FOR ALL MANKIND
“What if?” space race drama For All Mankind fast-forwards to 1983 for season two
Ron Moore’s alt.history space race rockets into season two.
IN SEASON ONE OF FOR ALL Mankind, the Apple TV+ show presented an alternate history world where the Soviet Union was the first nation to land men on the Moon. That single event would set off a chain reaction of technological, geopolitical and social sea changes that executive producers Ronald D Moore and Maril Davis have been exploring. While the first season focused on late–’60s America, and NASA playing catch-up on every level (including having to match the Soviets’ diverse, female-inclusive space programme), the new season moves the narrative forward to 1983.
“We said season two is essentially going to be the Cold War, with some kind of Cuban Missile Crisis in space which is the defining element of the season,” Moore tells Red Alert.
“We decided Reagan would be in a second term, instead of his first term, and that would be one of the historical changes that we made. And it felt like the Reagan administration would confront the Soviet Union in all aspects: on Earth, in space and on the Moon.”
This means that a lot more of the narrative will now be Moon-based, with the Americans’ Jamestown base habitat expanding to keep an equal footprint with its close neighbour, the Soviet moonbase Zvezda. “The mining operations are in full force,” Moore explains, “And one of the key questions going into the season will be, ‘What about the introduction of weapons on the Moon?’ What are the circumstances under which that would happen? How would that happen? And how would it escalate?”
One of the hallmarks of the series remains that while the entire show is speculative science fiction, there’s a lot of reality at the core of everything presented. Moore says they looked at NASA’S original plans for lunar bases and then looked at their current plans, finding a middle ground for this show’s reality.
“Dan Bishop, our production designer, did a lot of his own research about the things that are necessary to have on a moonbase, along with Garrett Reisman, our technical consultant who was a former astronaut. We wanted to say that the technology is still fairly recognisable,
just more advanced. It’s all building off Apollo space shuttle-era technology. And some of it’s moving faster. The technology that you’re going to see on the moonbase is starting to touch into what we would recognise as stuff that was available in the ’90s. Everything’s moving at a faster clip, because there’s a bigger investment in research and development on the Moon.”
The drama inherent in a decade’s worth of technological growth is also matched by where the characters are now. Central characters Edward (Joel Kinnaman) and Karen (Shantel Vansanten) lost a child at the end of season one. Moore says they wanted to show that long-range impact on their marriage, and Ed’s career as an astronaut who was mostly absent in his family’s life.
There’s also the impact of female inclusion in the astronaut programme, with those on the vanguard like Tracy Stevens (Sarah Jones) and Ellen Wilson (Jodi Balfour), and the introduction this season of the first African-american astronaut, Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall). The privately funded “Mercury 13” programme, which saw 13 women passing NASA’S physical tests for astronauts in 1960 despite no women being selected for the Mercury programme, was one inspiration.
“Season one was so pivotal in terms of just getting the women into the programme, because we talked so much more about the Mercury 13 programme and how disastrous that was for women – and sad, because you had so many promising amazing candidates who never got a chance to go into space,” Maril Davis says of the evolving storyline. “Season one was about achieving your goal. And season two is more, ‘Okay, you’ve achieved your goal. What next?’”
While Davis says that one of the joys of the series is getting to look at how much more ahead the USA could have been as a nation on some fronts, they also felt it was important that some things probably wouldn’t change.
“Across the board, Tracy, Danielle, everyone has their issues with being a woman in NASA,” Davis says. “We felt like we didn’t want this to be a utopian society. We still want to show, every season, that while we are much farther ahead in the NASA alternate timelines, we didn’t want to be so far ahead that there weren’t still challenges.” TB
For All Mankind season two is streaming on Apple TV+ now (new episodes every Friday).
Our technical consultant Garrett Reisman was an astronaut