For All Mankind S4E1 Review: An Asteroid Catches Fire and Buries a Hero
The premiere jumps eight years into a comfortable alt-2003 and then strands its founders in the wreckage of a mining mission that was supposed to launch the future.
For All Mankind treats the time jump as a contract. Each premiere skips a decade and trusts the long arc to absorb the shock. The fourth season picks up around 2003, after Al Gore’s term, after the M-7 alliance has been signed, after Helios has lost its antitrust suit and the Concorde’s successor has gone supersonic to low orbit. Happy Valley has matured into a working base, and the asteroid-mining mission XF Kronos is supposed to be the ribbon-cutting on the 21st century. The show spends twenty minutes selling that promise and the rest of the hour breaking it. By the time Joel Kinnaman’s Ed Baldwin cuts the tether loose, the season’s thesis is on the table: progress arrives through bodies, and the people who built this place are not going to enjoy it.
A montage trades the Cold War for a quiet new occupation
The opening sequence is one of the show’s densest. News clips compress most of the second Wilson term and the Gore years into a few minutes. Helios’s plasma-propulsion tech ends the launch-window bottleneck. The Marriage Inclusion Act passes under President Wilson. Reality television rises with The Osbournes and Moon Miners. Stanley Kubrick dies. The Y2K bug nudges the International Space Port. Riyadh falls into chaos as insurgents seize government buildings. Daniel Stern’s Eli Hobson — introduced through a glimpse of his Chrysler-savior memoir — has been brought in by Gore to run NASA after slashing its budget by twenty percent. Gore promises the Cold War is over. The Soviets are friends now. The M-7 nations have pooled their interests in Mars.
The clip-show is doing two things at once. It is selling the alt-history utopia the show flirted with at the end of season three, and it is foreshadowing how thin that utopia is. The “Marked One” line from the Soviet woman at the kiosk — her contempt for Gorbachev, her grumbling about new taxes — is the first crack. The Riyadh footage is the second. The show wants the audience to feel both at once: a Soviet cosmonaut and an American just shook hands on a ship in deep space, and the world that produced that handshake is coming apart at the foundations.
The Kronos mission stages the season as a workplace
The hour’s centerpiece is the rendezvous with asteroid XF Kronos. Commander Peters runs Ranger-1 from inside, Edi Gathegi’s Dev Ayesa is absent from the room but his Helios suit is on Grigory Kuznetsov’s back, and Aleida Rosales pulls thrust telemetry in Houston while her son sits beside her on his take-your-kid-to-work day. The scene is meticulous about the labor. Anchor pins fire into the asteroid’s surface. Cable harnesses get tightened by EVA teams who joke about Kuz preening for the cameras and gripe that they will not see their bonus if the ion engines do not fire clean. Ed Baldwin sits XO and ribs his old friend over the radio about being the second man on the rock again. Kuznetsov laughs about Ed coming in second. For most of the half hour, the show makes Mars orbit look like the floor of a refinery.
That is the point. The show has been pulling at this thread for two seasons — flag-planters versus pipe-layers — and the Kronos mission is the most concentrated version yet. Bonuses are mentioned three times. A throwaway exchange between two EVA techs on the truss confirms the crew is here because the money is here. When the cable warnings begin and the asteroid wobbles, the catastrophe lands not because the mission was reckless but because it was already a job, and the people doing it had every incentive to push through a bad reading rather than abort. Parker breaks Peters’s stand-down order for his bonus. Kuznetsov breaks it out of pride, or duty. The truss collapses around Kuz’s leg, opens his suit, and the alliance loses its symbol on live television.
Earth’s living rooms catch up before the news does
The episode runs three Earth-side spines in parallel that pay off the moment Kronos goes wrong. Toby Kebbell’s Miles Dale, a former offshore-rig hand whose marriage to Mandy has cracked under the post-rig downturn, sits across from a Helios recruiter named Tom Gamon who tells him the moon slot is two years out but he could be on a Mars rotation by summer. Miles is mid-interview when the news breaks. Mandy is at home watching cartoons with their daughter Sarah, and the broadcast cuts in with footage of the Ranger control room. Aleida Rosales walks out of mission control mid-shift, drives home, and freezes at the dinner table while her family makes pancakes around her. Krys Marshall’s Danielle Poole, retired from NASA, eats birthday cake with her goddaughter Avery and Ed’s surviving family. The same news bulletin reaches all of them within seconds of each other, and the show lets the editing do the work. The colony’s grief is the country’s grief is the family kitchen’s grief.
