Season five of “For All Mankind” picks up in the years since the Goldilocks asteroid heist. Happy Valley has grown into a thriving colony with thousands of residents and a base for new missions that will take us even further into the solar system. But with the nations of Earth now demanding law and order on the Red Planet, friction continues to build between the people who live on Mars and their former home.
TV’s under-the-radar masterpiece continues to go quietly from strength to strength. This is an alternate history of humanity if the USSR had landed on the moon first and the Space Race had become more marathon than sprint, and in its fifth season, it imagines a world that’s far more advanced than ours in many ways, but horrifyingly plausible in others.
Rather than a Star Trek-like, post-scarcity utopia, this world suffers the same problems of greed and petty rivalry as our own. There’s a Martian colony in 2013, sure, and they’re building a space elevator especially to delight watching sci-fi nerds, but there are also giant corporations underpaying workers and governments jockeying for position. Its closest relative is probably The Expanse, but even that has more extraordinary elements than this meticulously created alt-history.
Some might quibble over the old-age make-up now being applied to half the principal cast, but while a tiny suspension of disbelief is sometimes required, notably for the octogenarian Kinnaman, Cynthy Wu is still in her twenties and convincingly plays a 50-something, so there’s far more right here than wrong. And while large swathes of this season take place in the confined tunnels of the Mars colony, no show on TV is better at reminding us that there’s a great big solar system just outside — and no show is better at reminding us that it’s only our own silly fault we’re not pushing to get out there right now.
MacDailyNews Take: Hey, some people actually are pushing to get out there right now!
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