For All Mankind S2E8 Review: Two Cosmonauts Reach for a Case on a Ridge
Pathfinder gets armed, Gordo comes clean, and a moon-rock argument detonates into a shooting war over an empty toolbox.
Season two has spent seven hours arguing that the alt-history Cold War can still be steered by individual decency, and “And Here’s to You” is the hour where that argument breaks. The Reagan administration arms a science vehicle. Two NASA marines, two cosmonauts, and a misread Russian gesture turn a lunar mining ridge into a kill zone. None of the people who pull the triggers wanted to. Almost none of the people who designed the situation are anywhere near it. The hour spends fifty minutes showing every other character in the show busy losing something, then freezes on Helena Webster crouched over an unarmed enemy as the closing shot.
Pathfinder becomes a warship while everyone pretends it isn’t
The episode opens on the Reagan administration congratulating itself. Ellen Wilson delivers a clean status report on the lunar mining site, the president thanks NASA on the open line, and General Bradford quietly pushes the next domino. Apollo-Soyuz proceeds. Ellen is offered the permanent NASA administrator job, and Bradford and the unseen old man on speakerphone already speak about her like a campaign asset. The girl who caught the tank. The astronaut the cabinet will listen to. The wedge that opens between Ellen and Pam in the upstairs briefing room is the season’s most painful private scene, because Pam is the only person in the building telling Ellen the truth she would rather not hear. This is everything you always wanted.
The same meeting that congratulates Ellen approves arming Pathfinder. Four Phoenix missiles in the cargo bay. Radar-guided, hundred-mile range, proximity fused. The simulator scene that follows is short, surgical, and the closest the show has come to dramatizing the moment a science program becomes a weapons platform. Ed Baldwin calls the targets. Sally Ride locks. Gary fires. Two drones die. The chief praises the room. Sally walks out. Her quiet rebuke, that she signed up for the Pathfinder system but did not sign up for offensive missiles, lands harder than any of Ed’s bravado because the show has spent the season letting her be the rational one.
Gordo finally tells the truth he has been carrying for ten years
Half the episode belongs to Gordo Stevens, and Michael Dorman plays it with the throttle pulled all the way back. The Columbia launch shot, with Ed walking him to the suit-up van as REO Speedwagon plays, is the most generous gift the show has given the character to date. He is back. He is sober. He is sane. The whole point of the season’s first half was that nobody, including Gordo, believed the moon would let him be any of those things again. The episode then drops him into the Jamestown galley to discover his old bunk is now where the food is, the LSAM he flew is a parts donor, and his ex-wife is racking with the marines.
The cigarette scene with Tracy in the lithium hydroxide closet is where the season’s emotional spine finally locks in. Gordo tells her about the lava tube. He tells her he tried to take his helmet off. He tells her that Danielle Poole broke her own arm to keep Houston from grounding him. He tells her that the loneliness he could not name in 1974 was not space and not claustrophobia, it was the marriage already being over. The line that gets it across is delivered into the back of a service closet: he could not handle losing the most important thing in the world to him, which was her, and the rest came apart from there. Tracy’s face during the Sam Cleveland callback, the wild-horse line, is Sarah Jones doing more with a held smile than most actors do with a monologue. The kiss that ends the scene is staged so close to the air-cycle vent it looks like both of them are exhaling something they have been holding for a decade.
Aleida torches her career, then walks into Bill Strausser’s living room
The Aleida plot runs in the opposite direction. Coral Peña spends the first half of the hour being right and obnoxious about it. The docking-module design is bad. The three teams should be collaborating. Bill Strausser’s standard procedure is older than she is. She calls him Peanut. He quits. Margo Madison finds out about it the morning after a coin-flip negotiation with Sergei Nikulov that the script lets be small and human and slightly tipsy on the docking-symbolism nonsense from Moscow. Margo’s red blouse, recommended by Aleida, gets exactly the smile from Sergei the audience and Aleida both predicted. Wrenn Schmidt plays the moment with a tiny tell that is the closest Margo has come to having a life outside MOCR.
What follows is the harshest one-on-one Margo has had with a subordinate this season. The “going gets rough and Aleida gets going” line is meant to wound and does. Aleida shows up at Bill’s house anyway. The episode then does the thing it has been earning for two seasons. Bill tells her the story behind the pants. Gemini 8. Armstrong and Scott tumbling over China, signal lost for an hour, splashdown over Okinawa, the cheer in the room, Frank Bedlow’s question. Twenty years and a Space: 1999 commlock and Buzz Aldrin’s glove and the same goddamn story.
