The drama on Mars and Titan has only just begun on For All Mankind. Warning: There are spoilers ahead for For All Mankind Season 5 Episode 8, “Brave New World.”
After successfully landing on Titan, Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) and her team now have to get to the real work of trying to find life on the Saturn moon. But first, she delivers a speech that inspires the masses to keep up the good fight.
“There was a plaque that NASA had intended to place on the moon with Apollo 11. My father kept it with him until the day he died. It read, ‘We came in peace for all mankind.’ I carry these words with me today as we touch the surface of another moon — one that we reached because of people like my father, people like the brilliant engineers and scientists on Mars, who rebuilt and rehabilitated our ship, and people like the scientists who lost their lives aboard Kosmos 1. We carry their memory with us as we take these steps toward the search for life in our universe,” she says.
This sends every patron at Helios Bar — including her own son — into a clapping frenzy. It does wonders to inspire the wavering rebels — even former MPK Celia Boyd (Mireille Enos) is ready to wear the badge of “Marsee” with honor.
“Mars did that!” Mireille Enos says of Celia’s decision to fully assimilate in that moment. “We thought of the idea, we rigged the ship. It’s manned by Mars astronauts. It’s their mission, and we accomplished it. It gives a sense of identity to this little fledgling colony… They’ve needed a win for a while, and this is their win.”
Even Aleida (Coral Peña) decides to stick around to see it through, too, though she’s not ready to take anyone’s side.
“I don’t think she’s interested in the politics, simple as that,” Coral Peña says of Aleida’s perspective on the feuding. “There’s also part of her that understands the importance of having a neutral voice in the room… This season, I described her as grounding, and I think that’s what she is. She’s steady.”
Miles (Toby Kebbell) is advised by Irina (Svetlana Efremova) and Lenya (Costa Ronin) that if the SDM can hold out just long enough for the Russian president to resign, they’ll win this trade war. However, Aleida thinks he’s being naive to believe any of it. Worse, radar detects the incoming of M6 ships to steal the asteroid from under their noses, so they’ll need to come up with a plan to stop them.…
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Meanwhile, Lily (Ruby Cruz), still reeling from the death of her friend, is shocked when Alex (Sean Kaufman) suggests she join those transporting back to Earth and instead decides to take action that might help the cause — with her camera, she can record the truth about the Marsees and undercut the Earthlings’ messaging that they’re all just radical terrorists.
“I think a lot of her journey is finding her voice and the different ways that you can show up for what you believe in,” Ruby Cruz says of Lily’s newfound sense of determination. “I think she’s discovering new ways that she can really show up, and things really crescendo.” She also warns, “I can’t wait to hear what people think, because it gets kind of crazy.”
On board the M6 ship, AJ (Ines Asserson) and Haskell (Barnett Carnahan) are growing closer than ever as she empathizes with his grief over the same loss.
“He’s kind of a fish out of water as well,” Ines Asserson estimates of their connection. “I’m also alone. He’s doing something scary for the first time, and I think he can serve as a sort of inspiration to her.”
They’re both assigned to the reconnaissance team led by Ruiz (Keith Miller), and AJ has second thoughts about her true readiness to join the effort. She’s shown running at full speed on a treadmill — literalizing her figurative desire to get away — before asking Ruiz for a replacement.
“I think there’s this feeling of claustrophobia,” Asserson said of her character’s mindset in that moment. “It’s a constant battle. ‘Do you want to escape your past? Do you want to embrace it? What is it?’ It’s not a said-and-done thing, unfortunately… I think it’s quite a traumatic experience going to Mars instead of going to the moon [as she expected]. There’s kind of these two tensions of, ‘OK, that’s where our family was great on the moon, and Mars was where… everything went down.”
Ruiz knows of her family history, though, and shares his own experience with generational trauma — his father was an abusive alcoholic — and encourages her to stay the course.
“It was an important reminder that she’s not the only one going through things,” Asserson says of this vital conversation. “It’s easy to maybe think that you’re completely alone in your experience, but we all come from somewhere. To know that people that she’s working with also carry a weight on their shoulders, if you know it or not, it helps her feel more confident that this is something she can live with.”
It doesn’t hurt, of course, that he has a cutesy nickname for her in Tobasco, which Asserson loves: “I love that Avery has that fire in her. It speaks to her sense to speak up with just, ‘OK, hey, I have these impulses. Let me show you how I feel.’ … Her being outwards and having those moments of a bit of aggression, I do think it’s her first step in accepting her emotions a little bit.”
Unfortunately, the newly-palled-up AJ and Ruiz both soon face the unthinkable. The Marsees have devised a plan to pilot a hopper full of fertilizer-based explosives to the docking platform to blow it up … despite some fierce resistance from Aleida.
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“She was just thinking about safety,” Peña justifies. “That’s really our driving force throughout all of this… She’s trained as an engineer from a young age to say, ‘The least amount of fatalities is your goal. That’s your mission.’ So even with something like this, which is a political situation, she’s like, ‘I just want the version of this that has the least amount of fatalities. I don’t care to sacrifice lives for a greater mission. That’s not the goal.'”
Ultimately, Aleida is outvoted, and after a very touch-and-go liftoff through a storm, Celia and Lenya manage to complete their journey. It’s not until AJ and Ruiz are right on top of it that they realize they have 30 seconds to escape, and Celia, Lenya, and everyone else involved are horrified to realize the soldiers are onsite for the bombing. They have no way of stopping the carnage to come. Indeed, though AJ and Ruiz attempt to flee the site, he’s killed when a piece of debris from the blast penetrates his helmet.
For Enos, the gesture of Celia breaking her radio silence to try to warn the soldiers to escape the bomb was revelatory about the character. “I think in these tense, stressful situations, you make a plan, and you move forward, but they tried their best effort making sure that nobody was going to be hurt. That was very important to her, I think, from the moment that the MPKs were revealed [to be] dirty, for lack of a better word, that they were being deceitful, and they turn their weapons on the citizens. And then she finds herself, which happens so often, in these kind of war situations where there are casualties, and that’s unacceptable to her that she would have been the cause of that, and so when she tries to warn them, I think it’s really like a beautiful example of her moral compass, that she’s more Interested in humanity than nationalism,” the actress said.
Aleida, watching from Moxie’s control room, is “horrified,” Peña says. “The idea that she might have even had a small part in someone’s death is blood forever on her hands.”
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Where it goes from here, Enos warns, is intense. “It doesn’t get less tense before the end of the season. The Mars citizens definitely are required to fight to the bitter end to get what’s theirs.”
Over on Titan, things are getting quite hairy as well. Walt (Christopher Denham), still obsessing over what mistake he must’ve made to land them there, very nearly causes Kelly to confess her maneuver, but she’s stopped from spilling when he names her interim commander of the crew in his stead.
“That scene was such a tough one,” Cynthy Wu says of this exchange. “Kelly and Walt, the whole season, we were just butting heads and antagonizing each other. That moment was really just a human moment where he is so fraught, and his having obsessed with this breakdown, and obviously she’s dealing with guilt and wanting to come clean so tha the could release the feeling like he did something wrong. I think what holds her back from that moment is that he relinquishes control … In that moment, she has to move forward, for better or for worse. She has to decide, ‘OK, we’re going to drop all this nonsense, and this is our chance to go and complete what we set out for.'”
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With their seeker out of reach, Kelly devises a plan to reduce the number of travelers on the rover to reach the site to search for signs of life. She orders Walt to stop crunching numbers and join her and Elena (Michaela Conlin) on the disembarkation. What could possibly go wrong with that decision?
For All Mankind, Fridays, Apple TV
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