For All Mankind and Star City

I was leery of the show For All Mankind for a long time. The promotional material made it sound more like a political drama than a space adventure. And sure enough, the first time I tried to watch it a few years ago, I largely ran aground on all the domestic soap opera. But the show receives a lot of accolades, which finally led me to try again. I picked up where I’d left off in the first season and powered through, and was pleasantly surprised by season climax.

Season 2 also has its share of domestic drama, but it felt more tolerable. A substantial portion of the drama happens on the moon, which for me at least, always helps. But it’s in the third season where the show really starts to feel like science fiction, as the balance of the story starts shifting to Mars.

The premise is that in 1969 the Soviets actually beat America to the moon, which keeps the space race going. The overall story is an alternate history of the last sixty years that looks a lot like what futurists and science fiction nerds of the 1960s and early 70s thought would happen. The Soviets follow up by putting a woman on the moon, which incites America to open its astronaut corps to women much earlier than in our timeline. And the Soviet Union stays viable far beyond the 1980s.

The result is competing moon bases in the 1970s and 80s, which of course leads to tensions and eventually outright combat on the moon. In the 1990s, there is a race for Mars, which is complicated by a private space company entering the race. In the 2000s, an asteroid rich in iridium is discovered which adds an economic incentive for the whole space infrastructure, all of which eventually culminates in that now standard sci-fi trope, a movement for an independent Mars.

The story is told through a fairly large cast of characters, which initially focuses on astronauts, flight engineers, and their families, but then widens out as the series progresses. Many characters get killed and others age out.

Star City is a spinoff series. It’s in the same universe, but now told from the Soviet perspective. We see young versions of a couple of the Russian characters that eventually show up in For All Mankind. Like the original show, there’s a lot of soap opera drama, but within the context of a police state, making the stakes life and death, and giving the show a spy thriller feel. In this alternate timeline, Brezhnev era Russia still feels a lot like the Stalinist period.

Irina is a young KGB employee who spends most of her time listening to and making notes on clandestine audio recordings of cosmonauts and their families. Irina’s superior, Raskova, looks and acts like Colonel Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love. The Soviet Chief Designer, who died in 1966 in our timeline, is still alive and guiding the Soviet space program.

Someone has leaked the design of the Soviet moon base to the Americans, and manages to install a spy device on the spacecraft that carries the first female cosmonaut to the moon. Raskova is determined to find out who the leak is, and ends up arresting one of the female cosmonauts. But Irina suspects she is innocent. When she is able to establish that innocence, she learns something about the organization she works for.

While it took effort for me to get through the first two seasons of For All Mankind, the payoff in subsequent seasons turns out to be more than worth it. That show has five seasons out now, which takes it into the 2010s. The sixth and final season will take it into the 2020s, bringing it more or less to that timeline’s version of today.

The show does a pretty good job of highlighting various aspects of space travel and habitats. There’s an episode where a hotel in space, which spins to produce artificial gravity, is damaged by debris which causes one of its thrusters to begin firing, causing the spin to increase to the point where the entire structure is in danger of coming apart. Another series of episodes hinge on aspects of orbital mechanics. And I’m delighted that it always resists to urge to have sound in space.

But it’s not always accurate. The second season shows astronauts flying to the moon in the space shuttle, completely unrealistic given that vehicle’s design. And we see people flying between locations on the moon and on Mars in craft which, while accurately portraying that they would need to use thrust just to maintain altitude, seems unrealistic about how long that could be maintained.

Some of it I’m okay giving the show a break on, like people inside on the moon and Mars moving around like they’re in regular gravity. Getting that right would be prohibitively expensive. But the rest seems it could have been corrected with modest adjustments.

Of course, nothing’s perfect, and on balance I enjoyed the series. I’ll definitely be watching the last season when it comes out.

I’m also enjoying Star City, which is still in its first season, six episodes in at this point. It’s separate enough that it could be watched even if you haven’t seen For All Mankind, although you’d miss out on the significance of some of the characters.

Have you seen either of these shows? Or watched anything else interesting lately?