For All Mankind S1E9 Review: A Stranded Astronaut and a Rookie's Real First Flight
Apollo 24 misfires, a saved life rewrites Tracy's career, and Karen Baldwin sleepwalks into the only door she has left to knock on.
For All Mankind has spent half a season parking Ed Baldwin on the lunar surface while arguing, episode by episode, that Apollo 10’s near-miss bent every other life downstream. Penultimate hour “Bent Bird” cashes the bill. A relief mission misfires on its translunar burn, a daring repair rendezvous turns into a runaway third stage, Molly Cobb ends up a mile out with thirty minutes of oxygen, and a rookie command module pilot has to fly through a crippled spacecraft to a strobing beacon and the rescue Houston refused to authorize. Around that spine, Karen Baldwin cracks open, Gordo Stevens tries and fails to confess, Aleida Rosales’s father is dragged off in handcuffs, and Apollo 24’s uncommanded burn fires the ship a thousand miles past the moon.
A relief mission breaks the burn
The cold open is one of the cleanest the show has put on the air. Apollo 24 has been launched to relieve Ed, stranded on the moon for one hundred and fifty-nine days. Deke Slayton is at the helm, Ellen Wilson running checklists, Harrison Liu in the third seat. Five seconds to ignition. Five, four, three, two, one. Master alarm, master caution. Deke’s verdict, dry as ash: “Well… we’re not dead.” A failure to ignite has stranded the relief crew in low Earth orbit, the third-stage S-IVB sitting on a bad board in the Saturn instrument unit that cannot be repaired in space.
The diagnostic phase is the kind of nuts-and-bolts NASA work the show has always written better than its peers. Margo Madison and Gordo run the trace, find the dead spark in the ASI, and walk a briefing room through a rescue plan so audacious it sounds like a pitch from a different show. Molly Cobb, fresh off a year of EVA training for the orbiting observatory, will fly up on a Saturn IB with Dennis Lambert and rookie command module pilot Tracy Stevens, rendezvous with the crippled 24, tether the two ships, enter the instrument ring through a single access door, cross eighteen feet of cramped truss, and swap the flight control computer. Their booster is not powerful enough to break Earth orbit. The fix has to work the first time.
The briefing also reframes Tracy. The show has spent eight episodes treating her as a tabloid astronaut, a wife photographed for her hair. Here she is the only command module pilot at NASA with the EVA hours to fly the rendezvous. Margo signs off without flinching. Tracy says thank you, sir. The voice in the room finally matches the rank on her sleeve.
The repair becomes a runaway
The rendezvous itself runs textbook. Molly’s thousand-dollar socket wrench works as advertised. Harrison Liu pulls the diagnostic line. Apollo 24 powers up the new FCC for a self-test. And then the tank pressures rise, the turbo pump starts, and a flight controller realizes the booster is still armed. The third-stage engine fires uncommanded. Deke, Ellen, and Harrison are jammed back into their couches as the ship rips through its tether toward nothing. Molly is flung free. Tracy and Dennis are spun off-axis in a banged-up 25, thruster quad D dead from the collision, fuel hemorrhaging.
Houston’s call is the hard one and the right one on paper. Molly is at least a half mile out, drifting fast, with thirty minutes of O2. Apollo 25’s fuel is bleeding past nineteen percent and a rescue burn will leave Tracy and Dennis stranded on the wrong orbit for reentry. Margo, working flight, tells Gordo to relay the no-go. Gordo refuses on an open loop: “Not while they’ve still got a chance to save her.” Margo gives the order to Tracy directly. Tracy refuses on the same loop, citing her authority as pilot in command, and asks Houston to put Gordo back on.
The rescue itself is the most procedurally honest piece of zero-g action the show has staged. Dogfighting rules: “lose sight, lose the fight.” Tracy holds Molly in the rendezvous window while Dennis closes the helium to the dead quad. Manual control on all axes, posigrade thrust at apogee to slow them onto Molly’s track. The flashlight battery dies. Molly goes black against black at five minutes of oxygen. Margo, in the only line the episode lets her raise her voice over, asks if they are really about to lose Molly Cobb to a dead flashlight battery, and then orders 25 to light its own rendezvous beacon. Molly sees the strobe. Two pulses, minus-Y. One more. Apollo 25 closes the gap and pulls her in. Tracy laughs. Gordo, on a hot mic in Houston, says it was all her, babe. Not bad for a rookie.
The episode does not let the rescue cancel the cost. Apollo 24’s uncommanded burn has put the ship a thousand miles off lunar trajectory with no telemetry, no voice comm, and no confirmation that any of the three crew are still breathing. Dani Poole, working capcom, keeps calling Apollo 24, Houston, do you read. The hour ends with the question unanswered.
