For All Mankind Season 5 Premiere Review – “First Light”

The first episode of For All Mankind Season 5, “First Light,” is now streaming on Apple TV. Beware: Spoilers ahead!

Another season of For All Mankind begins, and another 10 or so years into the future we go. Breezing through the fallout of the Goldilocks asteroid heist at the end of Season 4 — Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), still kicking around on Mars, is found guilty in absentia — and a decade-plus of sociopolitical shifts in the house style of newsreel clips, the opener “First Light” teases the season’s major conflict to be over how well, if at all, the second-term “Earth first” strongman succeeding Al Gore in the White House, James Bragg, can wrangle Mars to be an obedient colony that sends over its mined iridium resources without much of a fuss.

The rest of the episode, however, mostly avoids any opening salvo between home base and the burgeoning Happy Valley colony. It spends its 59 minutes instead showing how inescapably human people living in a society are, even on another planet.

One of For All Mankind’s greatest strengths has always been its care for the human element (“hi, Bob”) in a phase of space exploration that was risky and dangerous. Now, Mars is solidly developed with its multicultural citizens from the U.S., Russia, and North Korea living in harmony, mostly. It has a Domino’s, boring high school graduation ceremonies with catered canapes, a labor movement that meets once a week to quibble over wording in petitions, and smartphones that light up with news alerts. And, as we learn near the end of the episode, its first homicide, the body discovered by Alex Baldwin (Sean Kaufman), Kelly Baldwin’s (Cynthy Wu) restless now-teenage son who doesn’t know what to do with his life now that his three total peers are moving on to higher education paths back on Earth while he’s stuck watching the ocean through a VR headset on Mars.

It’s all fascinating on paper, but in practice, the season premiere feels somewhat sluggish, like a massive ship making a slow, lumbering turn before setting its new course. In triangulating the coordinates for this stretch of the 2010s, the episode becomes overly laden with plot to the point that nothing — even the murder mystery! — quite leaps out, even though schemes are surely afoot. Even though his DNA was found under the dead man’s fingernails, first man on Mars Lee Jung-Gil (C.S. Lee) seems an unlikely candidate, and I’m curious to see how this season stress tests the Martian legal system.

Much like its aging protagonists, with Ed very sick and wearing an ankle monitor from his sentencing (but still cool as hell) and Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) reading the paper from jail after a life in and out of Russian protection, a certain vigor is inevitably gone. Ed might still be cracking jokes as a semi-senile old man (and Kinnaman still carries the show, performance-wise), but he’s grappling with the fact that his remaining time is short. The instigator from last season, Toby Kebbell’s Miles Dale, is a buttondown-wearing family man these days who leads the aforementioned talky meetings at the restaurant he runs with his former co-conspirator Ilya Breshov (Dimiter D. Marinov), who Dale yells at for trying to lowkey bribe a police officer. All of the troublemakers have been quelled!

Even Dev Ayesa’s (Edi Gathegi) Helios is years outside of the “move fast and break things” phase of a bold space startup. Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña), now the CEO, laments Dev doing a TV interview about Meru, his new vision for a 1 million-person sustainable Mars colony, because it didn’t go through the proper channels. The new energy potential lies in two spots. One is with The Youth: Alex and Lily (Ruby Cruz), Miles’s daughter doing her own secret rebellion spraypainting “Free Mars” on corridors at night. The other is in Kelly’s tedious work plumbing the Korolev Crater searching for alien life, still holding out that a breakthrough might finally come after 10 years of toiling away. It’s coming soon, girl, I can feel it!

In that time Kelly has been toiling away drilling hole after hole into red rock — and Talladega Nights and Breaking Bad still got made — Happy Valley has grown immensely, and the production design remains incredible. The colony infrastructure looks like a good run on Surviving Mars, with clear domes and modular cube homes sprouting out of the red soil, and it’s incredible catching the quiet detailing in the evolution of the tech being used. The space suits are now sleeker, the ground transportation swaggier (see: Alex’s gift bike from Dev), the insides of traversal ships blinker and more futuristic with arrays of buttons and metal frames. A show like this simply can’t be made well without fine tuning these kinds of details that elevate the baseline of speculative fiction, and the crew here has done exceptionally well by their craft.

Transmissions From Happy Valley:

• The broadcast reels are a staple of season openers of course, but A.I. Al Gore now that we’re firmly in the age of generative A.I… feels kinda bad, man.
• Glad to see that journalism and film are also considered viable college majors in alternate c. 2012! Let’s circle back on that in Season 6!
• Also glad to know flash mobs were still a fad in this alt-history!
• A John Lennon and Jay-Z “Grey Album”… no thank you!
• Ed gets the line of the episode: “Easy on the sauce there, my dumpling.”