For All Mankind Trailer - Apple TV- SPOILER

One of the currently few returning shows where i am really excited.

The first season was awesome and the second could be even more so. I love the idea of the "what if" we did the right thing and not stopped funding space exploration after the Moon landing sticked together with the expansion of the Cold War into the space program.

It's part dream ( where would we be today if we put our money at the exact right spot at the right time) + drama elements (and it seems much more hardcore action - love the glimpse of the F5 maneuvering in air combat).

Just one week

 

interesting interview with Ron Moore @ Interview: Ron Moore On How ‘For All Mankind’ Is Building The Road To Star Trek – TrekMovie.com
Warning contains some light season 2 and 3 spoilers!

 

yay S3.

 

Episode 1 is out now.

That opening montage of alternative outcomes of historical events felt too on the nose. Like there should have been bigger butterflies, some of the events should have never happened.

It sounds like Enterprise wasn’t just a test shuttle in this timeline. Of course RDM would give some love to her.

 

Yesterday, Perseverance safely landed on the Martian surface with plans to launch Ingenuity for aerial surveillance with the overall mission of seeking out evidence of ancient life.

Today, the second season of this wonderful what if show premiered and what a banger of a season opener. Sunrises viewed on the Moon are all fun and games until a massive solar flare happens!

I knew Molly was going to risk her life the moment she spotted her fallen collogue, but damnit, I wish she hadn't. It was a risky endeavor on her part and it appears to have been completely fruitless. He looks like he's already dead before the solar flare even hit. Now it's a question of how badly was Molly hit with radiation and how long will it take for her to feel the effects of it?

Maybe, maybe not, but I liked the divergences that we did see (like how Lennon and the pope's assassination attempts swapped outcomes) and most of them wouldn't be effected drastically because of the invigorated space race.

 

Now that S2E1 is now available, shouldn't we move over to a Season 2 thread? Perhaps someone would like to start one?

As for me, I really enjoyed the episode. Poor Molly, she had to be the hero. Now she's going be a crispy critter.... So happy this series is back. Extremely well done...

 

Read the story "Remaking History" by Kim Stanley Robinson. Something like an assassination (attempt) is a matter, to borrow a phrase typically used about baseball, of seconds and inches. You never know if something had delayed someone or if someone was standing there who otherwise wasn't, etc etc.

 

So the shuttles mention in the episode:
Kon-Tiki, Columbia, Beagle, Discovery, Enterprise, Endeavour, Atlantis, Victoria, and Constitution.

Plus the Mark 2 shuttle Pathfinder

There are also unnamed military shuttles.

 

Huh, I'm surprised I haven't even heard of that story. I'm a big fan of his work particularly (relevant to this discussion) The Years of Rice and Salt. Of course, in that novel, the divergences occur periods of centuries instead of just a decade or so.

 

I really need to watch that sequence again and do a lot of pausing.

————
Ok, I think I got most of it:
November 4th, 1976: Reagan elected President
August 8th, 1976: Russians launch N-3 rocket
US to scrap space treaty
August 1977: NASA launches Mars rover
September 18th, 1978: Israel and Egypt peace talks fail
Roman Polanski arrested
December 25th, 1979: Soviets withdraw from Afghanistan border (we see a photo of Osama Bin Laden)
October 7th, 1980: Soviets expand Zvezda lunar base
June 1980: Dawn of the personal computer, solar energy boom
Accident prevented at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant
52 American hostages rescued from Iran
September 12th, 1981: Reagan refuses to bail out Chrysler
Assassination attempt on John Lennon fails
May 14th, 1981: Pope John Paul II assassinated
October 8th, 1981: Assassination attempt on Anwar Sadat fails
Prince Charles marries Camilla Parker Bowles
August 15th, 1981: NASA prepares for launch of their first space shuttle, Enterprise

 

Yeah, I need to do the same. I caught most of the references, but based on a review I just read, it seems I misheard one of the divergences (regarding the royal wedding).

 

Interesting, first shuttle launch in '81.

It's '83 in the show right now and they have 9 shuttles, plus possibly other shuttles used by the military

That seems like a lot in a short time, especially compared to IRL.

 

It took ten years from project kickoff to Columbia’s first launch in our timeline. I don’t recall any mention of the Shuttle program in the first season, though I may have just missed it. It does seem like a lot of work took place in a really short period of time to build a fleet of nine STS orbiters, plus a second generation military version, and these can apparently travel to the moon as well.

 

From the dialogue I took it that the Military want to take the first one, it wasn't built solely for the military.

 

I spent the last week catching up with the show (I did the same thing with "The Expanse," come to think of it, watched the whole first season right before the second one started) and I'm certainly invested.

Has anyone else tried out the For All Mankind "Time Capsule" Augmented Reality app on iOS? The premise is that, a bit before season two starts, you go through a box of keepsakes belonging to Gordo and Tracy's now-teenaged son. If you've played the game "Gone Home" or Environmental Narrative stories like that, it's pretty similar, with the gimmick that you hold up your device so the objects you're examining are laid out in front of you on a real-world table. I'd kind of prefer it as a straight sit-down game, but then you would lose the whole tech-demo aspect (for instance, a sequence with a slide projector that actually projects, distorting the image across whatever objects are in front of it in the room. I couldn't see half of each picture because I didn't realize I should play it in a room with an exposed wall, but it was still pretty neat seeing the machine understood the shape of my furniture and things to project the image on them realistically). It had a little more detail on some of the alternate history in the skipped decade, but mostly seems to have been focused on refreshing the audience (or teasing new viewers) on what happened in season one, and teasing Gordo's storyline for this season.

We spend most of our time with astronauts and Mission Control, they wouldn't be talking much about spacecraft they weren't going to have for several years down the line (especially in the second half of the season, which was one rolling crisis after another where everyone's thinking was extremely short-term).

 

Molly running to save the other astronaut during the solar storm was one of the more intense scenes I've seen on a show recently. I loved the first season, but the second season is already off to a strong start. I'm interested to see how the rising tensions between the US and USSR affect the people on the Moon given so far they haven't been hostile to each other at all.

 

I have red/green colorblindness so can't really distinguish the colors on their arm radiation detectors - Molly's is supposed to be green, right? I assume she took it off to be able to remain in the space program ( she knew if she went out there the radiation would be too much and she would be dismissed on medical grounds) but what about her colleagues band? Red or Green?

Anyway - strong start to the season and both nations really stepped up their investment into space, which to me sounds credible. The US is spending hundreds of billions per year on their military so imagine where NASA would be today if they continually had 100+ billion to spend per year from the 70s omwards.

 

Yes, Moll's stayed green and her colleague's was red.

 

Well not dismissed, but grounded for sure. It's a real thing that individual astronaut's radiation exposure over the course of their careers is carefully tracked, and once they reach a certain amount, that's it. No more flights for them.