For All Mankind Trailer - Apple TV- SPOILER

Feels tacky to self-quote, but ...

... since we're discussing this anyway, I feel like I should elaborate.

Yes, the Soviet Union is being portrayed in an antagonistic manner and the Russians are "the baddies", but it's done so in a way that completely aligns with my experiences. Regardless of the regime of the moment (so I also feel no need to differentiate between Soviet and Russian here), Russia is pretty consistently a fairly antagonistic place, both to foreigners and its own inhabitants. Even when you have interactions with fundamentally decent people, the paranoid and ruthlessly powerful state security apparatus, be it the Soviet KGB or the modern FSB, as well as the relentless brainwashing of the masses, poisons everything. The methods we've seen used are fairly true to real-world methods used by the KGB/FSB.

So this really isn't "the Russians" being stand-in villains because you need villains. It's IMO a pretty informed portrayal of how a "partnership" with Russia might play out.

 

By that logic, Chinese people should mostly be portrayed in a negative light because of the Mao period, and Americans, for that matter, should be judged for what they did to Native Americans (or because Trump), and so on.

 

I think the Soviets are portrayed realistically and well, largely they are fine people apart from the commander who is a bit of an ass but lets face it the commander of such a mission would be a true believer party fanatic.

 

And... Only basing this on limited knowledge and The Hunt for the Red October, wouldn't one of the crew also be a "party official" whose job it is, to make sure that everyone toes the party line? I mean, on a limited space (literally) mission like this, I guess that could also be the commander's role. Again, I have no idea what I'm talking about.

 

Maybe that's one of the changes Gorbachev made.

 

I'm reasonably confident that even the Soviets would consider a political officer to be a foolishly useless addition to such a crew. Space travel is unforgiving, and there's no room for crewmembers with no useful practical skills.

Much more likely for one of the cosmonauts to be KGB; if not an officer, then at least an asset.

 

watch out on socials - if you don't want to get spoiled somewhat.
there is photo(s) and also people who have seen the screeners of the last episodes.

Spoiler

the earth bound Stevens actor posted a revealing photo on socials. Maybe there is even more out there.
Saw a before/after photo of a chair/couch and where the Stevens statue was in concrete rubble in front of a green screen. So there is definitely a bomb/accident or something happening at NASA.

 

it could have been a case of was.

One of the cosmonauts killed while being rescued by Sojourner could have been the kgb informant.

 

New episode is up. Is 6 p.m. Pacific/9 p.m. Eastern when all Apple shows drop?

 

Yes, this was a common practice across the Communist World. (What follows is mostly based on experiences people from different countries have shared with me over the years, so hearsay alert.) Not just in military operations, in *any* group of people doing anything deemed sensitive by the authorities. Any university course, any tourist group, etc. In Hungarian said person was called "the brick"; can't find any confirmation that the same figure of speech is/was used in Russian. Sometimes it was tricky to figure out who the brick was (e.g., in military detachments), sometimes it was ridiculously easy (e.g., in a university course, the one person clearly not following the topic at hand - most extreme example I know of is how there'd often at international conferences be one member of delegations of linguists from Estonia who *didn't speak any Estonian*). Teachers etc. would breathe a sigh of relief as soon as they identified the brick, as then they'd know who they have to butter up, whom they have to be careful around, etc. Given the authorities' dedication to quotas, people seemed fairly confident that there would only be one brick per group.

I cannot conclusively prove this, but I am almost certain that groups and delegations from Russia I've interacted with over the last ~15 years have also contained bricks.

I am somewhat skeptical, however, if even the KGB could keep bricks on missions to space, given how small the groups of people were, and given how you can't exactly wing it without any in-depth knowledge in spaceflight.

 

It seems the Russians didn't bring any condoms, or at least didn't use them. I wonder if anyone thought to bring along some nappies?

 

OK. And where's the drama in that exactly?

 

Njet!

