Stream It Or Skip It: ‘For All Mankind’ Season 4 on Apple TV+, Where The Sci-Fi Drama Adds Way More Mars To Its Imagined History

In the ten-episode fourth season of For All Mankind (Apple TV+), the Emmy-winning, big thinking drama from creators Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar Galactica, Outlander), Ben Nadivi, and Matt Wolpert, mining asteroids for valuable minerals is humanity’s latest space race gambit. The time jumps that have marked each consecutive season of FAM and pushed four decades into its own future have by now brought us to 2003, where Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) is still in space, Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) is about to rejoin him, disgraced NASA director Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) is in exile in Russia, and Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña) is still processing the terror attack that ended the show’s season. There are new faces in this imagined world, too – Daniel Stern, Tyner Rushing, Toby Kebbell, and Svetlana Efremova join the cast.   

FOR ALL MANKIND – SEASON 4: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: “The desire to go further has been a part of the American Dream since the founding of our great nation,” President Ellen Wilson (Jodi Balfour) says in her address to the 1996 Republican National Convention. “We saw the impossible, and we made it possible.” In For All Mankind’s alternate timeline update, we also learn that Michael Jordan plays for the Seattle Mariners, giant corporations have set up shop on the Moon, Helios developed clean energy engine tech, and that in her second term as the country’s first openly gay president, Wilson signed the Marriage Inclusion Act into law.  

The Gist: It’s still a society that looks like ours. Moon Miner is America’s most popular reality show. Clint Eastwood played legendary NASA astronaut Ed Baldwin (Kinnaman) in a hit movie. Former president Bill Clinton is getting divorced. And under Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika initiatives, Russia’s economy and society have been transformed. Al Gore is the US president now, and he’s tapped former auto executive Eli Hobson (Stern) to lead the country’s space program, which these days operates out of a facility named for pioneering astronaut Molly Cobb (Sonya Walger), who died in the 1995 domestic terrorist attack on NASA. With the support of the M-7 coalition of nations, the Happy Valley research base on Mars has grown exponentially. And a bearded Baldwin, now in his 70s, is still up there working hard as XO, though the tremor in his hand might suggest a reason why he hasn’t returned Earth-side to face his superiors.

We meet Baldwin again as he pilots the ion thruster-powered vessel that will propel an impossibly vast asteroid known as Kronos into Mars orbit, where it can be mined for the resources coveted by governments and corporations like Helios back on Earth. It’s a tall order, harnessing an asteroid, and For All Mankind shows off its impressive care for representing the technological dynamics of working and living in space while cosmonaut Grigory Kuznetzov (Lev Gorn) conducts an EVA to drive stabilizing pylons into its surface. But tragedy strikes when the operation goes south. In order to get things back on track, Hobson wants retired Commander Danielle Poole (Marshall) on a space jet to Mars. And she’s intrigued, though the experiences of season three – and the legacy of life-destroying astronaut Danny Stevens – still linger in her mind. At Mission Control, past traumas also haunt brilliant NASA engineer Aleida Rosales (Peña). And in Russia, the efforts of disgraced NASA chief Margo Madison (Schmidt) to contribute her expertise to their space program are rebuffed, even as she’s approached by a mysterious woman. Patience, the woman preaches; Margo’s time will come.

To mine an asteroid, you also need miners. And to that end, For All Mankind has expanded its already large cast to include Toby Kebbell as Miles Dale, a former roughneck who lost his job working on oil platforms in the late-1990s clean energy boom, who has accepted a two-year bit on the red planet as the colony and job market there grow. Mars is where all of the action is. But even amid the technological wonders of an alternate timeline, it’s human relationships and decision-making that bear the heaviest load.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The earlier seasons of For All Mankind often felt like an expanded universe version of the 1983 classic The Right Stuff. But as human society in the series has looked ever more spaceward, nowadays it bears similarities to The Expanse, which spanned six seasons across SyFy and Prime Video. That show looked hundreds and hundreds of years into the future. But it always centered the squabbles and power struggles between the people of Earth, Moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt. 

Our Take: The audaciousness! When it comes to For All Mankind, it’s tempting to just wish for an extended cut of the cultural recaps in its per-season timeline jumps, because they’re so well-imagined. From the start, the series has proven adept at weaving its constructed history of the late 20th century and beyond into the faces, facts, and folly of our own society, and that work does wonders for its world building. But it also strengthens the material in general. It gives its characters foundation, makes them real in a way that doesn’t just lean on science fiction assumptions. And by now, in the FAM version of 2003, the characters who’ve weathered the adversity of nearly four decades have a lot to confront as humanity continues its spread across the galaxy. 

What will Danielle’s reunion with Ed look like, given their lengthy professional history? What is Margo up to in Russia, and who are the mysterious people keeping an eye on her movements? And what does it look like when Mars becomes a job-creating engine for regular everyday folks, and not just the engineers, astronauts, and other high-level professionals working with NASA and the international space agencies? As For All Mankind illustrates, the only reason Miles Dale even manages to find work on Mars is because the Moon is already full up. In the premiere, the graphic that slaps the logos for Exxon, Shell, and Haliburton onto the lunar surface in a foreboding mirror image of how our own society could evolve, and it’s details like that – in addition to the series’ continued excellence in special effects and production design – that really hit the same-but-different dynamic at the root of FAM’s biggest storytelling swings.    

Sex and Skin: Off camera, Miles and his wife Mandy (Shannon Lucio) sleep together before he ships out for Mars, though they’re technically separated. “This doesn’t mean we’re getting back together!”

Parting Shot: With new Happy Valley personnel plus Miles and his fellow Mars workers en route to the red planet, Ed Baldwin smokes a joint in his quarters. The weed might take his mind off all he’s lost as well as the latest tragedy. But still the pronounced tremor in his hand won’t quit.  

Sleeper Star: Margo Madison’s exile to Russia and her return to matters of space is one of the most intriguing storylines of For All Mankind as it launches its fourth season, and Wrenn Schmidt continues her terrific work as Margo, representing the scars of the NASA attack with every step, delivering the majority of her lines in Russian, and wearing the best of the show’s age-furthering makeup. 

Most Pilot-y Line: Eli Hobson wants to Lee Iacocca the Kronos disaster, but to do that – and please big business – he’s gotta lure Danielle Poole out of retirement. “When I got here,” Hobson says of NASA, “over 60% of the projects were over budget or behind schedule. Even before this fiasco. The M-7 nations have sunk untold resources into building out Happy Valley for this asteroid mining program, and they expect a return on that investment.” 

Our Call: STREAM IT, all the way to Mars and back. For All Mankind continues to audaciously rewrite history in season four. It’s got a handful of legacy characters with over thirty years of baggage to process, as well as new frontiers of the continuing space race to explore with both its sharp writing and stunning production design.  

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.