For All Mankind Recap: Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars
We are down to the wire! Both in terms of the asteroid heist, which must take place within the next 24 hours, and with regard to this season. The penultimate episode can only be described as putting in the effort but getting a wobbly result. You may recall that in the season premiere, “Glasnost,” the mission to capture the asteroid Kronos failed because the degree of the asteroid’s oscillation was too great, shaking loose its tethers and killing Kuznetsov and Parker. “Brazil”’s excessive plot and action oscillation yield tonal shifts that range from sometimes thrilling to queasiness-inducing. Instead of the good, the bad, and the ugly, the big themes and beats of the episodes are more along the lines of solidly good, good to a point, and very bad, indeed.
Let’s start with the good. Dani Poole’s role in this episode grows increasingly mixed as the story unfolds, but one of the best and most hopeful scenes of this season as a whole is of her recording a vidmail for her stepson Isaiah. A few episodes ago, Dani struggled to put on a happy face for a video to be played at his wedding, but this time, the words came easily and sincerely. She’s sorry to miss the birth of her first grandchild but is so thrilled for Isaiah and his wife to be building their family, and she can’t wait to teach their baby all about the classics: Star Trek and The Bob Newhart Show. I’m going to wish upon a star that they name their baby Bob so Dani can bring “Hi, Bob” to a new generation of potential space explorers.
Equally easy to root for is Kelly’s promising initial research results from her equipment setup expedition, which suggest that Korolev Crater’s lava tubes are far from the only places on Mars holding large methane deposits. There may even be methanogenic bacteria at the planet’s poles. If the SEEKER team can prove this hypothesis, it would be yet another game-changer for life on Mars and a career landmark for Kelly and her team. Noting Dev’s distraction as she presents the preliminary data about a potential Holy Grail of findings, Kelly pivots to asking about his recent buddy-buddiness with her dad. She finds their friendship “surprising, considering your history” and laments that she hasn’t grown closer to Ed since her arrival.
Dev offers some encouragement, urging patience before skipping off to see how things are going with the asteroid capture mission. If you placed a bet that one of the biggest surprises of the season would be seeing Dev “I want it all and I want it all yesterday” Ayesa sincerely recommending patience to another character; congratulations on your prescience. I never saw that one coming, and it’s nice to see once again how well Mars suits Dev. It’s not just the change of scene or even the heist itself that’s drawn out his playful and reflective sides. It also seems as though Mars Dev has a real friend in Ed and that it’s finally occurred to him that we all need relationships with other human beings to create meaningful lives for ourselves. Upgrade!
Ed, too, is starting to remember how much he needs human connection. We saw some glimmerings of it when he read aloud to Alex in the last episode, and Kelly — the person he loves most in the entire, literal universe, and who has always seen him clearly whether or not he wanted to be perceived as he is — does a lovely job of drawing out some crucial emotional truths. He doesn’t answer her questions about any connection that may exist between his new friendship with Dev and the recent disappearance of a bunch of comms equipment, but he acknowledges that he’s been lying to her for years and that he fears dying without having contributed to a lasting legacy on Mars. He couldn’t bear to tell her sooner, for fear of seeming “crazy,” and apologizes for having missed out on so much time with her and Alex. Men really will grumpily hole up on Mars for decades rather than go to therapy.
Meanwhile, another category of events is emerging; good and interesting ones … until they erupt into horrifying violence. One set is the two overlapping sleuthing missions by Dani and Lee’s colleague, Commander Cho. The second set is the entwined aspects of Margo and Sergei’s plotline: Sergei’s contributions to the engineering success of the Goldilocks asteroid capture and mining operation and their hopeful plan to defect to Brazil.
Dani and Cho’s respective sleuthing operations uncover distinct elements of the heist in progress by Ayesa’s Seven, but due to Cho’s total lack of trust in anyone other than himself to learn why a NASA-barcoded doohickey was drawing on the North Koreans’ surveillance feed, the two investigations proceed on parallel tracks. Looking at the situation from both Dani’s and Cho’s perspectives regarding operational security and the urgent need to solve the whodunit (if not the whydunit, which I’d argue is equally important), I both understand and respect their dogged approaches. Dani summarizes her investigation results with Eli in a vidmail: the problem goes much further than the feed-splitter. A detailed inventory of all cargo currently on Mars has revealed an alarming amount of comms equipment unaccounted for, and Dani now thinks the equipment is a means to a far larger end.
Eli, Will, and Irina deduce that whoever the thieves are, they must be using the stolen equipment to attempt to communicate with Ranger. Their minds immediately turn to sabotage. Eli is particularly worked up about it, all but shouting that the thieves must be found and stopped “before they commit acts of violence.” A generous reading of Eli’s response would be that he doesn’t know the purpose of the heist, so it is possible that violence could occur. His commitment to protecting Ranger’s crew is both correct and admirable. These concerns are likely amplified by the political and budgetary constraints he noted in a meeting earlier, to say nothing of the very narrow window they have to identify and foil Ayesa’s Seven. However, once again, with feeling: the explosion at the fuel plant, which is the only recent event by the striking workers that could be described as violent, was a terrible industrial accident caused by the scabs who went there to circumvent the strike. The so-called “anarchists” haven’t actually resorted to violence at all yet.
