tl;dr

The death knell of For All Mankind

Right when season 5 was starting, I rewatched For All Mankind. That first season? Amazing. I adore it. Seasons 2 and 3 are also fun and enjoyable. And now that I’m both done with the rewatch and finally made myself finish the very underwhelming season 5, I have to say: the show I loved ended in season 3, in more ways than one.

Let me be clear: I didn’t dislike season 4, even if I liked it quite a bit less than the other 3. But that was definitely the point where the story shifted towards something different from what it had been. Season 4 still had remnants of the show I loved, but those are pretty much all gone in season 5. It became a different show and one which simply does not spark joy. Or interest, for me.

It is of course the focus away from space exploration to a frankly quite dour story about labor rights and independence on Mars (The Expanse did this much more engagingly).

It’s also the fact that it progressively stopped being alternate history as it got closer to the present. There’s no longer compelling and recognizable echoes of the past.

It’s the fact that almost the entire cast of complex, engaging characters is either sidelined or gone (death or otherwise). Obviously moving forward a decade each season you’d have to replace the characters but the new characters are just not interesting. I don’t care about the Baldwin and Stevens grandkids or the people surrounding them.

On the character front, once again looking back it was the final episode of season 3 that marked a before and after. Yes we’d lost Tracey and Gordo, but their absence was manageable and it was just them. But season 3 we lose Molly Cobb, and THAT left a gaping hole that was never filled. I also question the necessity of it frankly. Yeah, she went out a hero. The show was more fun with her in it.

We also lose Karen Baldwin just at a point when her story was taking a super interesting turn. I would have loved to see her as the head of Helios. It feels egregious that she was killed off then.

And in season 4… Ellen is out of the picture. By the end, Margo is in prison and basically out of the action in season 5. We see Danielle once, I think. Ed dies a few eps into season 5 and frankly he’d become insufferable. So that leaves Aleida out of the original cast actively involved in the story.

I think in future rewatches I will just stop at the end of season 3 and pretend that’s it.