For All Mankind S5E3 Recap: “Home” — Take Things as They Are

The following recap contains spoilers for For All Mankind S5E3, “Home” (written by Nina Braddock and directed by Meera Menon)

For All Mankind S5E3 feels, first and foremost, like a swan song for Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman). The opening scene, which flashes back to when Ed’s plane went down in Korea years ago, lands like a promise that the character’s death will serve as the bookend to the episode. And that’s OK. I’ve watched TV before.

What is a bit disappointing is that, when it comes down to it, Ed’s death didn’t pull my heartstrings nearly as much as some of the scenes that precede it. I cried when Gordo (Michael Dorman) and Tracy (Sarah Jones) died, but Ed’s story felt like it was done. If anything, it felt like it ended last week; almost as if he’d overstayed his welcome.

But, maybe that’s fitting for Ed Baldwin—stubborn bastard that he is—and his continued life through “Home” gives the space for some reconciliation with Kelly (Cynthy Wu) and Alex (Sean Kaufman). In purely narrative terms, I’m not sure how well this works. Rather than pushing the story of Season 5 forward, For All Mankind spends most of its third episode reflecting on a character who’s been there from the beginning and doesn’t matter anymore, but the scene where Ed, Kelly, and Alex do a shot together at the bar is incredibly charming (particularly when Ed tells Alex to cough).

We don’t check in with Lee Jung-gil (C.S. Lee) in S5E3, but we know he has received sanctuary with the ISN, and we get some news reports about the tensions between the ISN and the M-6 back on Earth. Personally, I would like more on that front, along with more about the tensions between Helios and Kuragin.

Aleida (Coral Peña) has learned that Kuragin is about to launch a mission to Titan and is wondering how they found out about the signs of life Helios detected. Margo (Wrenn Schmidt) suggests that there is a spy. Wouldn’t be the first time!

Ultimately, Aleida takes Margo’s advice about going to Mars herself to refurbish the Sojourner, which has been gathering dust for two decades. Season 3 gave us a race to Mars, and it seems like Season 5 is setting up a race to Titan.

Meanwhile, Boyd (Mireille Enos) continues to pursue her suspicions about what Kuragin is up to on Mars. She believes that Lee is innocent, and that Kuragin’s illicit night operations have something to do with the first murder on Mars. She is stonewalled, however, by Palmer (Myk Watford), and when she continues to investigate anyway, she gets a pipe to the skull for her trouble. As S5E3 ends, Boyd has been placed on paid leave for six weeks, but I doubt she’s going to give this up.

As for Palmer, he’s rounding up anyone associated with the SDM in light of last week’s jailbreak. We know that these people had nothing to do with it, but For All Mankind is making the point that Mars isn’t America. There is no First Amendment here, and while I’m sure the M-6 charter provides for rights for the people on Mars, we’ve never precisely gotten the details about that.

Palmer has apparently caught Lily (Ruby Cruz) doing her Free Mars graffiti, which puts Miles (Toby Kebbell) in a bit of a bind. Last week, Palmer pressured Miles to rat out his comrades, and Miles resisted. But now it’s strongly implied that Miles is going to play along to keep this vandalism charge from going on his daughter’s permanent record.

With Ed’s death at the end of “Home,” almost all of the characters from Season 1 of For All Mankind have exited the story. Margo is still around, but I don’t know how much we’ll be seeing her now that Aleida won’t be visiting her in prison. And, of course, Aleida was in the series premiere, even if she was a kid and portrayed by Olivia Trujillo at the time.

Gordo’s dead, Tracy’s dead, Karen (Shantel VanSanten) is dead, Molly (Sonya Walger) is dead…

I guess Ellen (Jodi Balfour) is still out there somewhere, but I don’t expect to see her. Maybe, given some comments I’ve seen from Krys Marshall, we’ll get a little cameo of Danielle Poole.

For All Mankind has tried its best to seed new characters to keep us caring about its story as it moves forward in time, but I think it’s fair to say the results have been mixed. I’m not going to run through each character to pass some sort of judgment, but one of the greatest joys of TV lies in getting to know characters, and the complicated dynamics between them, over a large number of episodes.

One of the best examples is how Ed and Danielle would always greet each other, and it’s sad that we won’t get that again.

Bye, Bob.