The lack of violence on the part of Ayesa’s Seven comes to an abrupt halt in the final moments of Commander Cho’s investigation. He’s been keeping an eagle eye on his security feeds and tracks Miles (whose name Dani did catch when he was yelling his suspicion that the HVAC technician might have placed the offending signal splitter) to an elevator where he seems to disappear into thin air. Following the breadcrumbs Miles has left for those with eyes to see, Cho quickly finds the wiring workaround that allows Ayesa’s Seven to access Sublevel 4 and their alternative OppsComm. Lee discovers Cho and knocks him out in the ensuing fistfight, but things do not look good.
Unbeknownst to anyone else, Dani does as ordered, activating the CIA and KGB assets at Happy Valley. The agents are Mike Bishop (who we saw briefly in “Over The Line” looking on in horror as one of his colleagues died in agony from injuries sustained in the fuel plant explosion) and Timur Avilov (who was a bit player in the strike), and they get right to work, agreeing to interview Miles first. It’s worth noting that “interview” is the word they use, not “question” and not “interrogate,” leaving Dani free to imagine that they’re just going to have a chat with Miles. This is naive, but necessary: I doubt Dani would ever authorize Bishop and Timurov to use the tactics if they told her in advance what their “interview” techniques could entail.
Miles’s interview with Bishop and Avilov is a failure. Thinking they just want to scare him and to buy time for the heist-doers, Miles stonewalls. This character is integral to the asteroid heist but has often been kind of dull. He’s coming through when it matters a great deal, though, having been very cool under intense pressure twice now. Everything goes off the rails when he refuses to budge from his established stance of blissful ignorance about the theft of any comms equipment. What would he even do with the stuff? He is but a small-time, humble importer of underwear and mouthwash! His “interviewers” kick things up a notch by pivoting to what they’ll euphemistically describe in their mission report as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Geneva Conventions? We don’t know them!
On Earth, Sergei and Margo have been making eyes at each other, both mathematically speaking and not, for the last month, and Aleida is pretty much done with being their go-between. She reluctantly but inevitably agrees to help them one more time, inviting Margo over for an innocent-looking family dinner, where Sergei happens to turn up. I have concerns about his operational security, too, his arrival hours in advance and car parked several blocks away notwithstanding. All the math-related skulduggery of the last few weeks is worth it, though — Sergei’s recommended adjustments could move up the mining timeline by nine months, a godsend to the project as a whole and to Al Gore’s re-election chances in particular.
Aside from the feeling of creeping dread that overhangs this entire plotline, their meal and following conversation could not be more lovely. Victor and the kids clearly love Margo and are glad to see her again; Margo, Sergei, and Aleida continue to work together beautifully, and Sergei might just have a plan for the next phase of his and Margo’s lives. Margo isn’t immediately sold on his suggestion of defecting to Brazil, where a friend who’s high up in their space agency would jump at the chance to welcome them both. They’d have protection from their former homelands and could be instrumental in elevating Brazil’s space exploration program. She’s not set against the idea, either, as we see her perusing some information about Brazil’s space agency on her laptop the following night.
This scene starts out cute — aw, Margo and Sergei are both eating burgers in their respective hotel rooms! She’s listening to the Duke Ellington CD he gave her! They have hope for the future! Cruelly, though, Sergei barely gets to enjoy a bite of his Big Mac™ before he’s shot in the head. Any notion of his death being a sad case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time evaporates as the killer puts the gun in Sergei’s hand and leaves the motel room door open so his body will be found as quickly as possible. This is not a murder; it’s an assassination. It’s not a surprise, of course — the writing was on the wall the moment that Sergei said Irina Morozova had been his KGB handler for all those years — but it’s still shocking and still awful.
Houston, We Have Some Bullet Points
• If anyone can specify which three Star Trek series exist in FAM’s timeline, I will be most grateful. My money is on The Original Series, Next Generation, and Deep Space 9.
• Two unrelated circles I cannot square: Sergei’s wife and the telltale splitter barcode. As “Brazil” unfolds, we learn that Sergei has been in Houston for a month. A month. What does his wife now know about his identity and whereabouts? As for the barcode, how did Miles not remove the barcode on the splitter before placing it? Make it make sense!
• Every time someone on this show talks about life on Mars, all I can think about is David Bowie’s song “Life On Mars?” A fun fact about this great and infinitely interpretable song: Bowie wrote it as a parody of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” which Paul Anka wrote as a translation/re-interpretation of the French song “Comme d’habitude.”