There are series that you want to recommend over and over again because the communicator is convinced that they have not yet reached their entire audience: that feeling that, if they are not more successful, it is simply because they have not been given a chance or because they are in the minority content platform. For All Mankind should be the quintessential example: a space science fiction series that recovers the sense of adult adventure from the commercial cinema of the late 20th century. And, as it returns on November 10 with its fourth season, series fans who have not yet caught up with it have less than a month to do some very entertaining homework.
It is one of the series with which Apple launched its content platform in November 2019 and was endorsed by a highly respected name in the genre: Ronald D. Moore, responsible for the Battlestar Galactica remake, which signed For All Mankind with Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi. Originally, the story wasn’t exactly science fiction but an alternate history space drama. It was based on a hypothesis: What would have happened if the Soviets had set foot on the moon first instead of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin with the Apollo 11 spacecraft?
In the first season, Moore, Wolpert and Nedivi had fun taking real NASA characters and developing missions to rewrite history. By losing the great space challenge in the middle of the Cold War, the United States makes the space duel a priority. And, as a propaganda element, the White House and NASA choose to promote women and black people to sell an idea: the United States is the land of freedom and opportunities, regardless of sex and skin color.
This new work environment initially bothered star astronauts like Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) or Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman), who suddenly found themselves in a system where they no longer had such a privileged status to make room for promises from the sector. as Ellen Wilson (Jodi Balfour), Molly Cobb (Sonya Walger), Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) or Tracy Stevens (Sarah Jones), Gordon’s wife converted into one of Nixon’s Women, the first women to enter the program space.
The stimulating thing is that, as they take center stage and their plot becomes detached from our story, the series gains strength. In part, this is due to production values ??and Apple’s obsession with having fiction that looks fantastically good on the TV and does not erode its brand image: watching the expeditions to the moon means feeling like you are on that satellite . It is also due to the power of the female characters. But above all it is due to the sense of entertainment and spectacle of those behind the cameras.
For all humanity, it makes the viewer participate in the missions. They are like a dream come true for those who regret that, after stepping on the moon, only robots are sent away from Earth and that the ability to look into space and see it as a place to explore, full of opportunities, has been lost. And after imagining the Soviets landing on the moon, the scriptwriters only raised the bar again and again.
In the first season, the moon is presented as a territory that both the United States and the Soviet Union intend to conquer. In the second, set in 1983, the possibility of converting the satellite into a corner where the tension of the Cold War with human settlements can be unleashed to the maximum (and has one of the most exciting climaxes on recent television).
In the third, which already places the characters in 1992, a new space race is presented: the obsession of the great powers to reach Mars and in a competitive context where even a private company can humiliate NASA and the space agency of the USSR, which remains intact because the Berlin Wall never fell. And where does the fourth point? Pay attention to the trailer that confirms that the Soviet Union still exists in the 21st century:
There is no arguing that For All Mankind is a perfect series. Its main problem stems from the obsession with keeping veteran actors on the payroll when their characters should have said goodbye gracefully and left room to build new characters and dynamics. But it is a splendid series for its sense of spectacle and its way of transmitting the amazing: it is the space adventure that our timeline stole from us.