A widow, a confession, a father, an enemy
The ground-side hour is paced around four collapses that the rescue does not redeem. Karen, weeks into the wake for her dead son, is selecting funeral clothes when her best friend lets the neighborhood wives in to sit shivah in her kitchen. Karen does not want them, or corn bread, or a shower. She wants to go back to bed. She finds her son’s room being walked through by Danny Stevens, who came over to return a pinewood derby car he never owned and to confess that the water-meter prank that killed Shane was his idea, not Shane’s. Karen grabs her keys and drives. She bangs on a stranger’s door. When Ed’s old lover Pam Horton answers, Karen does not know what to say. “I don’t know” is the only line she can find. She is in a doorway that was not even hers to find.
Gordo’s arc is the mirror of Tracy’s. While his wife is hauling Molly back from the dark, he tries to make an honest man of himself by telling Dani Poole he wants the world to know what really happened on the moon, that she broke her arm saving him, that his crack-up cost her a command. Dani’s answer is iron. She knows the truth. She is proud of breaking her arm to save a fellow astronaut. If he breathes a word out of misguided justice they will ground her, and she has worked too hard to get there for him to take that. Gordo nurses a ginger ale, walks back to console, and ends the night running an open-loop mutiny with Tracy to save Molly. The penance he wanted is the one Dani refused to grant. The penance he gets is operational.
Aleida Rosales’s subplot is the cruelest cut in the hour. A federal agent walks Octavio Rosales through his employment record, his Social Security number that belongs to a dead man, his locker full of NASA design documents, and the names of a Soviet KGB suspect and an arrested FIP Systems vice president. Octavio insists he just cleans the offices, that the papers were trash, that he meant them as souvenirs for a friend who loves space. The agent does not believe him. Handcuffs. Aleida, earlier in the hour, was grounded for not telling her father she had been accepted to the Kennedy School. The deportation pipeline arrives between scenes. The episode does not flag it as a tragedy. It lets the audience do the math.
And in the run-up to the rescue, the show drops a coda the next episode will have to answer for. Ed, alone at the Jamestown base, hears banging at the airlock. A Soviet cosmonaut has lost a rover, run his O2 low, and walked to the American door. Ed says come on in, Ivan, while “My Way” plays from a speaker. The cosmonaut crosses the threshold, flips switches Ed did not authorize, sets off the alarm. Ed lunges. The Cold War on the moon stops being theoretical.
What this episode argues
“Bent Bird” argues that the hardware fails and the people are the redundancy. NASA’s flight rules, written by Margo and enforced by Houston, give a clear no-go on the rescue and the math behind that call is correct. The math is also incomplete. What gets Molly back is Gordo’s mutiny, Tracy’s pilot-in-command authority, Dennis’s quiet competence on the helium valve, and a rendezvous beacon that lives on the rescuing ship rather than the rescued astronaut. The institution that planned the mission also planned its abandonment. The crew, on the open loop, decided to be a different institution.
The other argument is about who carries the cost. Tracy’s rookie flight is the season’s clearest case for the women-astronaut program: she does the work, takes the lead, ends the hour as the pilot who brought Molly home. The same hour buries Karen under a casserole brigade she did not invite, hands Dani the bill for Gordo’s breakdown, ships Octavio out in handcuffs, and leaves Apollo 24’s crew floating past the moon with their carrier wave dropped. The show is not interested in clean wins. It is interested in who carries what afterward.
Verdict
Penultimate episodes are graded on whether the season’s bills come due, and “Bent Bird” pays a lot of them. The rendezvous-and-repair set piece is the most technically literate zero-g sequence the series has staged, and the show is brave enough to follow it with Houston giving the no-go and the crew flying through the order anyway. Tracy’s hour-long graduation from tabloid astronaut to pilot in command is the season’s most satisfying character flip, structured almost entirely through procedural language rather than monologue. Karen’s drive to Pam Horton’s door is the kind of grief beat the show has been writing toward all season, and Shantel VanSanten plays it with no editorializing. The Aleida cliffhanger is brutal and earned. Apollo 24’s silence at the end is a finale-shaped problem the show now owes an answer to.
The episode is not flawless. The Pam-and-Wayne kitchen scene runs long for an hour this stuffed, and the Ed-and-cosmonaut button, while load-bearing for the finale, is so abrupt it nearly tips into camp before “My Way” pulls it back. Small complaints against an hour that does what penultimate episodes are supposed to do. Stakes raised, characters realigned, season thesis sharpened. The relief mission failed. The rescue did not.
Rating: 9.2/10