For All Mankind S2E7 Review: KAL 007 Drags NASA Into the Cold War
A heart attack pulls Ellen off the plane that kills Tom Paine, and the show spends the next hour drafting every character into a war they did not sign up for.
For All Mankind has spent six episodes braiding domestic collapse and lunar logistics into the same rope. “Don’t Be Cruel” yanks on it. A KGB fighter shoots down Korean Air Lines flight 007 over Sakhalin Island, kills 269 people, and leaves a NASA Administrator’s body floating in the Sea of Japan. Ronald D. Moore and the writers use the real 1983 incident the way the series has always used real history — as the moment the alt-timeline shears off — and the shear in this case is that Tom Paine was on the manifest. Jodi Balfour’s Ellen Wilson is suddenly Acting Administrator. Wrenn Schmidt’s Margo Madison is being asked to weigh civilian Soviet lives against a classification stamp. The episode runs five different plots about people being handed authority they did not ask for, on a deadline they did not set, and is honest about how each of them flinches.
A heart attack saves Ellen and dooms Tom
The cold open is staged like a different show. Paine and Ellen are sharing martinis at a Honolulu bar before a fourteen-hour Korean Air leg to Seoul, joking about UN delegates and the East Asian space alliance she is being groomed to negotiate. Ellen tries to tell him something — the audience can read what — and the hotel phone interrupts. Her father has had a heart attack in Connecticut. Paine puts her in a limo without a debate. “This is family. Go.” The next time we see his face he is on a satellite call from KAL 007’s first-class cabin asking about the proposed space station, and the line goes dead mid-sentence. The choice to give Ellen the survivor’s-guilt scene rather than the explosion is the episode’s first thesis. The show is not interested in the spectacle of the shootdown. It is interested in who is left at the desk afterwards.
Balfour plays the Connecticut hospital scene with her father — who is already pushing her to come home and run the family business, already invoking Larry and grandchildren — as the last private conversation Ellen will have for the rest of the season. The White House operator interrupts. By the time she is on the phone with Reagan, the show has staged her promotion as a Hitchcockian accident. Her father’s coronary saved her life. It also conscripted her into a presidency that wants her clear-eyed, Christian, and willing to put missiles on Pathfinder before the week is out.
Margo cracks a sergeant and a Soviet in the same afternoon
The Margo plot is the episode at its sharpest. With Soyuz-Apollo engineer Sergei Nikulov locked down under FBI cordon, Margo bulldozes a Sergeant Perkins at the door with a stopwatch and a recital of the chain of command — fifteen seconds to call your superior, twelve to brief him, forty-five to reach General Bradford, ten for you to open this door, ninety-seven seconds away from either a cold beer at end of shift or an open-ended transfer to Thule, Greenland. It is the funniest scene in the hour and the meanest piece of character writing the show has done for her. Schmidt plays Margo as a woman who has spent twenty years being condescended to and has finally found a register where the condescension can be weaponized.
What she does with Sergei is harder. She brings borscht. Schmidt sells the steam-carries-the-soul ritual without sentiment, and Sergei, played with the right amount of mourning by Piotr Adamczyk’s engineer counterpart from earlier in the season, lets her trade respect for access. He will call Moscow. He will tell them he is not being tortured. He will see if they can reach Star City. The scene is doing two things at once. It is closing the open loop on Danielle Poole and Nate Morrison’s silence. It is also planting the relationship the back half of the season will detonate, because the next time Margo sees Sergei it will be under General Bradford’s orders to keep her mouth shut about Buran.
The O-ring and the choice nobody is supposed to make
Bradford’s reconnaissance photographs are the episode’s hinge. The Soviets have rolled their Buran shuttle out to the launchpad at a secret military facility on Sakhalin Island — the same facility KAL 007 was flying over when a Su-15 vaporized it. Margo, looking at the schematic, recognizes it instantly. “It’s like I’m looking at plans for our shuttle.” The KGB stole the US orbiter design down to the payload bay, including the solid rocket boosters as they existed two years ago. Margo is the one who caught the O-ring flaw on Challenger. Sakhalin gets a whole lot colder than Florida. If the Soviets copied the boosters to that extent, the launch is going to kill dozens of civilians.
Bradford’s no is the political spine of the hour. Buran can be armed. Buran can drop munitions on any point on Earth without warning. The risk of warning the Soviets that we are reading their shuttle program is more than he is willing to spend on civilian engineers in Sakhalin. “If they decide to use Buran as a weapon at some point in the future, that’s their choice.” The choice he is making is to let Soviet scientists die so the US does not have to admit it has the photographs.
