A couple of weeks ago, I read a comment somewhere by an entertainment reviewer who mentioned that “of course” she had immediately started bingeing the latest season of the science fiction space exploration series For All Mankind on Apple TV+. That caught my attention, since for some reason I had been avoiding checking it out, even though I am currently in an Apple TV-watching phase (like many of us, I began economizing by turning my various streaming subscriptions on and off in turn several years ago).
Perhaps I was avoiding it because I’ve never been much of a fan of alternate history stories, particularly when they focus on the period of time I’ve lived in. And fictionally riffing on realistic space flight and real space science, rather than the fantastic and magical worlds of most science fiction, somehow sounded kind of dull to me.
I was so mistaken. I don’t remember the last television show I’ve watched that has so immediately grabbed my attention and refused to let go. This is an amazing, incredibly exciting piece of television. It works on so many different levels, and explores a vast range of human, social, technological and political topics on (and off) our own world. I’ve been bingeing it for the past several weeks, which is a large project, given that there are currently four seasons of ten episodes apiece, with each episode an hour and a half long. I’m only finishing season 3 now.
The basic concept for the series is this: the story begins in the summer of 1969 with the dramatic announcement of the successful landing of the “first man on the Moon”, which as we all know was accomplished (in our version of history) by Neil Armstrong on the Apollo 11 mission. But in the show’s altered version, the Russian space program gets there a month before the U.S., and not only that, the first person on the moon is a woman – a female cosmonaut.
This shocking pair of twists kicks off a frantic escalation of the space race, where human exploration of the moon and Mars are not abandoned for the next fifty years (as they have been in our reality), and where women get an earlier and more prominent role in the U.S. space program than they actually did in the version of reality we have lived through.
These alterations to our familiar history trigger an astonishing new version, peopled by a large ensemble cast of characters that changes over time, as heroes die or move on, characters age, and new players arrive on the scene. The casting and acting is consistently excellent, the scripts and plots are superb, the drama is intense and riveting, and new challenges and dangers are constantly introduced, as individuals and nations vie for power and dominance in space.
The structure of the series is essentially this: each season tells the story of the ongoing space race in successive decades. Season 1 takes place in the early 1970s, Season 2 moves the story into the mid-1980s, Season 3 is set in the mid-1990s, and so on. Apparently there are plans to continue out through seven seasons, which would put us somewhere near our own real time (in the 2020s) at the end of the series.
Even though there are many characters, there is a core group at the center of the story over time, made up of a few individuals on their own, and several families whose members all have their own individual and familial relationship stories. There are even some characters who are based on real people from our space program, like Deke Slayton and Sally Ride, as well as real major political figures and other celebrities we recognize.
At the beginning of For All Mankind, in the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Season 1, many of the important characters seem to be taken almost straight out of Tom Wolfe's book (and the movie) The Right Stuff. They’re macho, driven, daring military test pilots (from which the original NASA astronaut corps was built), along with their long-suffering wives and children. As in real life, the family members have to balance the pressures of instant fame, constant press scrutiny, and rigid role expectations as public figures in the American space program, with the recurring terror of waiting for their husbands and fathers to come back from their space training and missions, or perhaps dying on the job.
As a group of American women pilots is hastily recruited to compete with the Russian female cosmonauts and their role in the Soviet space program, though, new social and political elements enter the story. With each new plot development, familiar human and social conflicts from our era appear, slowly changing not only the space program, but the society and the course of the altered history itself, as issues like feminism, equal rights for women, gay rights, the civil rights struggle, and many other social pressures interact with the diverging reality and timelines created by the show’s accelerating space race.
The show does a terrific job of depicting the lived experience of the people who have built our actual space program, as well as the fictional accelerated version we see in the story. We witness the whole range of emotions, behaviors and plots among the characters: love, ambition, jealousy, loyalty, bravery, heroism, self-sacrifice, selfishness, irrationality, sex, infidelity, addiction and betrayal – really, anything you can imagine in a human drama shows up somewhere in an episode.
There’s an important point being made thereby, which is this: no matter what astonishing new worlds humans may visit or inhabit, and what brilliant technologies we invent to get there, we will take our essential natures and problems with us. Humanity and our societies will not be perfected or cleansed of our imperfections by finding new worlds to live on.
Another thing I wanted to mention is that this show, more than most science fiction, is steeped in the science and engineering of human space flight and space travel as we understand it. There are no warp drives, death rays or light sabers. It’s telling that several of the most important characters are engineers and scientists.
We see them at work in NASA’s Mission Control and Johnson Space Center, and later in private industry, trying to design the equipment the astronauts must use to survive in the hostile environments of space, and often responding to emergency situations reminiscent of our real Apollo 13 mission, where accidents and equipment failures in space have to be remedied in a hurry by NASA Mission Control and the astronauts working together, using whatever materials are at hand.
These aspects of the story are made more powerful by the impact of the outstanding visual storytelling throughout the series. We watch as the equipment, the interiors and the backgrounds on Earth slowly change with the technologies and fashions we recognize from each passing decade (along with some new inventions we've never seen before). The producers have done all this with wonderful attention to historical period detail and authenticity.
Did I mention that since this is essentially a Cold War story, we’ll also encounter all the familiar dramatic plot lines that come with that genre too? With the U.S.-Soviet competition in space, we also naturally get espionage plots, domestic political conflict, nuclear brinkmanship, and even the threat of battles and war in space. Just in case there aren’t enough tensions and dangers in space exploration itself to keep the story lively . . .
Another truly impressive feature of the series is how convincing and lifelike the landscapes of the Moon and Mars appear, with astronauts trying to live and work in their primitive habitats on those distant worlds, and inside their tiny spacecraft on the way. It all looks so real, just like the video and pictures we’ve seen taken by our space program’s astronauts and remote rovers.
There are apparently extensive podcasts that accompany this entire series, which delve into the science behind each episode and its plot developments. I haven’t had a chance to listen to any of those yet, but it seems to me it might be a further bonanza for anyone who is interested in learning more about space exploration, and the challenges humanity faces in trying to survive off this planet, traveling in deep space and on at least to our nearest planetary neighbors.
For All Mankind is simply brilliant television, a compelling, entertaining and vast epic about humanity’s quest for the stars, as well as an exploration of our own society, our world and recent times from the perspective of a subtly altered reality. Very highly recommended.