For All Mankind review, Episode 404: As below, so above

The crew on Mars can’t escape the gravity of Earthbound politics in the latest episode of For All Mankind, “House Divided.”

We pick up in the aftermath of the Soviet coup, with a hard-line interloper overthrowing the appeasement-minded Mikhail Gorbachev. Suddenly, the world is back on the brink of Cold War, and the first skirmish happens on Mars. Svetlana, the Russian cosmonaut with whom Ed Baldwin started was getting cozy last week, gets into a fight with a Soviet grunt worker employed by Helios…on the surface of Mars. The grunt worker, Vasily, ends up in a hyperbolic chamber after his suit is ripped.

The new Soviet government, eager to flex its muscle, demands that Svetlana be returned to the Soviet Union to stand trial, which everyone assumes will basically be a death sentence. What is to be done? Does Earth law apply way out on Mars? Apparently yes, because after Danielle Poole refuses to send Svetlana back, the Soviet cosmonauts start mucking with with Happy Valley, like changing the internal computer system so everything outputs in Cyrillic. Everyone on Mars has taken Earth with them.

Except maybe the grunt workers like Miles. Down below, the Americans, Soviets and Europeans all seem united in their general contempt for the fancy astronauts and scientists who talk down to them whenever they cross paths. I feel like this upstairs-downstairs dynamic is played up a touch too much — I can understand Ed Baldwin being a smug bastard, but it’s harder to buy from Danielle — but I am intrigued to see where it goes. There’s gotta be a workers-of-Mars-revolt-type uprising coming at some point, right?

Anyway, the Americans eventually come to a compromise with the Soviets where Svetlana will be tried in India, a neutral third party state. Danielle agrees, and we get a good scene up on Mars where Ed throws a fit over Danielle sending away his main squeeze even though she did almost kill a man and also keeping her here could become an international catastrophe. He even tries to hide Svetlana in the bowels of Happy Valley, and only her good sense stops him.

I guess it’s clear where my sympathies lie in this argument. Ed is indeed being a selfish prick, whether Svetlana’s punishment fits the crime or not. And Danielle is right that he’s let his feelings get in the way of his thinking before, like when he recruited Danny Stevens to go to Mars in season 3 against Danielle’s advice. The two come very close to telling us what happened to Danny but stop short, which is starting to feel cruel on the show’s part. Is that what it like back in the days before streaming, when we had to wait weeks before finding out answers to our questions? From now on, fans must begin every new episode of For All Mankind by yelling “What happened to Danny?” at the screen, and we can’t stop until they tell us.

Margo in the house of glass and knives

Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, Margo makes a remarkable recovery from her terrible, no good, very bad day of torture and interrogation and adjusts to her new job at Star City, the Soviet equivalent of NASA mission control. It’s good to see Margo (Or Margaret, as she’s known in the SU) back to her old tricks, by which I mean sitting at a desk thinking about math. Seeing her strung up on a drain pipe last week was so weird and out of place that I was relieved to be back in familiar territory.

But this isn’t familiar territory. Margo is still good at her job — she finds out that the asteroid accident in the season premiere was the result of faulty measurements on the Soviet side of things, something the engineer in charge of the project kept out of his incident report — but this is Roscosmos, not NASA. After Margo shares her findings with her new boss Irina Morozova (played with wonderful iciness by Svetlana Efremova), the accountability-dodging engineer is dragged away by the KGB to be taken who-knows-where. In the U.S. he just would have been sacked.

Can Margo’s conscience take working in a place like this? And if it can’t, what could she do about it? I want to find out more, but For All Mankind is staying true to form and pacing itself deliberately. Season 4 has been competent, solid, and effective, if not spectacular…yet.

For all Bullet Points

• There’s a whole subplot I didn’t mention where Miles goes out onto the surface of Mars to try to collect valuable space rocks to ship back to Earth so his wife can sell them. He falls in a crevice and is rescued by his coworker Samantha. I liked these segments but they seemed meant to do nothing more than to set up some sexual tension between Miles and Sam. Seems like a long way to go for that.
• We get to spend more time with new NASA director Eli Hobson in this episode, which I’m ambivalent about. In one scene he comes off like a complete doofus while trying to negotiate with Irina, and in another the show tries to humanize him by giving us a lengthy scene where he talks about how hard his job is with his wife. It was kind of jarring, cause I’m still not sure what the show wants to do with the character. Is he a full-bodied member of the cast or an obstacle to be overcome?
• Speaking of Hobson, he talks on the phone with a convincing Al Gore impersonation. We even see deepfake Gore talk to the press!

Episode Grade: B

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