colonized only via the deployment of vast industrial resources […] or by the federal government itself, which controlled much of the land”, leading settlement to be “largely directed by large corporations”, and making it a region “exploited as an internal colony for the benefit of the seaboard” regions.
It’s been interesting to see the progression of Lenya’s ambitions and life trajectory over the course of the season. Costa Ronin described playing this arc to me as peeling back the layers of an onion. Lenya started out seeing Mars purely “a stepping stone to him [on his way to] becoming the next president of the USSR” and making all of his decisions based purely on that ambition. Initially, “he cannot burn any bridges [because] he has to be a professional politician” at all costs, but by the end of the season, he looks perfectly at ease relinquishing that role as he swears Miles into it in the closing montage. I’m not worried about him at all, given that Khorzhenko has been toppled, and Irina’s assessment that “Comrade Polivanov has always been very resourceful.” On this note, I encourage everyone to watch Star City for the Soviet perspective on what unfolded after the USSR got to the Moon first. Among others, we meet a very young Irina Morozova, who is both idealistic and quite resourceful in her own right.
Following the destruction of the M-6’s command center, the other big on-Mars beats are the shootout on Main Street, which felt like it wouldn’t have been out of place in an early episode of Say Nothing, and the supremely odd couple of Irina and Aleida accepting that they best they can hope for at this point is harm reduction, and teaming up to re-activate old-timey satellites so that the folks on Titan can have a shot at getting back to Mars. I loved seeing Aleida flatly declaring “I’m the fucking CEO” to the Helios security lackey (who seems not to recognize her? Rude!) and just taking over Dev’s workstation. This sequence is particularly gratifying as a valedictory reminder of how deeply Aleida has come into her own over the years. In our conversation, Coral Peña said she’d been looking forward to playing this version of Aleida, “a woman who is like, ‘Listen, I know all my quirks, but I’m really good at what I do, and if you want me on your team, I can save your life, so if you like that idea, let’s go for it.’”
It’s also fitting that Aleida and Irina’s arrival comes on the heels of Dev witnessing Alex and Avery joining forces to help the Helios offices’ in-house emergency medicine team save Marcus. Dev is experiencing feelings seemingly unknown to him before, such as shame, regret, and a desire to right some of his unfathomable wrongs. At this point, I will take anything that motivates him to do the right thing, in this case, actually putting his own life on the line to extend the range of the space elevator tower so that the USS Bradford can communicate the cease-fire news with the M-6 troops. I was happy to see the unexpected twist of characters doing the dramatically heroic things here — like Dev’s tower climb and Alex riding his graduation bike hell for leather to try to call off the shootout on Main Street — come through their trials just fine. Even Kelly’s self-sacrifice on Titan is not flashy at all. It’s quiet and considered, and her massive methane lake discovery is hers alone. (For now!!!)
Titan, man. It’s peaks and valleys galore up here! Walt, Kelly, and Elena are running out of oxygen, they can’t communicate with Sojourner-T, and their rover’s engine is completely shot. On the other hand, Kelly’s somewhat reckless collection of the shimmery liquid sample Elena mentioned before she punctured her suit turns out to be a bonanza beyond the team’s wildest dreams. Methane-based life! If life can be based in carbon and methane, in atmospheric conditions as disparate as Earth’s and Titan’s, it can emerge from many more elements and compounds, in every solar system! After being thwarted so many times on Mars and just barely surviving the journey to Titan thanks in part to Kelly’s cheeky sabotage, this success is even more amazing than they’d hoped for.
Once Kelly convinces Walt and Elena that of the three of them, she has to be the one to accept certain death by remaining behind, her final vidmail to Alex plays as a voiceover to the season-ending montage. Margo and Graciana enjoy Tootsie Rolls together while having a heart-to-heart; Avery takes Alex’s bike out to the capsule where her father was exiled and died, while wearing a space suit featuring her original surname of Stevens rather than Jarrett; and Dev joins Lee and Moon Yeong in planting new crops under an ag-dome. I think Kelly’s right that Alex will be fine, and in her assessment of the excellent person he’s continuing to become. It’s still heartbreaking to think of Alex as an orphan at his age.
Or will he be an orphan, after all? The lake full of shimmery bioluminescence that Kelly finds and wades into in her final scene has me so curious. Will she die and just be preserved in that lake for future missions to find? Is the glowy blue stuff sentient? Does it want to communicate with humans, à la the heptapods in Arrival or the glowing deep-sea creatures of The Abyss? Does it have mysterious, life-preserving properties? Wait, are we in a full Cocoon situation?! Hope springs eternal, for Kelly Baldwin, and for all of us committed to seeing For All Mankind through its next and final season (which I also hope will arrive sooner than 2028).
It’s not enough to go out on just one space science mystery, though. We need more, something equally tantalizing, like an alphanumeric string suddenly lighting up a computer console that’s presumably been powered down since 1994 somewhere past Saturn. Surely we can go even bigger than that, though! What if that alphanumeric string was in Russian, and necessitated me taking a photo of the screen, painstakingly typing the alphanumeric string into a Cyrillic language keyboard, and then pasting the resulting text into Google Translate, to learn that it says “GW Detection 3.06.0451 // Nikulov loading…” Nikulov is the surname of our beloved, late Sergei. What did he do? What?! Is?! Happening?!!!
• Here’s my transcription of the code on the Mars-94 monitor screen. Please chime in with a correction if Google Translate steered me wrong: “обнаружение гв 3.06.0451 // никулов загрузка…”
• The Earth-side coverage of the Battle of Happy Valley is fascinating. All season, I’ve been wondering what the vast majority of nations that are not in the M-6 or ISN have been making of the interplanetary war games nonsense the others have been playing at. Turns out, they are resoundingly unimpressed, with 80 of them condemning the M-6’s actions. It’d be cool to get a stand-alone episode from the perspective of folks from places like Uruguay and Cameroon on the whole situation.
• Kudos to Alex and Avery; Ruby Cruz mentioned in our conversation a few weeks ago that she really loved Sean Kaufman and Ines Asserson’s scenes together, and it’s easy to see why. Rather than an info-dump between them at Helios, we get to see two thoughtful young people arriving at the shared understanding that they’re actually on the same side. Each of them is feeling the moral and psychological weight of their actions, and each does what they can to prevent further harm: Avery by preventing a fellow Marine from shooting Alex, and Alex by doing his Paul Revere thing to spread the cease-fire news. I hope we get to see more of them working together next season.
• And finally, farewell (I think) to Margo Madison. Wrenn Schmidt described the presently incarcerated former NASA administrator and problem solver par excellence as the most challenging and “profound [character] for me” because she demanded constant “thinking about how experience and wisdom change how you interact with the people you love the most, and how you act with the world.” After a lifetime spent relentlessly pursuing the notion of more, the Margo we see this season “has had all that stripped away and is really left with: who do I love, who loves me, who are my people.” It would be so gratifying for her to have one last chapter, but if this is the end of the road for Margo, Schmidt has taken her out on a beautifully humane note.
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