For All Mankind S1E4 Review: Prime Crew Politics and a Press Conference Coup
Patricia Doyle's funeral, John Glenn's lobbying tour, and a wildcat announcement reroute Apollo 15 around the White House while Gordo loses his seat to Molly Cobb.
“Prime Crew” works as a hinge episode. It cleans up the wreckage of “Nixon’s Women” — a dead trainee, a grieving program, a White House losing its nerve — and locks in the crew that will fly Apollo 15. Between those poles the hour stages a small bureaucratic coup, gives Molly Cobb the moon shot, exiles Gordo Stevens from his own ride, and opens three private fronts (Ellen’s closet, Tracy’s hotel room, a young Aleida on a single bus ticket) that the season will keep returning to. It is the densest hour yet and the first that lets the women carry the A-plot end to end.
A funeral, a phone, and a busted hand
The cold open is funeral coverage. Patty Doyle gets the NASA family eulogy on broadcast and a small wake at the Outpost where her classmates trade pilot-talk that lands as denial. Ed Baldwin has been her instructor for the bedstead and is taking the death personally, and the hour spends its first ten minutes letting that grief metastasize. He calls Mr. Doyle to express something and gets a parent shouting him hoarse on the other end. The receiver goes dead. Ed swings, the phone breaks, and Karen Baldwin finds him bleeding at the kitchen counter. The exchange between them is the episode’s first thesis statement on the show’s male leads. Karen tells him he can’t keep blaming himself for everything that goes wrong; Ed answers that he was Doyle’s instructor and it was his job to prepare her. The argument ends with him telling her to go mow the lawn. That’s the marriage. Joel Kinnaman plays it like a man who has not been told a feeling is allowed since 1958.
John Glenn shows up at NASA the same morning to lobby Deke Slayton. The scene reads like a Senator’s office visit because that is what it is — Glenn is one in the alt-history, and his pitch is openly political. Patty’s death proves the women are out of their depth. Experience matters. Men go off and fight the wars and fly the planes. He praises Deke’s atrial fibrillation as a “raw deal” and reminds him this whole circus wasn’t his idea anyway. Chris Bauer plays Deke as a man cataloguing the offer rather than refusing it. He doesn’t fight back, doesn’t agree, just notes that he decides who goes up. The audience is meant to leave the room not knowing what he’ll do next.
“I say who’s an astronaut”
What he does next is execute a clean piece of agency capture. Nixon’s chief of staff arrives at Deke’s office with the kill order — the peace treaty with Vietnam is the perfect cover, the polling says Americans don’t want to watch women die in fiery plane crashes, the circus is over. Deke listens, says nothing usable, and lets the man leave thinking he’s been heard. Then, off-screen, he calls a press conference, gathers Shorty Powers and the four trainees the audience has been watching for two episodes, and walks them onto a stage in flight suits. Sarah Jones as Tracy Stevens. Sonya Walger as Molly Cobb. Ellen Waverly. Danielle Poole. America’s next Apollo astronauts. The audience cheers, photographers fire, Shorty grins like a man who has just been deputized for treason. The chief of staff, watching from the floor, can only deliver the line out loud: “You just made Nixon’s shitlist.”
The structural beauty of the move is that it’s irreversible by the hour’s logic. Once the four women are on every front page, pulling them back becomes more embarrassing than letting them fly. The show telegraphed the press in “Nixon’s Women” but withheld the actual reveal until now, and the choice pays off — the trainees only learn they’ve been promoted at the same instant the country does. Wrenn Schmidt’s Margo Madison watches from the back with the expression of a flight dynamics officer who suddenly has four crewed missions to schedule.
Gordo gets bumped
The flip side of the coronation arrives in Deke’s office a beat later. Ed is informed his LEM pilot is being replaced. Gordo’s out. Molly Cobb is in. Ed protests the obvious — Gordo’s been up there twice, trained for nine months, is the best LEM pilot in the program — and Deke does not budge. The scene is staged as a small command moment with Karen present, and Shantel VanSanten gets one of her sharpest beats of the season when she calls the swap a publicity stunt and warns Ed they’re not ready. Ed lets her finish, then asks if he wants the flight. If not, he can get drunk and watch it on TV with Gordo. Karen leaves. Deke offers, gently, to tell Gordo himself. Already done, Deke says. It was my call.
Michael Dorman’s Gordo gets the news by drinking. He stumbles home to a celebration Tracy has organized for her own assignment and unloads — Deke replaced me with Molly Cobb, she’s taking my ride, she gets the moon and I get shit. Tracy resets the night into a Stevens-on-Stevens celebration and offers to buy him a new Corvette, and Gordo’s response — “I can’t go next week, they’re sending me to the Cape to help prep” — registers as the first real fracture in their marriage. Tracy is going where she’s told, just like he is. The line is true and it ends the conversation, but the camera holds on Gordo’s face long enough to mark it as the first time someone in this house has said it back to him.
