MARSHALL PLAN
How Danielle wins the race to Mars in ‘For All Mankind’
SEASON 3 of “For All Mankind” has been all about the race to Mars. In the alternate timeline of the Apple TV+ series, NASA finds itself in a tense three-way battle with the USSR and private company Helios to be the first to land on the red planet. In this week’s episode, “Seven Minutes of Terror,” we finally find out which country — and more importantly, which “For All Mankind” character— lands on Mars first.
The win all comes down to perfect timing — and it goes to Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall).
At the start of Season 3, we saw that the higher-ups at NASA — Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) and Molly Cobb (Sonja Walger) — had fiercely different ideas of who should command its first mission to Mars. Margo wanted it to be Danielle, on account of her calm head and scientific expertise. Molly, on the other hand, thought it should be the hot-headed, but experienced test pilot Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman).
The ultimate decision led to a break within the organization, with Molly being fired for giving Ed the seat without oversight and Ed joining Helios’ rival launch. But in the end, Dani not only got the command; she got to step foot on Mars first (with her Soviet freeloader).
Series co-executive producer Ronald D. Moore said they knew Dani would get the honor of stepping on Mars first “very early” in the writing process.
“We knew the season was about Mars and getting to Mars, so much like the first episode, you start talking about, ‘Well…who’s gonna command that mission?’” Moore said. “It felt like Ed and Dani, within the realm of the show [and] they were certainly the two leading candidates. And we start to say, ‘Well, let’s have NASA debate that as well.’
“It felt like it was right that it should be Dani, just in the long and the short of it as we went through the various options, that felt like the right choice for the show to make,” he said.
Marshall said that she felt that Danielle’s journey on “For All Mankind” has been “really sympatico” with her own.
“I came into the show [as] such a fledgling in many ways,” she said. “I’ve never been on a show that ran for this long [and], I’ve never done something with such complex themes. I feel like me and Dani grew up together in so
many ways. We’re watching her find a way to create a space for herself and I felt like I was doing the same thing in my experience on the show.
“So that image of Danielle walking into the classroom and peeping over to Tracy (Sarah Jones) [in Season 1] and being like, ‘Hi, nice to meet you!’ to now being this commander, this head chick in charge, the one who is responsible for a lot of what we’re doing on this Mars mission … I think those seeds were in Danielle the entire time.”
Because NASA’s Sojourner lands first on Mars, you would think that Dani would automatically get the honor of being the first to step foot on the planet. However, her USSR companions have other plans and she and Captain Grigory Kuznetsov (Lev Gorn) get into a hilariously petty fight to step on Mars first -which looks like a triumph of diplomacy to people far away on Earth.
Marshall said she’s still a little worked up about the moment -- and proclaimed that Dani is the first to step foot on Mars. “What do you mean ‘one of ’?,” she said. “She’s the first! She’s the first!”
Marshall also argued that Danielle’s competitive streak isn’t anything new, but rather a part of the character that’s always been there.
“Danielle is tough. I think that throughout the seasons, we see a very diplomatic version of her,” she said, recalling the way Dani took her sister-in-law’s criticisms of her “on the chin” in Season 2. “We see a very constant, very stoic version of Danielle.”
But you also remember that this is the same woman who literally said at the end of Season 2, ‘Yyou guys better send up those coordinates for us to dock unless you want us to crash into each other on national television,’” she said. “She is absolutely able to take charge and be competitive and be a leader in that way.”
Krys Marshall and Joel Kinnaman in Season 3 of “For All Mankind” on Apple TV+.