For All Mankind season 5 Episode 2, "The Hard Six," is a mild improvement over the Apple TV show's previous outing. While that may sound like light praise, it would only come across that way if the premiere wasn't very good. "First Light" was great, but "The Hard Six" is even better. With the recent news that season 6 will end For All Mankind, I half-expected events to at least begin to settle down ahead of the eventual season finale. Far from it.
What's so impressive about For All Mankind is that it always sticks the landing with its finales. One of the downsides of this can occasionally be that the other episodes feel like they're dragging their feet a little in the build-up to the explosive conclusion of each run. The show never feels boring, but I can see why some viewers may feel less engaged at times. However, "The Hard Six" sidesteps this issue completely. As just season 5's sophomore effort, there were times when I felt I should check I hadn't somehow skipped ahead to the finale.
FULL SPOILERS for For All Mankind season 5, Episode 2, "The Hard Six."
The jailbreak scene in "The Hard Six" is already one of my favorite For All Mankind moments
Joel Kinnaman's Ed Baldwin has almost nothing left to lose in For All Mankind season 5. Now in his eighties, he's been deemed far too old to make the taxing trip back to Earth, which has resulted in an ongoing house arrest on Mars in the wake of his involvement in the Goldilocks heist almost a decade earlier. Men in his position may see themselves as right on the edge of disaster, but not Ed F****ing Baldwin. He was never one to sit idly by as injustice unfolds, and "The Hard Six" proves he hasn't changed an ounce.
The sequence that sees him spring Lee Jun-Gil (C.S. Lee) from MPK custody is so fraught with nail-biting action that it rivals every For All Mankind finale to date. It's a far more truncated version of something that would appear in a season-ender, but the overall spirit of the thing is the same. Masterfully written, shot, directed, edited, and performed; the works. Made worse/better (depending on how you look at it) by the fact that Lee was about to be off the hook.
For All Mankind season 5's murder mystery subplot proves the show really can do anything
This new element of For All Mankind was teased toward the end of the season 5 premiere, and I feared that the show was taking on too much. It's already a sci-fi, alt-history, political thriller/prestige family drama. Surely there was no space in this dense formula for it to also go all Agatha Christie on us? How joyously wrong I was.
The case of the first murder on Mars has already been blown wide open, and it looks to be taking even more prominence than the political tensions between Earth and the Red Planet. The objectively exciting possibility of finding life on Titan even feels secondary to this. I have no idea who the murderer is, although it seems obvious at present that it's not Lee. It's also quite clearly the head of a much larger case, with Kuragin's "good" name now being pulled into the mix. Truly compelling stuff.
Mars' new governer is the perfect For All Mankind villain for season 5
Costa Ronin's Governor Leonid "Lenya" Polivanov could easily be framed as a bad guy in most stories. He's a stern politician with his own solid views on matters. It's nothing new in politics, nor is it original to For All Mankind. However, it is the first time a member of the Soviet Union has had such a position of power that isn't inherently Russian. With many movies and TV shows often framing Russians as the story's antagonists, it's something of a knee-jerk reaction to assume Lenya is up to no good.
But here's the thing: he's just doing his job. By this stage in For All Mankind, the audience has been conditioned to want the same things as Ed and company.
This isn't a bad thing, but it ignores the fact that Lenya isn't actually doing anything wrong when it comes to proper procedure. It could easily be perceived as a wrongdoing, and maybe he could have been more lenient with Lee's case, but there was no requirement for him to do so. If anything, the way he flips his interaction with Ed back onto Kinnaman's character makes the octogenarian spacefaring legend somehow come off as the one in the wrong. A lot of credit goes to how well Ronin gives his character a sense of moral ambiguity that, objectively, isn't really there.
For All Mankind's Ed Baldwin endgame takes a giant leap forward in "The Hard Six"
The inevitability that no For All Mankind fan wanted to think about has been thrust to the forefront in season 5. The premiere not only revealed Ed at a more advanced age than we've ever seen him, but his secret battle with lung cancer very much seems to be how he'll be making his exit from the show. That said, I would be hugely disappointed if he just slipped away from a terminal illness. He's been far too central to the story for too long for that to be acceptable.
Although his health takes yet another blow at the end of "The Hard Six" after heroically piloting his friend to relative safety, I have to believe that Kinnaman's character still has more ahead of him. Even if it's only a little. The uncertainty surrounding how the show will pull off a suitable death for Ed will surely haunt season 5 as it goes on, but For All Mankind has made it painfully clear that he's not going to be around for much longer.
Episode Rating: A
For All Mankind season 5 is streaming now in Apple TV. Catch a new episode each Friday until the finale on May 29.