A dinner, a diaper, and Mercury 13 seniority
The crew dinner is the episode’s set-piece comic scene and also its sharpest social document. Ed and Sedge sit Molly down at a restaurant and explain that there will be a lot of eyes on her, a lot of expectations, that she should put it out of her mind and follow their lead. Ed orates. Sedge backs him up. The baked potato is outstanding. Molly waits them out with the patience of a woman who has heard this lecture in fourteen different officer’s clubs, then notes evenly that she was in Mercury 13 before either of them got into Gemini, and that in a sense she has seniority. Isn’t that funny. Sedge burps. The scene is funny because Sonya Walger plays it with the relaxed pilot’s smile of someone who has decided not to fight the room, and it’s grim because she leaves the restaurant knowing exactly who she’s flying with.
The diaper conversation in the suit lab is the same joke from a different angle. The relief tube was designed for man parts and Molly will not be able to use it without making a hell of a mess. Worked for the guys on Gemini, somebody offers. Ed steps in and rules from the chair he’s earned: no one on my crew is going to the moon in a damn diaper, you’re rocket scientists, figure it out. It’s the first moment in the hour the audience sees Ed actually advocate for Molly, and the show is careful to stage it as a command call rather than an ideological one. He doesn’t say women deserve better engineering; he says his crew does.
“You’re an astronaut”
The simulator scenes are where the episode does its most serious work on Molly. She’s behind on procedures. She enters Noun zero two zero six when it should be two zero seven, and Ed reworks the DSKY entries to handle the descent himself until P66. Margo confronts her in the hallway: he doesn’t trust you, and maybe he shouldn’t, because the truth is you’re not good enough, not right now. Molly answers the way she has answered every challenge since Jamestown — I am who I am, screw them, I’m not trying to be a goddamn role model, I’m just a pilot. Margo’s reply is the cleanest line in the script. “No. You’re an astronaut.” It works because the show has spent four hours building a distinction between those two jobs. A pilot answers to her own confidence. An astronaut answers to a country that is watching her not to drown in a centrifuge. Molly leaves the conversation having heard the same thing Deke heard from John Glenn, just inverted — your word carries weight, whether you wanted it to or not.
What this episode argues
The episode argues that the program is now bigger than the men who built it, and that those men have not yet noticed. Glenn lobbies on Mercury-era assumptions and loses. Deke’s chief-of-staff handler arrives with a White House kill order and leaves with nothing. Ed and Sedge run the crew dinner like a Right Stuff reunion and discover their LEM pilot has more flight hours than either of them. Gordo’s seat is given away by a man who used to drink with him, and the show stages the handoff at Ellington with both pilots speaking the half-language of men trained to hide everything. BOHICA. Yeah. Godspeed, 15. The new order is so polite it barely registers as a transfer of power, and that politeness is what makes it real.
Underneath, three subplots open quietly. Ellen wakes up at Pam’s, gets a call meant for her at Larry Wilson’s number, and rides home in a closeted arrangement Larry already understands better than she does — “you used to be more careful.” Tracy unplugs her phone in a hotel room and lets a toilet flush into a long-distance call with her husband. Octavio Rosales puts a child Aleida on a bus to Cape Kennedy with one ticket and an apology that there wasn’t enough for two. The show plants the threads next to the launch, so the rocket goes up while three households are quietly falling apart.
Verdict
“Prime Crew” is the strongest hour of the season so far and the first one that fully trusts the women to carry it. The Doyle funeral pays off the cliffhanger from “Nixon’s Women” without wallowing in it, the press-conference coup is staged with real procedural confidence, and the crew dinner is one of the best small scenes the show has written. Joel Kinnaman and Sonya Walger find a working dynamic that the season will need; Michael Dorman sells the Gordo demotion as the start of his unraveling rather than the end of it; Wrenn Schmidt gets her first real Margo monologue and lands it. The Ellen and Tracy subplots are sketched more than developed, but the sketches are clean and the launch montage delivers an honest hit of awe even after four episodes of paperwork.
The hour’s one weak seam is the John Glenn scene, which leans a little hard on the audience already understanding what an installed Mercury hero means to NASA’s internal politics. That’s a small price for what the rest of the episode pulls off. By the time Molly looks up at the night sky and says “I’m going to the moon,” the show has earned the line the way a season premiere usually has to.
Rating: 8.6/10