For All Mankind S5E3 Review: Ed Baldwin Goes Home Aboard the Ship He Helped Build
A series-defining death scene set inside Sojourner 1, walked into the room by the men Ed could never save.
“Home” is the episode this season has been quietly arranging since the premiere — the one where the show finally lets Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) stop pretending the ankle monitor, the bladder cancer, the dead son, and the Korean War flashbacks are separate problems. They were always the same problem. Across an hour that splits its attention between a Sojourner 1 retrofit on Earth, a sheriff’s office cover-up on Mars, and the surrender of the franchise’s longest-running protagonist, Ronald D. Moore’s alt-history machine arrives at a goodbye earned across five seasons and six decades of fictional time. The hour does not stage Ed’s death as catharsis. It stages it as the only place he was ever going to feel safe.
A Korean War flashback that the show has been hiding all series
The cold open is the most narratively confident thing For All Mankind has done in years. We are inside a battlefield medbay, but the bay keeps shorting out into a green Korean ridge, with a man named Barnhill propping up a wounded young Ed, asking “Hey, Skipper. You ready?” The show holds the trick longer than it has any right to — letting “Patient is coding,” “Heart rate: 165,” and “He could be bleeding internally” sit in the same beat as a Korean soldier closing in on Barnhill and executing him while Ed cannot move. We have known Ed flew jets before becoming an astronaut. We have not known, until this hour, that he watched his friend die at the edge of a treeline and could not get to him.
The flashback returns three times across the episode, each pass adding another bar of guilt. The medbay frame is the trick: we are watching Ed’s mind try to keep Barnhill alive in the only way it knows how, which is to relive the moment as if he could still go back and grab him. By the time the third pass lands in the cold open’s stuck loop — “Hey, Skipper. You ready?” — the show has installed the unspoken thesis. Ed Baldwin has been carrying a Skipper-shaped wound longer than the audience knew there was one. He spent fifty years building a NASA myth on top of a man he could not save in 1952.
Kelly fights for treatment Ed already declined
The Ed-Kelly scenes are the cruelest in the season so far, partly because Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) is right and partly because being right does not help. Dr. Dima tells her the bladder cancer has metastasized to lungs and bones, that Ed knew, that Ed told Dima to keep it quiet, that Ed refused the radiation therapy that would have weakened him. Kelly’s response is to rush forward — Dr. Ash Karlan at NASA Ames, nanoparticles, new research, “incredible success.” Ed cuts her off with a line that lands harder than any monologue: “This is why I didn’t tell you.”
Wu plays Kelly as a daughter trying to save her father by becoming his project manager, and the show is honest about what that costs. Kelly steps back from the Titan mission. Calls Dev. Tells him to give the launch to Walt. Ed responds by ordering her to take it back, refusing treatment, and bolting from medbay in a hospital gown the moment her back is turned. The fight is not about whether Ed is dying. It is about whether Kelly is allowed to be the one who decides what dying looks like, and Ed will not give her that.
Alex gets the gentlest scene of the hour, and Dev Ayesa runs it. Ed’s grandson is in a hab trying to break a bolt loose from a power controller mount, ostensibly fixing a tractor, actually hiding from a death sentence. Dev tells him his own father died at fifty-eight, that he has been thinking about it lately, that the question is not how to fix the time you have left but what to do with it. “Sometimes you have to take things as they are, not as you want them to be.” It is the verdict the episode hands Kelly twenty minutes before she is ready to accept it. Alex obeys it; she does not. Watching her not obey it is the dramatic engine of the back half.
Aleida’s launch, Margo’s permission, and an old ship called Sojourner
The Earth track moves at the speed of an emergency. Kuragin is launching for Titan in six weeks. Aleida Rosales’s Helios mission is sidelined. Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) does the math out loud in a kitchen scene that captures everything the show is still good at — the casual brutality of orbital mechanics next to a plate of cold pasta. There is no time to build a new ship. So they will not. They will pull Sojourner 1 — the ship Aleida helped design, the ship that has been “gathering dust for 20 years” — and they will retrofit her with a mark 9 fusion reactor, plasma engines, and a heat shield rated for four times the aerobraking g-load.
Margo’s pitch lands because she is asking Aleida to do exactly what she once did: leave a family, take a ship, go. The episode does not pretend Aleida wants to. She says no four different ways before saying yes. She tells Margo about Graciana’s tough place. She mentions Javi in New York. She talks about the board, the budget fights, the search-for-life programs. The thing that finally moves her is Margo saying, “I didn’t want to delegate to you at first. But it was one of the best things that I ever did.” It is the closest Margo has come to apologizing for what she did to Aleida’s career in real time, and Schmidt plays it without flinching.
