For All Mankind season 4 finale tries to have its cake and eat it too (in space)

At one point in "Perestroika," the finale of For All Mankind season 4, Margo Madison decides to try and prevent NASA and the rest of the major powers on Earth from bringing the Goldilocks asteroid -- which is full of valuable iridium -- home to Earth. She wants to make sure it stays in orbit around Mars, because that way the nations of Earth will have to keep funding space exploration. She tells Aleida a story about real-life rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who was her boss at NASA way back in season 1. She'll never forget the moment she confronted him about his Nazi ties, and whether he knew about the death camps. He told her that sometimes, sacrifice is necessary for the sake of progress.

This is a cool full-circle moment for the show, because Margo is now in the position that Wernher was in back in season 1, with Aleida as her protégé. But it also has some weird implications. Was this fictionalized version of Wernher von Braun saying that the death camps were a justifiable sacrifice given the scientific progress made by the Nazis, and if so, what scientific progress were they to have made? It was pretty much all quackery back then. In any case, Margo seems to have accepted his wisdom. That means she's saying that continued space exploration is worth whatever sacrifices they have to make in order for it to happen, sacrifices like depriving the people of Earth from rapid access to valuable iridium we're told over and over again could improve their lives. Following the analogy, this sacrifice is worth it in the same way that the scientific progress made during and after World War II was worth the absolute devastation that war visited upon humanity, including the eradication of millions of people in the Holocaust.

Is that what the show is trying to say? It seems like it couldn't be, because it's a pretty monstrous thought; if the people of the 1940s could have bought back the millions of lives brutally lost in war for the price of slower scientific progress, I'm betting they would have. But For All Mankind thinks it's okay because...we got nuclear power plants faster than we otherwise would have, I guess?

This kind of strange messaging is all over this finale. This is the episode where the conflict that's driven the latter half of this season -- will the saboteurs succeed in trying to keep the Goldilocks asteroid in orbit around Mars? -- comes to a head. They do succeed, by the way, but only after a series of thrilling twists. If nothing else, the episode keeps you on the edge of your seat. I was not bored.

But I was also kinda frustrated, because rather than let me decide for myself whether it was a good idea to keep the astroid near Mars, the show used some pretty shameless tricks to sway my sympathies. At the beginning of the episode, Ed, Dev and Miles are trying to keep the asteroid in Mars orbit while Margo, Aleida and Danielle are trying to bring it back to Earth. By the end, everyone but Danielle was on Team Keep-The-Asteroid-on-Mars, a sign that the show wants me to be on that team too.

To drive the point home, the only allies Danielle has by the end are a pair of black ops goons -- one from the CIA and one from the KGB -- who brutally torture Miles in an attempt to get him to squeal on his co-conspiritors. After the torture doesn't work, they threaten to have his wife arrested for being an accessory in his Mars-to-Earth black market scam. Although we like Miles, it's true that he's committed illegal acts, and threatening his family with legal punishment is a legitimate way for law enforcement officers to work their way through a criminal conspiracy. Torture, on the other hand, is very much not. The only reason I can think for the writers to include the torture when this better, less dicey method was available is to establish that these two spies suck, and to make us hate them. And hey, they just happen to be fighting for Team Bring-the-Asteroid-to-Earth, together with the evil Irina Morozova, who took out a hit on the love of Margo's life.

For All Mankind season 4 finale review, "Perestroika"

Now, if I asked them, I suspect the producers of For All Mankind would say that the rightness or wrongness of the decision to divert the astroid is supposed to be left up to the viewer. There are little bits in this episode that straddle the gap. Ed gets an eye roll of a line when he tells Danielle that Mars is his home, and that she's the one still "tied to that blue rock." Her response is pretty funny: "Well, of course I am, Ed, that's our home!" Yeah, Ed, Earth has breathable air; why would you want to live anywhere else?

And at the end of the episode, after Margo is taken into custody for sabotaging NASA's plans to bring the astroid home, she gives a speech in voiceover about the how complicated and full of contradictions human beings are. But even with these gestures toward ambiguity, it's pretty clear to me what side of this conflict the show came down on. For All Mankind wanted to have its cake and eat it too. I think it dropped the cake.

That's not to say I wasn't entertained. The sequence where Sam space-walked outside Ranger to activate the manual override (there's always a manual override, isn't there?) was very tense, for instance. But I don't think the show fully sold the meaning of its Mars-vs-Earth conflict. There were too many dropped balls, too many passed-over opportunities to underline the uncertainty of the situation. For example, think about how many times we were told that the iridium in the asteroid would improve life on Earth. But we were never told exactly how. Maybe if we were, we would have a better idea of what's at stake.

For All Bullet Points

• FYI, "Perestroika" was a policy of economic reform in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, as the country attempted to integrate into the wider world.

• Kelly, who was undecided about the whole asteroid situation at the end of last week's episode, doesn't get a single line in the finale, which I found odd. If the episode is trying to piece together which side is in the right, we could have benefitted from hearing from someone in the middle.

• So Margo was arrested for her role in diverting the asteroid. Does that mean Ed, Dev, Sam, Miles and the rest will be too? I know they're on Mars, but this was a high-profile asteroid heist. For the sake of optics, the governments of Earth might send some police officers to the red planet to collect them.

• I should mention that Danielle gets shot during a fracas towards the end of the episode, and with the same gun she buried on the Martian surface in the season 3 finale, no less. She's fine, though. It kinda seemed weird to bring back that plot point just to give us a fake-out death.

• Someone finally manages to smuggles Lee's wife to Mars! That's nice for them. Couldn't have been a fun trip, though.

• If for some reason Hollywood ever wants to make a biopic about disgraced Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, Krys Marshall, who plays Danielle, would be a pretty good choice. Just an errant thought.

• Ellen and Larry Wilson never showed up this season, which is too bad. What are the former president and First Gentleman up to, I wonder? I guess the season had a lot to cover.

Will For All Mankind get a fifth season?

It's tradition for each season of For All Mankind to jump forward in time several years to show what progress has been made. In 2012, we have a city of the Goldilocks asteroid. Will we catch up with our characters there in season 5?

Right now, we're not sure. For All Mankind producers Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi have previously said that they want the show to run through season 6 or 7, and creator Ronald Moore sounded hopeful that Apple TV+ may get moving on season 5. "There’s definitely been more conversation about it, yeah," he said in November. "You can sense things are starting to pick up, and just industry-wide everyone’s starting to gear up towards, ‘Okay, we know it’s about to all happen again, so let’s start talking in earnest about how we prepare the way for it.’”

Still, we don't have an official renewal announcement yet. The show has always been respected but has never been a ratings smash for Apple TV+. They kept renewing it despite middling viewership before, so I don't see why they would stop now. We'll see what happens.

If the show does come back, I imagine the focus of the story will be on characters like Kelly, Aleida and their protégés. I don't know how much more elderly person makeup they can apply to Joel Kinnaman and Wrenn Schmidt before it starts looking ridiculous.

Episode Grade: B

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