Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for the Season 5 finale of For All Mankind, S5E10, “This Land Is Our Land” (written by Matt Wolpert & Ben Nedivi & Kira Snyder and directed by Sergio Mimica-Gezzan)
For All Mankind S5E10 picks up with Miles (Toby Kebbell), Aleida (Coral Peña), et al. in MOCC during the events of last week’s episode. Lee (C.S. Lee) comes up with a plan to get all of the M-6 forces to a central location where the SDM can surround them, and Lenya (Costa Ronin) suggests allowing the M-6 to “rescue” him so that he can get to their mission control (called it!).
The team tracks Lenya to discover where the M-6 has set up its HQ, then pumps the oxygen level in that room up to 100 percent so that they can set the place on fire with an electrical charge. Aleida, of course, objects to this idea, but they do it anyway. When it comes down to it, Miles pushes the button himself, killing a bunch of people. Lenya and Ilya (Dimiter D. Marinov) get out just in time.
Elsewhere, Alex (Sean Kaufman) and Avery (Ines Asserson) successfully get into Helios in order to get medical care for Marcus (Barrett Carnahan). He survives and is in stable condition before Avery decides she has to leave to rejoin her unit. There is a brief moment when she and Alex bond over the trauma of having shot someone, but unfortunately they don’t talk about their grandpas being on the Moon together. Maybe later.
Aleida is freaking out because she can’t contact the Sojourner in order to give them an ascent trajectory, since communications in Happy Valley have been shut down. They’ll be stuck on Titan unless she can get through. Meanwhile, Irina (Svetlana Efremova) wants to communicate with her contact in the USSR, so the two form an unlikely alliance to work out the problem.
It turns out there are nonoperational satellites in orbit that transmit on a different frequency from the newer ones, so Aleida and Irina head to Helios to try to turn one back on in order to communicate with Star City. It takes some doing and some help from Dev (Edi Gathegi), but they finally do it, at which point they learn that Korzhenko (Dimitar Bakalov) is out of power in the USSR and a ceasefire on Mars has been declared. The problem is that this can’t be communicated to the troops on the ground (perhaps because Miles killed everyone in their command center).
So, Alex rides his motorcycle through the base to tell Miles, while Dev gets in a spacesuit to adjust an antenna and get the signal through to the M-6 troops. This works, and the fighting stops, leading us to a closing montage that I’ll return to shortly.
On Titan, Walt (Christopher Denham) gets mad at Kelly (Cynthy Wu) for collecting a sample while she was helping the injured Elena (Kristina Klebe), but it turns out that this sample contains what is most definitely life. They look like paramecia under the microscope, but I’m not sure if scientists will call them that since they are a methane-based lifeform. That’s pretty exciting!
Unfortunately, their rover absolutely will not start, presumably for the same reason the Seeker got messed up. They can’t even manage to make contact with the Sojourner, so the only choice is to walk the 20 kilometers back to the ship. The problem there is that they don’t have enough oxygen for all three of them to do so, which leads to the three arguing over which of them will make the sacrifice of staying behind.
I was worried for a moment that they were going to land on Elena in short order, but Kelly—being a Baldwin—stubbornly insists that it be her. Objectively, though with apologies, I do think it should have been Elena, given her injury, but I’ll admit it works a lot better narratively to have Kelly’s final message to Alex serve as the closing monologue of the season.
In the accompanying montage, we see news of life on Titan reaching Earth, Miles becoming the governor of Mars, and Margo (Wrenn Schmidt) and Graciana (Olivia Aguilar) continuing to bond as the latter visits the former in prison.
I was glad to see Margo again in this episode, even if she didn’t get to do much besides talk to Will (Robert Bailey Jr.) briefly in an effort to get information about Aleida during the conflict on Mars. I wonder if For All Mankind will find a way to work her into its sixth and final season.
As expected, the Season 5 finale ends with a jump forward in time to 2020. Panning out from Titan and moving across Saturn, we come to the USSR’s Mars-94 ship floating through space. You’ll recall how its crew had to be rescued when things went wrong back in Season 3, so the ship is empty and has a hole in its side.
The camera enters that hole and moves through the ship, with what are honestly some of the darkest shots I’ve ever seen on TV, to land on the control panel, which comes to life. Translated, the screen reads, “D:/Detection of GW 3.86.8451 // Nikulov loading…” Nikulov was Sergei’s (Piotr Adamczyk) last name, and that’s about all I’ve got for you there. The bigger question is why the thing is activating as it floats through deep space.
I have no idea where For All Mankind is going with this, but I look forward to finding out. Will Lenya be in charge of the USSR in 2020? Will the USSR continue to exist? Will it still be part of the M-6, or perhaps have joined the ISN? Any bets on who will be the President of the United States next season? I guess my money’s on John F. Kennedy Jr., who is still alive in this alternate timeline.
Regardless, stay tuned to TV Obsessive for whenever Season 6 arrives, and in the meantime, you can check out my thoughts on Star City.
Remember I love you. Always.
