OUT OF SPACE
For All Mankind features a frantic moon race, while Apollo: Quarantine touches on familiar topic
For All Mankind Season 2 Apple TV+
Apollo: Quarantine iTunes
What does it take to change history? In TV shows like The Man in the High Castle or the miniseries The Plot Against America, the Second World War plays out differently, which brings about some mighty big changes very quickly.
The alternate-history series For All Mankind starts with a rather smaller ripple in time. In 1969, a month before the planned landing of Apollo 11 on the moon, the Soviets get there first.
Among the immediate consequences is that Senator Ted Kennedy heads up a commission into how the U.S. came second. He cancels a planned trip to Chappaquiddick, so the car accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne and derailed his political career never happens. He is elected president in 1972. His support for the Equal Rights Amendment (and the shaming effect of the Soviets' coed space program) puts U.S. women on the moon in the 1970s.
And that's just season 1. By the opening episode of the second season, streaming on AppleTV+, butterfly effects have spread across the fabric of space-time. It's 1983, and Ronald Reagan is already in his second term as president. Prince Charles is married to Camilla. The Iran hostage crisis ended after just three months. John Lennon survived an assassination attempt. Pope John Paul II didn't. Elvis is just as dead as in our timeline. (We'll leave it you to decide what that means.)
But in many ways all these fascinating what-ifs are so much window dressing to the main thrust of the series, which explores what might have happened if the space race had continued at the frantic pace seen in the 1960s. Series creators and head writers Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi imagine that by 1983 there would have been a U.S. lunar base with room for up to 30 astronauts, and a fleet of beefed-up space shuttles providing transportation. One could almost imagine that, by 2001, the show could segue nicely with the vision of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
For All Mankind handles the science very well — no surprise when you consider that its technical advisers include Star Trek boffins Denise and Michael Okuda, and former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, veteran of three shuttle flights. But the reason the series is already in its second season and green lit for a third comes down to the wide-ranging and well-crafted personal storylines.
Characters include Ed and Karen Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman, Shantel VanSanten), who lost their young son in the first season, and are now dealing with an adopted daughter (Cynthy Wu) who yearns to follow her father's dangerous career path. Ed was formerly a fighter pilot and an astronaut, and is now head of the astronaut office, in charge of handing out crew assignments.
There's also Gordo and Tracy Stevens (Michael Dorman, Sarah Jones), husband-and-wife astronauts who have split up since the first season, and whose fame is operating on very different levels. Tracy makes regular appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, while Gordo seems to be stuck on the Rotary Club circuit, swilling scotch as he repeatedly tells the same story about the time he was stuck on the moon. What's worse is that the world is unaware that he basically suffered a nervous breakdown there. The cast is too sprawling to list everyone — it's a wonder to watch how the show manages to divvy up time for its various characters — but also of import going into season 2 are Ellen and Larry Wilson (Jodi Balfour, Nate Corddry), whose marriage is hiding the fact that both are gay. Then there's Molly
Cobb (Sonya Walger), based on real-life aviator and almost-astronaut Jerrie Cobb, who does something equal parts heroic and stupid in the season opener.
Finally, we are keeping up with Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt), NASA's civilian manager, constantly butting heads with new character Nelson Bradford (John Marshall Jones), a military officer. The militarization of space, long a simmering course of tension in the real world, comes to the fore in For All Mankind after the Soviets remove U.S. mining equipment from the moon, prompting calls for an armed response.
AppleTV+ is releasing episodes of For All Mankind weekly, though if you haven't seen the first season, there are 10 episodes you can binge right away.
And anyone looking for an extra dose of lunar drama can also tune in to Apollo: Quarantine, a 23-minute documentary short from Todd Douglas Miller, director of the fantastic 2019 doc Apollo 11. Essentially a coda to that film, Apollo: Quarantine tells the story of the little-known quarantine period required for the crews of the first three lunar landing missions. The thinking was that if any harmful “moon germs” had come back with the astronauts, this would protect life on Earth. In the horror-movie version of this story, the lunar virus would have escaped into the atmosphere when the capsule door was briefly popped open to toss in biological isolation garments (or BIGs) for Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to wear while they were transferred to the mobile quarantine facility (essentially a modified Airstream trailer), en route to the lunar receiving laboratory in Houston.
In fact, no lunar life existed, and the quarantine procedures were stopped after Apollo 14. But for the Apollo 11 crew, after a day on the moon and a further seven in space, they had to wait out 17 more in isolation alongside a handful of scientists and kitchen staff who had agreed to take the risk and join them.
The film features a variety of “behind-the-scenes” footage, including the unpacking and careful handling of exposed film and precious moon rocks. And we witness Armstrong 's 39th birthday, celebrated in quarantine. He approaches the job of blowing out the cake's candles with the eye of an engineer and the lung capacity of a top-tier astronaut. Armstrong, never one for speeches — honestly, can you recall anything he said in life beyond a couple of phrases from the lunar surface? — had this to say on getting out of quarantine: “I can't say that I would choose to spend a couple of weeks like that, but I'm very glad that we got the opportunity to complete the mission.” I'm sure all of us, in whatever form of quarantine we've had to endure of late, would agree.