Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for For All Mankind S5E4, “Open Source” (written by Sabrina Almeida and directed by Meera Menon)
For All Mankind S5E4 opens with Alex (Sean Kaufman) and Kelly (Cynthy Wu) going through Ed’s (Joel Kinnaman) things. Alex remarks that they aren’t allowed to have a memorial service for Ed, which seems wrong to me. Despite his crimes, Ed Baldwin had a long and storied career in this timeline. He was almost the first man on the Moon, and he held down the fort alone at Jamestown when exigencies called for it. He was one of the first on Mars and was key to the development of the colony there (even if this did involve some crime).
I can understand the withholding of honors, given that Ed ended his life by breaking the law once again, but the denial of a funeral strikes me more as something out of ancient Greek tragedy than what you’d expect from a 21st-century civilization. Also, I’m curious as to how this works on the red planet—are we burying people on Mars, cremating and scattering ashes, or what?
Regardless, whatever has been decreed by the M-6 with regard to Ed, the people of Mars think he deserves to be remembered. Lily (Ruby Cruz) brings Kelly and Alex to a makeshift altar that’s appeared in what I want to call the food court, and it’s filled with photos, candles, and trinkets. When it comes down to it, Lenya (Costa Ronin) doesn’t dare to remove the shrine for fear of causing further unrest. So, we don’t quite get Antigone in space after all.
Lenya is already receiving pressure from the Soviet Union because work on Mars has slowed due to poor morale. His solution to this is to try to rally everyone on Mars around the planned mission to Titan, appealing to a shared sense of purpose. That’s interesting in and of itself, insofar as the mission from Mars stems from the Americans at Helios and is in competition with the Soviets at Kuragin, but perhaps the fact that these are private companies gives Lenya some breathing room to appeal to Martian solidarity.
It’s not likely to matter, anyway, since the big news of S5E4 breaks shortly after Lenya’s rally. Alex, who begins a job at Helios early in S5E4, has discovered a file on the company’s servers about plans to automate labor on Mars, and as “Open Source” ends, he has taken Lily’s suggestion of leaking this information to the press.
The news comes as a shock to everyone who receives an alert, including Dev (Edi Gathegi), but what we don’t know for sure as the episode ends is whether Dev was aware of the plan. Given his position of power at Helios, you’d expect that he would be, but there is some tension between his plans for Meru and the idea of sending everyone back to Earth.
If Dev was not only aware of, but on board with, these plans for automation, we’d have to imagine that Meru is not intended for Martian laborers but for rich folks who want to escape Earth. I suppose that’s plausible even in a world where global warming has been solved, but boy, will it have me thinking Dev is a bad guy if that’s how things pan out.
The folder Alex finds is labeled in Russian, but its contents seem to be in English (unless he ran them through a translator and I didn’t notice). Alex himself doesn’t have security clearance to access the folder, so he sneaks into the office at night to use his boss’s computer to access it. Could this be a Russian plan that Helios got its hands on, as opposed to something Helios endorses? We already know Kuragin is up to some shady business.
Another possibility might be that the automation files are a proposal that has not been adopted. Aleida (Coral Peña) seems to be blindsided by the news when it breaks, and if this was an official Helios plan, you’d presume the CEO would know. It’s true that Dev surprised Aleida with his Meru announcement, but those plans were not approved prior to his announcement. He went public in order to force the Board’s hand.
Of course, the automation of tasks is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, insofar as it can free human beings from onerous labor. But workers have built a life for themselves on Mars at this point, and if these plans threaten to undermine that life, it’s easy enough to see the conflict that will follow.
To be honest, I kind of miss when For All Mankind was hitting more optimistic notes with a Black woman on the Moon in the 1970s, the passage of the ERA, the reversal of global warming, the first woman to become President coming out as gay in the 1990s, etc. But if it’s going to turn into something of a prequel for The Expanse, at least The Expanse was good.
Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) makes an appearance in “Open Source” in a context I could not have guessed prior to viewing the episode. Early on in the hour, we’re (re)introduced to Avery (Ines Høysæter Asserson), the daughter of Danny Stevens (Casey W. Johnson) we last saw as a toddler. Now, she’s enlisting in the Off-Planet Expeditionary Force (OPEF), but the powers that be have some worries about her psychological disposition, given what happened with her father.
At first, Avery is defensive and claims that she doesn’t even recognize Danny as her father, but after she talks with Danielle, she becomes more honest. She wants to serve her country like her father and grandfather before her, and I guess that’s what the muckety-mucks wanted to hear. She seems like something of a powder keg to me, though, so I’ll be curious to see where this storyline leads. I wouldn’t take her killing someone we care about on Mars off the table.
Aleida arrives on Mars in S5E4, and though the whole idea was that she needed to be there in person to get the Sojourner up to snuff for the mission to Titan, she doesn’t seem to do much on that front prior to its launch towards the end of the episode. She does inform Dev that they don’t have the calculations they need in order to land on Titan successfully. Kuragin must have the data, or they’d be foolish to launch their own mission. Dev promises to get that data for Helios, but unless I missed it, there’s no confirmation that they’ve gotten that data prior to launch.
I hope that Helios isn’t launching with the faith that they’ll get the numbers they need in time, but even if that is the case, I wish that For All Mankind would have made it more explicit. Aleida would be mad, push back, and maybe ultimately give in. She certainly wouldn’t just take Dev at his word when there’s a risk of crashing into Saturn.
Moreover, even if I don’t understand the math, and even if it might be glossed, I want For All Mankind to nerd out on the engineering stuff. In the real world, Artemis II just did a splashdown as it returned from the Moon, at the precise time and location planned, and there’s something sublime about that. That kind of sublimity used to be the bread and butter of For All Mankind, and I fear it’s being pushed to the margins.
“Open Source”
Indeed, if I have any critique of For All Mankind Season 5 thus far, it’s that everything feels a bit at the margins. Seasons 1 and 2 focused on getting to the Moon and establishing a base there (plus Cold War). Season 3 was about the race to Mars. Season 4 centered on securing the Goldilocks asteroid. We’re nearly halfway through, and I don’t know if I could sum up Season 5 nearly as succinctly.
Putatively, it’s about going to Titan, but it’s also about the first murder on Mars, tensions between Mars and Earth, the corporate exploitation of workers extending into space, etc., and none of those things feels central.
Lee Jung-gil (C.S. Lee) made it to the ISN base on Mars in S5E2, but there’s been no follow up on that to this point. We still know very little about the Independent Spacefaring Nations beyond the fact that their coalition exists. And, if Kuragin is actually responsible for the death Lee has been accused of causing, well, the one person on top of that, Celia Boyd (Mireille Enos) just sits in bed this week and does nothing after being put on leave last week.
I have to believe that the various threads of the story will come together by the end of this season, but I hope they begin to do so soon. Perhaps the fact that Irina Morozova (Svetlana Efremova) is a part of the incoming Russian delegation to Mars will help bring things to a head.
See you next week.
