[Editor\u2019s note: The A.V. Club will return to recap the show on April 24.]\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
For All Mankind, by design, has its protagonists grow up faster than most TV shows. By jumping forward a decade each season, the sci-fi drama allows us to follow a character over a long period. When we first met Ed Baldwin<\/a> (Joel Kinnaman) in the 1970s, he was a curmudgeonly but talented astronaut in his thirties who, over the years, went on to land on the moon and Mars. As the show now settles into the early 2010s, he\u2019s an old admiral living on the Red Planet with his daughter and teen grandson. Or take Aleida Rosales (Coral Pe\u00f1a), whom we saw crossing the border from Mexico to the U.S. as a child in the series premiere. After getting mentored by Margo (Wrenn Schmidt), she eventually got her dream engineering job at NASA and is now the wealthy CEO of a major aerospace company, Helios. At this stage of FAM, though, its unique narrative conceit is proving to be quite a hurdle.\u00a0<\/p>\n Having invested in Ed, Aleida, Margo, Dani (Krys Marshall), and Kelly (Cynthy Wu) for so long now, FAM is forced to shift focus to the next generation of space explorers, scientists, and workers, which means preparing to say goodbye to beloved faces. Then again, there\u2019s only so much prosthetics can do with Kinnaman\u2019s face to make us believe he\u2019s eightysomething. More importantly, FAM tapped into humanity\u2019s curiosity and desire to venture into worlds beyond Earth through these characters. Science was a priority, as was discovering awe-inducing aspects of space and what it says about our potential to evolve. In its early run, FAM managed to intertwine its ambitious ideas and scope with the nitty-gritty of character development and relationships. Unfortunately, it slowly started to lose its grip on this. Season four<\/a>, which was about how capitalism has ruined Mars, turned a little too soapy, with not as much concern for thrilling galactic adventures. Season five begins on a similar note.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFirst Light,\u201d written by co-showrunners Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, is nothing more than a slow setup. That doesn\u2019t have to be a bad thing. FAM\u2018s premieres tend to do that to catch us up on the show\u2019s alternate reality, but there\u2019s usually some action involved<\/a>. But as the series lands in 2012, what we get is a whole lot of table-setting. There are updates about the alternate reality that range from JFK Jr. debating a run for president to the fact that there\u2019s an increase in undocumented immigrants on Mars and that Brazil, China, and Pakistan have formed a coalition against the established M-6 treaty (i.e., the U.S., the Soviet Union, the European Space Agency, India, North Korea, and Japan). With these details out of the way, \u201cFirst Light\u201d sets up its new normal. Ed, who was tried in absentia and found guilty for helping incite the riots 10 years ago, has stage three cancer. He can\u2019t even fly an M-SAM anymore, which has got to hurt. He hasn\u2019t told Kelly or his grandchild, Alex (The Summer I Turned Pretty\u2018s Sean Kaufman). Instead, he\u2019s focused on getting Alex involved in his political agenda.<\/p>\n Ed is still secretly working alongside Helios employee Miles (Toby Kebbell) as part of the Sons & Daughters of Mars group to ensure their demands are met by the government back on Earth, all while the Happy Valley base has expanded to add Domino\u2019s and other restaurants over the past decade, including one run by Ilya (Dimiter D. Marinov). Alex, however, isn\u2019t ready to join yet. Having just graduated from a high school on Mars (alongside three other students), he\u2019s figuring out how to live under the pressure of his family being kickass astronauts and space researchers. In fact, he yearns to go back to Earth and spend his time on beaches, like any normal 18 year old. To take a breather, Alex suits up and rides a bike on the planet\u2019s surface, only to stumble upon a dead body. At first, it\u2019s presumed to be a suicide victim because apparently, a lot of residents have been killing themselves due to depression and isolation. Thanks to a clever security guard, Celia Boyd (Mireille Enos), cops realize that the man was likely murdered. The episode ends with Lee Jung-Gil (C.S. Lee) under arrest for seemingly killing his North Korean comrade.\u00a0<\/p>\n And with that, news reporters announce that Mars\u2014which now has its own cornfields, by the way\u2014has just had its first murder. \u00a0A freaking whodunit? I\u2019d like to think the show\u2019s writers are more creative than that, but this is only episode one, so let\u2019s see where this storyline goes and how it affects the U.S.-Soviet relations. For now, the political climate back home is just as chaotic, thanks to POTUS Jim Bragg\u2019s (Randy Oglesby) \u201cEarth comes first\u201d notion. It has sown the seeds of discord not between countries but planets. It\u2019s partly due to the iridium-filled asteroid Goldilocks being in Mars\u2019 orbit, but through this, FAM wants to comment on humanity\u2019s incessant need to topple itself with fighting. It doesn\u2019t matter that people have made enough scientific progress to reside on celestial objects, because we\u2019re always going to be greedy to win over each other. I get what they\u2019re going for thematically, but it takes away from the riveting space stuff that made FAM work so well.\u00a0<\/p>\n Heck, even Aleida is growing tired of it. She visits Margo\u2014now an old lady with dentures\u2014in prison to talk about not feeling fulfilled despite the personal and professional successes she\u2019s had. At least this mentor-mentee friendship still hits the mark because we\u2019ve followed their journey together from the start. Aleida is fed up with Helios founder Dev Ayasa (Edi Gathegi), who\u2019s working on a sustainable city on Mars called Meru, which can house up to one million people. Has he overpromised on what he can deliver? Aleida thinks so. And how will Meru affect the conditions of those in Happy Valley, because that base\u2019s crew quarters are still looking kind of cramped? \u201cFirst Light\u201d takes a long time to set up the remaining nine installments. Let\u2019s hope they live up to the awe of the show\u2019s early seasons. Perhaps Helios sending a probe to Saturn\u2019s second-largest moon is a good sign for that.\u00a0<\/p>\n Stray observations\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2022 Some other updates in this alternate reality: CIA tortures people on Mars (that tracks), Helios is trying to make a space elevator to make transporting iridium easier, and a company called Uhuru has made realistic robots on Earth. But my personal favorite twists: John Lennon is also alive and has collaborated with Jay-Z on a Grammy-winning album, and a thriving Blockbuster is opening a store on the moon.\u00a0 Saloni Gajjar is\u00a0The A.V. Club\u2018s TV critic.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[Editor\u2019s note: The A.V. Club will return to recap the show on April 24.]\u00a0\u00a0 For All Mankind, by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548317,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-548316","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548316\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u2022 Where is Danielle Poole?! We\u2019d better get a \u201cHi, Bob!\u201d moment soon.\u00a0
\n\u2022For All Mankind has spent so long as a historical drama in a way that hearing Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s \u201cRun The World (Girls)\u201d as a needle drop was jarring. I miss the nostalgia factor.\u00a0
\n\u2022 Ed tells Lee that he\u2019s been married three times. We only know of Karen and Yvonne, so whom did he marry in the years between seasons four and five?\u00a0
\n\u2022 Bottoms star Ruby Cruz debuts as Miles\u2019 teen daughter, Lily, who seems more interested in joining the Mars political movement than her crush, Alex. She\u2019s even running around at night in secret to rebel with graffiti art.\u00a0
\n\u2022 I screamed \u201cAre you kidding me?\u201d out loud when the Mars crew referred to the rising number of people killing themselves as \u201cpulling a Gordo.\u201d It\u2019s a reminder not just of the incredible season-two finale<\/a>, but of just how excellent this show once was.<\/p>\n