The future of For All Mankind hung in the balance. That’s what some viewers believed. The period science fiction series, which imagines an alternative space race to the one we live in, had said goodbye in January without a renewal on the table. But, if its renewal took a while to be announced, it was possibly because there was more on the table: Sony Pictures Television, which produces the series, has agreed with Apple TV for both a fifth season and a Soviet spin-off.
“Our fascination with the Soviet space program has grown with each season,” said Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, showrunners of For All Mankind and creators of the series with Ronald D. Moore. “The more we learned about this secret city in the forests outside Moscow where Soviet cosmonauts and engineers worked and lived, the more we wanted to tell the story of the other side of the space race.”
In an interview for La Vanguardia, Wolpert and Nedivi already explained that their way of expanding For All Humanity in the fourth season was to give more visibility to the Soviet Union based on the situation of Margo (Wrenn Schmidt), who had had to exiled there after forcibly betraying the United States. Instead of raising the bar on a space level, with a new base on the Moon, Mars or wherever, the plots were renewed with the dynamics until then in the shadow of Moscow.
This Soviet spin-off is titled Star City, has Wolpert and Nedivi as directors and, for now, is being sold as follows: as “a paranoid thriller that returns us to the key moment in the alternative history of the space race, when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon.” What was the training of cosmonauts like? And the lives of engineers under the pressure of the communist regime? What were the heroes on the other side of the Iron Curtain like?
And, with respect to the fifth season of For All Mankind, there is already a starting point. The story will jump eight years with Happy Valley further expanded by Mars by turning former enemies into partners. Let us remember that, at the end of the fourth season, we could see how the United States and the Soviet Union were working on an asteroid in the orbit of Mars to extract quantities of Iridium that could change the future of humanity and science.
In the new episodes, which should be scheduled for 2025, the powers focus on the capture and extraction of extremely valuable and mineral-rich asteroids, which could change the future of both Earth and Mars. But, of course, maintaining diplomacy and international peace will not be easy.
The fifth season of For All Mankind could be the penultimate if one takes into account that the next one will be set in 2012. And, as Wolpert and Nevidi advanced to this medium, they want to reach a sixth season that takes place in the year of public broadcast. They want viewers to watch the series, then look out the window and see how different the two realities are: “The power of the series is in this juxtaposition: what we could have been.”
