Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for For All Mankind S5E8, “Brave New World” (written by Nina Braddock & Kate Burns and directed by Dan Liu)
For All Mankind S5E8 revolves around the M-6 sending troops to Mars in order to quash the rebellion, which is a predictable enough development given how Season 5 has threaded in a story about Avery (Ines Høysæter Asserson) joining the space marines. Miles (Toby Kebbell) learns of the planned invasion from Irina (Svetlana Efremova) and Lenya (Costa Ronin), who assure him that if the SDM can just hold out for a couple of weeks, the current government of the USSR will collapse, opening the door to the possibility of Martian independence.
We know that Irina has her eyes on Lenya as the next leader of the Soviet Union, and that she is a savvy political operator, so perhaps this promise to Miles isn’t entirely hot air. Regardless, Happy Valley doesn’t have a lot of time given its food supplies, even if some inhabitants will be leaving to go back to Earth, as they’ve requested.
Aleida (Coral Peña) won’t be among them, as she’s committed to seeing the Titan mission through. In the meantime, she helps Miles to identify that an M-6 military vessel is indeed making its way to Mars. They only have a couple of days before it arrives, and the only plan the SDM council can come up with is to destroy the platform on the Goldilocks asteroid, which is all the M-6 really cares about.
It’s Lee’s (C.S. Lee) idea originally, but Miles is the one who comes up with a way to make the requisite explosives out of fertilizer, and the plan becomes to take a hopper to the asteroid in order to blow up the docking platform. Boyd (Mireille Enos) insists on piloting the mission, and Lenya insists on being her co-pilot, noting how he might have more at stake than anyone else, given how his family is being threatened and so on.
They have to navigate through a dust storm, with Aleida’s help, but manage to get to the asteroid and set the timer on the bomb. The only wrinkle is that, in the meantime, marines have shown up, including Avery. But there’s no way to stop the bomb from going off. The platform is destroyed. Avery lives, but she’s left floating in space, and her commanding officer, Ruiz (Keith Miller), is dead.
Aleida might regret her involvement in this whole thing.
On Titan, Walt (Christopher Denham) can’t stop obsessing over what happened to the flight plan he entered to abort the mission, and when Kelly (Cynthy Wu) is about to confess that she messed with it in order to force them to proceed to Titan, Walt cuts her short and passes command of the mission to her.
There is a pressing decision to be made about lowering the number of people who will take a rover out onto the moon’s surface in that moment, such that it’s easy to see why Kelly would take the reins to move things forward, but it’s not cool to let Walt persist in his neurotic state. Kelly’s basically lying to Walt, and ordering him to go on the rover mission hardly makes up for it. You can see Ed Baldwin’s influence on Kelly here, but not in a good way.
Meanwhile, back on Mars, Lily (Ruby Cruz) gets inspired to continue Gully’s (Yael Chanukov) film project in order to show the people of Earth what Marsies are like. Since her death in last week’s episode, Gully has been labeled in the media as an insurgent and a terrorist, in line with the characterization of the SDM we’ve seen in news clips.
We know that isn’t true, of course. It might arguably be true that people like Miles and Gerardo (Salvador Chacon), or even Boyd, are insurgents, since they did basically stage a coup, but Gully was nothing of the kind, and the people of Mars generally just want a decent life for themselves.
I’m curious whether the film Lily is making will find its way to Earth and whether it might make a difference. Those Marsies did just kill some marines, after all.
See you next week.