The payoff is fifteen minutes later, in the cleanest piece of subterfuge the show has staged. Margo, walking Sergei out of the building before he is repatriated, brings up “the docking module specs” and asks him to look them over fresh-eyed. By the way, she says, about a year ago we found a defective component in our shuttle. A flaw with the O-ring seals in the boosters. The ring hardens in cold weather and fails to seal the joints. Temperatures at Merritt Island rarely drop below forty, so you can understand how we initially missed it. Sergei’s eyes do the entire scene. “Yes. I can understand this.” The episode does not score it. It does not cut to a Soviet engineer pulling boosters off a rail in Sakhalin. It lets Schmidt and the Russian actor sit there with the felony she has just committed, and trusts the audience to do the math. Margo just gave the KGB a tip that will save Soviet lives and that, the moment it is traced, will end hers.
Karen sells the bar and crosses a line in the same week
The Karen plot is the episode’s slow burn. Shantel VanSanten’s Karen Baldwin has spent the season running the Outpost like a museum to a dead son and a marriage she has already left in her head. Sam Cleveland’s pitch to franchise the place lands on the right week. “Truth is, the place isn’t mine. It never really was.” She sells it to him for $390,000 on a Texas handshake. VanSanten plays the handshake like a woman exhaling for the first time since 1974.
What she does with Danny that night is the part the season has been pretending was not happening. Danny — high-school senior, son of Tracy and Gordo, employee at her bar — drops a Billy Swan cover of “Don’t Be Cruel” on the jukebox and pulls her up to dance. The scene is staged with a slow zoom and a held two-shot that the show knows the audience will read as a held two-shot. Casey W. Johnson plays Danny like a kid who has been rehearsing this moment in his head since the first scene of the season. VanSanten plays Karen as a woman who knows exactly what is happening and lets the song finish anyway. Then Ed comes in. The cut that follows — Karen straddling Ed in a kitchen chair as the same Billy Swan track resumes on the soundtrack — is the most loaded edit the show has made all year. The reconciliation is real. So is the substitution. Karen is sleeping with her husband on the rebound from a moment with a teenager she should not have stood that close to, and the episode lets the ambiguity sit.
What this episode argues
“Don’t Be Cruel” makes a case about delegated violence. Reagan signs off on arming Pathfinder. Bradford pushes the Pentagon’s hand into NASA’s pocket. Ellen — coached by Nate Corddry’s Larry into “start acting like” the administrator — submits the recommendation to retake lunar claim site 357 Bravo at 0800 on a daylight pass, eighteen hours earlier than the cover-of-night plan, with a Marine fireteam whose training is not finished and a junior LSAM pilot in Charles. Margo objects. Ellen, in the cleanest character pivot the season has given her, says the recommendation was hers. Sarah Jones’s Tracy ends up flying the LSAM herself, dropping the Marines into a canyon to humming bars of “Ride of the Valkyries,” because everyone above her made a political choice and she is the one with the stick.
The other argument is about the price of access. Margo pays for her stopwatch performance at the door with a borscht ritual, then pays for the borscht with a treason. Ellen pays for her promotion with a Pathfinder armament she will spend the rest of the season living with. Karen pays for the freedom of selling the Outpost by walking back into her marriage on a Billy Swan cover. Each of these women got something this hour she had been working toward, and the show is honest that the price was set by someone else.
Verdict
“Don’t Be Cruel” is the episode the season has been engineering toward. The cold open is one of the most economical pieces of staging the series has done — Paine alive in martini-bar light, then a dial tone, then his name in a Dan Rather list of the dead. Margo’s stopwatch-the-sergeant scene and Margo’s borscht-Sergei scene are bookended by Margo’s O-ring confession, and Schmidt is operating at a level she has not been asked to reach before. Balfour’s Connecticut hospital pivot into the Acting Administrator chair gives Ellen the season’s clearest arc. VanSanten and Casey W. Johnson make the Danny-Karen jukebox dance play with the queasy charge the show wants it to have, and the Ed-Karen kitchen-chair cut after it is the kind of edit a less confident series would not attempt.
The hour’s one weak seam is the Pathfinder-arming briefing, which moves a little fast for the consequence it is loading. Bradford’s announcement reads less like a deliberation and more like a beat the season needed to be in place before the LSAM hits the canyon. But the canyon sequence pays the rest of the hour back in full — Jones’s “dropping like a stone” landing, the Marines humming Wagner, “Tracy Stevens, you are a badass.” The series has been promising it would put rifles on the lunar surface since the pilot. It put them there with the music up and the camera honest about what kind of show this has become.
Rating: 9.0/10