The Miles sequence is the cleanest new-character introduction the show has staged in a long time. He is offered the moon and pivots to Mars in the same conversation. Mandy clings to him on the porch and asks him not to go. He promises he will not. He almost certainly will. Kebbell plays the desperation with a charm that lands the choice as slow-motion tragedy rather than setup.
Margo and Ed are still running from the same room
The hour’s two quietest scenes are the ones that matter most to long-time viewers. Wrenn Schmidt’s Margo Madison, exiled to Star City as a consultant who is allowed in the building but not in the meetings, calls Director Catiche and gets a polite stonewall. When she walks into the Roscosmos lobby unannounced, an English-speaking aide informs her her appointment is in nine days. Margo’s protest — that she was promised consultations, that she has crisis experience the Soviets cannot replicate — gets a polite, lethal answer. Most of the technology of her day is obsolete. She is being kept on a shelf. The episode closes her arc with an unsettling bench scene: a stranger feeds bullfinches and tells her, by name, that her interests are not served by making waves at Star City. She is a prisoner who does not yet know whose prison she is in.
Ed Baldwin’s arc is the mirror. He records a soft message home to Kelly — “I just need to make sure things have a smooth transition” — and books himself another year on Mars after losing his oldest friend on Kronos. The Olga line cuts hardest. She has heard him promise to come back in ‘98, ‘99, 2001. She is done holding her tongue. Alex hears every word. Ed is staying because he cannot face what waits for him on Earth, and the show has had the patience to make that pattern legible without scolding him for it.
Danielle gets the call she does not want
Hobson’s Houston pitch to Krys Marshall’s Danielle is the episode’s structural close. The Mars commission is grounding asteroid missions. Peters has to go. The Russians are letting NASA pick a replacement because Peters was leaving midterm anyway. Hobson is here to ask the first American to walk on Mars to walk on it again. Danielle’s refusal is firm and precise. She has a private life. She has Avery. She has spent seven years telling herself the thing with Danny was not on her, and she does not sleep any better for it.
What turns her is Kuznetsov. The scene with William Tyler at Astronaut Affairs is small and devastating — a congratulations on Will’s engagement to Rob, a line about “the angels wait” — but the conversation about Mars plants the seed. The hour ends with the plasma drive lit and Trans-Mars injection counting down. Danielle has said yes, off-camera, because Kuz was her rock when Ed could not be, and because Hobson’s pitch about everything having been in vain landed on a wound that was already open. The premiere closes on the burn rather than her decision, and that restraint is the show at full volume.
What this episode argues
The premiere argues that the second decade of alt-history Mars is not going to be a sequel to the first. The frontier rhetoric has been replaced by a vocabulary of bonuses, slots, tours, and missed deadlines. Helios has lost an antitrust suit. NASA has been cut by twenty percent. The M-7 nations have built Happy Valley as a return on investment. Workers from Earth — recruited from shuttered rigs, from former Soviet republics, from Mars itself — are stacked into a labor pipeline the founders’ generation barely sees. The Kronos accident is the first test of whether that pipeline keeps running, and Hobson’s answer to Danielle is yes, if the right American puts a familiar face back at the top.
The other argument is generational, and it is sharper than the show has been before. Margo, Ed, and Danielle are all being asked to choose between a private life that does not satisfy them and a public one that broke them. Margo cannot get a meeting at the agency she helped Soviet-side. Ed is staying on Mars because he cannot face Karen’s absence on Earth. Danielle is being pulled back by Kuznetsov’s death. The kids — Miles’s Sarah, Aleida’s son, Avery — are watching their parents make choices that will keep them at one-light-minute distance for years. The fairy tale Gore sold in his Cold War sunset speech was that the heroes get to come home. The episode is honest that none of them have figured out how.
Verdict
“Glasnost” is For All Mankind doing what only For All Mankind does. The eight-year montage runs long, the new characters are sketched rather than colored in, and Hobson’s recruitment pitch lands a beat too on-the-nose. But the Kronos sequence is the strongest disaster set piece the show has staged since Apollo 25, and it lands because the hour spent thirty minutes treating the asteroid like a workplace before it became a tomb. Kuznetsov’s death works because the show let him be cocky and warm and a little ridiculous in the same scene. Miles’s slow drift toward Mars works because Kebbell plays the desperation as charm. Margo’s bench scene works because the show has finally given her a cage to test. Danielle’s reluctant yes works because the hour earned the silence around it.
A premiere this committed to runway will live or die on what it pays off. The setup is denser than season three’s, and the payoffs feel further away. But the long-arc craft is intact. The colony has stopped pretending it is a frontier. The founders have stopped pretending they have a life waiting anywhere else. The hour ends with a plasma drive lit and Danielle on a flight back to a place she swore she would never see again, and that is the right note to start a season on.
Rating: 8.3/10