Aleida answers with hers. Bryant Street. Rock salt and bird shot. The emergency room she ran from because she was undocumented. The scars she will not show in tank tops or bathing suits. The script trusts the symmetry without ever underlining it. Two people, two private humiliations, both kept because confession would cost more than carrying. The episode lets them sit in front of Jeopardy for the last beat, lets Bill say “fuck you” in the cadence of someone who is going to come back to work, and moves on. It is the cleanest scene of writing the show has put on screen, and it works because Coral Peña and the actor playing Bill Strausser both refuse to play it for tears.
Karen and Danny end exactly the way a forty-something running a bar ends a thing she should not have started
The Outpost subplot has been the season’s slowest fuse, and the episode burns it down efficiently. Karen Baldwin is selling the bar. Danny Stevens is leaving for the academy at week’s end. The kiss from a previous episode was supposed to be a thing two friends did not talk about. Danny cannot stop talking about it. Shantel VanSanten plays the back-room scene with a hand on Danny’s chest that is half stop sign and half permission slip, and the show lets the second one win. The morning after, when Danny says he loves her, Karen does the thing the script has been begging Karen to do all season. She calls it. We had a great time. It is not love. About-face. That is an order. Don’t turn back.
Karen Baldwin has been the wife of the program, the mother of the dead son, the bar owner of the bench astronaut Lonnie tends, the cohost to Tracy’s makeover, and the woman drinking alone in her kitchen for the better part of two seasons. The Outpost is the only thing she ever built by herself, and she is selling it. The Danny mistake is the kind of thing a person does when they realize the life they assembled cannot survive its own architecture. The episode lets Karen know that, which is more than the previous seven have.
The ridge
The final sequence is the cleanest piece of action filmmaking the series has done. Tracy ferries a relief crew in LSAM 2 with Gordo in the right seat. The marines, Vance Paulson and Helena Webster and Lopez, move to a ridge above grid 357 Bravo because Jason saw a flash at ten o’clock. Two cosmonauts are working a piece of equipment. Houston tells the marines to switch to the Russian comms frequency and order the cosmonauts to vacate. Helena does. The cosmonauts move. The case opens. Lopez shouts. Vance fires. One dead, one screaming through a hole in his suit while Vance tries to patch him. Bradford asks for the White House. Helena walks the case down and finds it empty.
The show has spent the season setting up the lunar mining-site escalation as a chess problem managed by adults. Bradford. Ellen. Margo. The president. The chess problem ends because three nervous marines, two cosmonauts reaching for a sample kit, and a radio order nobody trusted met at the same moment with live rounds. Webster’s “there are no weapons” is the indictment.
What this episode argues
“And Here’s to You” argues that the people who design Cold Wars and the people who shoot them are not the same people, and that the show’s real subject was always the second category. Bradford and the president and the cabinet sign off on missiles in Pathfinder’s cargo bay and Phoenix exercises in low Earth orbit, and the violence those decisions cause happens four hundred yards from a parked rover with a hopper somewhere over the horizon. The episode runs this thesis on three scales at once. Macro, Pathfinder gets armed. Mid, Ellen is told her marriage to Pam is incompatible with the career the president wants her to have. Micro, Bill Strausser cannot get past a single sentence somebody said in 1966.
The Aleida-Bill scene and the Gordo-Tracy scene are doing the same emotional work in opposite registers. Both pairs are talking about a shame they thought they had to carry alone. Both confessions cost the confessor something they were afraid to spend. Both end with the other person not running. The show is making the case that the only thing the Cold War has not contaminated yet is private honesty, and the closing ridge sequence is the show admitting that even that may not survive the next episode.
Verdict
“And Here’s to You” is the strongest hour of season two and the strongest hour the show has aired to date. The Gordo confession sequence pays off two seasons of patience with a character who could have been written off four times. The Aleida-Bill scene is the show’s best argument that its B-plots are not B-plots. The Karen-Danny breakup is the cleanest moment Shantel VanSanten has had on the series. Sally Ride’s quiet veto of an armed Pathfinder is a small scene the next two episodes will spend a lot of time paying off. The ridge sequence is staged with a discipline the show usually reserves for premieres and finales.
The episode solves nothing. The cosmonauts were unarmed. The marines fired anyway. Houston already told the White House. Ellen has not told the president no. Karen has not told Ed she sold the bar. Molly Cobb is going blind and has not told NASA. Pathfinder is loaded. Gordo and Tracy are in a closet on the moon. Ronald D. Moore’s writers’ room has stacked the last two hours with so much detonation potential the only question left is which fuse burns shortest. The hour is confident enough not to answer.
Rating: 9.3/10