The scene that follows — Aleida telling Margo she is taking the next transport, on Friday — is the most affecting writing in the hour outside the death scene. Aleida says what they have both been avoiding: “You should be the one going up there.” Margo, parolee-tagged to Earth for the rest of her life, answers without self-pity. “What happened happened and I’m glad it did. I wouldn’t have it any other way.” It is a goodbye between mentor and protégé that the show has been working toward since Aleida found out Margo was alive. Aleida cries. Margo does not. Margo’s restraint is the gift.
The Mars peacekeeper plot keeps grinding
The episode’s weakest material is its Mars procedural, and that is partly by design. Celia Boyd brings Sheriff Palmer her case that Lee Jung-Gil did not kill Yoon Tae-Min, that Kuragin is hiding something in unrecorded cargo containers, that the breakout was someone else’s tell. Palmer’s response is to read her file out loud and humiliate her — “your hunches and your due diligence,” “sounds pretty reckless to me.” Palmer is so transparently captured by the governor’s wife that the scene plays as setup, not confrontation.
The Lily Dale subplot does more honest work in less time. Miles Dale (Toby Kebbell) finds his eighteen-year-old daughter arrested for spray-painting “Free Mars” on Polivanov’s hab. To get her out he walks into the sheriff’s office and accepts a deal we do not see: “if I was to help you, I’d need you to help me.” On the walk home, Lily refuses to be grateful. She names her father’s complacency, his coziness with Palmer, his old reputation from ‘03. She compares herself to Robespierre. Miles points out Robespierre was decapitated. Then she says the line that buries him: “You sound just like Grandpa.” Watching Kebbell process that — denial, then a half-step, then the small surrender of “you’re walking like him” — is the kind of beat For All Mankind is still uniquely good at. A father becomes his father in real time, with no warning.
Mahmoud Hesar’s near-confession to Celia — he saw Lee and Yoon arguing the night of the murder, he works the Kuragin cargo route, he shuts up only because someone is watching — sets up next week’s procedural beat. Kuragin is not running a construction supply line. Yoon was killed for what he was unloading. The question is whether Celia’s badge survives long enough to prove Lee innocent.
What this episode argues
“Home” argues that Ed Baldwin’s life was never about Mars. It was about the moment in 1952 when he could not get to Barnhill, and every flight he has taken since — Apollo 10, the lunar bases, the first Mars landing, the long Russian exile — has been a man choosing to be the Skipper for someone else’s Barnhill. Lee Jung-Gil, Karen, Shane, Kelly, Alex. The episode is honest that this is not heroism. It is unfinished business. Kelly’s grief is so sharp because she has been trying to be the person who saves Ed from his own war, and the show will not let her win that fight. Ed gets to die the way he wants to. The cost is that everyone who loved him has to live with his refusal of help as the last thing he gave them.
The Aleida-Margo thread runs the same argument in a different key. Margo will not go to Mars. Margo gives the trip to Aleida. The torch is passed inside the same conversation where both women admit it cannot be passed back. The show keeps pairing the act of going with the act of staying, and it is starting to feel like a thesis statement for the season. Some characters get to leave. Some have to be the ones who watch them go.
Verdict
The death scene itself is staged with a restraint the episode has earned the right to use. Ed pulls his oxygen, walks out to Sojourner — “Hey, old girl” — climbs into the cockpit, and the show finally lets the flashback finish. Barnhill, alive again on the ridge. Then Shane, his dead son, sitting in the seat next to him. “Hey, Shane. You know where Dad’s going?” “Yeah.” Two words and a kid’s smile and Kinnaman lets his breathing go. There is no swell, no monologue, no last reconciliation with Kelly. The hour trusts us to see what Ed has chosen: not the hospital, not the radiation, not the daughter who would have kept him alive for six more months. He chose to die inside the only home he ever finished building. Inside a ship.
It is the boldest creative decision For All Mankind has made since killing Karen, and the episode treats it with the gravity that decision deserves. Kinnaman’s last twenty minutes are extraordinary — funny in the Ilya’s bar scene with Alex’s first shot of vodka and the Elvis on the jukebox, then unguarded in the photo album with Kelly, then completely still in Sojourner. The show does not punish him for going on his own terms. It simply lets him go. That is rarer in prestige television than it should be, and on a series this long-running it lands with the force of a finale even though there are five episodes left.
Rating: 9.2/10