Spoiler

father to be Aleksei biting the dust
saw it coming from puking/headaches onwards though.
cruel, especially as baby martian is already underway

I don't have any subtitles, but I think the 2 cosmonauts at the end very talking about Kelly being pregnant.
the hand shakey one was the "Doctor".

Redemption Arc?

Spoiler

Dev on redemption arc? coming up with outside of the box solution.
shining a light on his real motivations and past, make him much more likeable.
Hoping we'll get to see him in season 4 and beyond - might he be taking over at NASA 2.0 following whatever happens not only with Margo but also NASA

Yay!

Spoiler

for PAM showing Ellen the mirror.
Here is hoping Ellen comes out publicly on her own terms spurned on by Pam's talk, gets divorced from (leisure suit) Larry and just maybe gets together with PAM (I'm shipping them still)

 

called it

 

For subtitles, be sure to set your app/device to “Auto” and not “Off” to get non-English dialog translated.

 

After the mostly unnecessary melodrama of last week's episode, this episode took full advantage of the dramatic set-up from said melodrama. This was one of the most intense, riveting, yet hopeful episodes to date, reminding me of Apollo 11 at its finest, and I loved watching everyone from NASA, Helios, and Roscosmos coming together to breakdown the problem and come up with a viable solution in time. Even though we didn't get the actual rescue (either because they ran out of money or for dramatic effect), the entire episode delivered a breathtaking experience from beginning to end. As much as I loathe the Jimmy the Conspiracy Nut story arc, I did appreciate his conversation with Karen about how much he hates being ensnared by the space program tangentially and how that affects him and those around him, and that particular theme resonated well here as it has in past harrowing disasters from afar on the show.

That all said, I genuinely believed Ed wasn't going to make it. That he would figure out that Danny was high on pills, that Danny fucked up the situation with the drill, and then Ed would die with the truth. And then Danny would get away scot-free.

But Ed survived and now knows that Danny was going through withdrawal and it's only a matter of time before he reconstructs what happened that day...even without Nick's collaboration. My heart breaks for Nick because he was used by Danny to gain access to Ed's messaging and he ultimately died because of Danny's drug-fueled rage. And I don't think anyone will ever figure out that particular truth, even if Ed realizes that Danny is responsible for the drill accident.

My heart breaks even more for Kelly. She was able to find her father but only to lose Alexei in the process, before she could even tell Ed how she actually felt about Alexei. But now she has a bigger problem: As we anticipated earlier on this season, she has become pregnant...and the Soviets are sitting on that knowledge until they get orders from Moscow how to handle it. But Grigory is right about one thing, her pregnancy is a risk for them all, because they are not equipped to handle all of the potential complications and intricacies of a pregnant woman on an unforgiving alien world. I worry for her safety and the safety of her child.

Unsurprisingly, the rescue efforts pushed aside Aleida's investigation, if only for the moment. Yet she still was able to take a moment to ask Bill what the Soviets have said about Margo, although what she really expected to her. At least Bill's response made that moment worth it. I imagine that will be the main focus of next week's penultimate episode, alongside repercussions for Danny's shitfest and Kelly's pregnancy. Not sure how this will all close out in the next two episodes but I'm looking forward to it (Danny and Jimmy aside).

 

The irony is that Danny will probably get off scott-free because NASA won't want to admit that one of their astronauts went a little bonkers. He'll never fly again but NASA won't have the son of two of their biggest heroes acknowledged as their biggest screw-up.

 

Danny isn't NASA. He's part of the Helios team.

 

and he's responsible for the death of a Russian Cosmonaut as well, not just members of of the Helios team.

Which internationally is a whole 'nother can of worms and potential issues. Both if revealed immediately or if covered up and then discovered later on.

It's funny how Jimmy is with these conspiracy theory people about how there was a cover-up about his parents death (when there wasn't), but his own brother may be involved in something covering up him causing three people to die.

 

Nit-picky, but there kind of was. The second reactor, which made their sacrifice necessary, was never disclosed to the public.