#for all mankind season 3

[not-a-fucking-mermaid]

I’ve seen my fair share of kissing scenes throughout the years. Few come close to Margo and Sergei’s kiss in 3x03. First of all, it’s such a deserved plot point. We’ve followed them through a lot of tension over the years. It’s not rushed in the storyline. It isn’t there simply because they’re colleagues of different genders so surely they should be attracted to each other. Second of all, there’s so much love and vulnerability in that moment. The uncertainty in the elevator. Sergei’s even more intense uncertainty in her room. Margo’s so very abrupt “I would like you to kiss me” which is not romantic in the slightest and yet it’s so in character for her and for their relationship. The knowledge that they’ve already crossed so many lines that in the eyes of the whole world should have remained firmly uncrossed. The knowledge that whatever this is and whatever happens next, it can only end in pain, and the choice to do it anyways.

[p0t3nt1al]

Today, I bring together a parallel between two ABSOLUTELY different characters from two different fandoms.

Call of Duty, and For All Mankind.

(Spoilers for For All Mankind and Modern Warfare III’s campaign)

Look at this character.

Now look at THIS character

Now what do they have in common?

One- They’re both Scottish!

Second- they were both offed by headshots.

[thinkmanythingsofit]

We would also suggest "Soyus-Apollo" as the name of the mission. For the sake of convenience.

[chaos-lioness]

In general I have not been engaging with this show in a fandom way but I gotta say Molly Cobb is absolutely my blorbo. My skrunkly problematic fave. Rotating her in my mind etc. one of my favourite ‘asshole’ characters of all time. I’m so glad they didn’t have her die of space cancer or in a fiery test vehicle crash and instead she got to round out a good decade of flying very large vehicles very fast by stalking around NASA with her fuckin. Seeing eye wolfhound and spending time in her brass tub with her weird husband (who I also love.) good for her.

[aenslem]

MARGO MADISON & MOLLY COBB ⤷ FOR ALL MANKIND (2019– ); season I

[piniatafullofblood]

MAJOR for all mankind season three spoilers under the cut. yall probably know what im gonna talk about and its not the nk thing your local queer teenager is FREAKING THE FUCK OUT

SHE FUCKING CAME OUT?! SHE FUCKING CAME OUT? SHE CAME OUT. ON AN ADRESS TO THE NATION. “IM GAY AND I HAVE BEEN MY ENTIRE LIFE.” OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD.

BECAUSE THE ORIGINAL IDEA FOR WHATS HIS FACE COMING OUT AS GAY AND ADMITTING TO AN ‘affair’ WOULD HAVE SET US BACK SO FAR. QUEER PEOPLE CANT DO ANYTHING PUBLICLY SHITTY WITHOUT THE ENTIRE COMMUNITY BEING BLAMED. ITS STILL THE 90s. AIDS IS STILL HAPPENING. THIS WOULD HAVE STRENGTHENED ALL THE PREDATOR STUFF.

SHE TURNED IT ON ITS HEAD. SHE GAVE WILL A MEDAL. IT COULD HAVE GONE SO BADLY BUT THIS IS A MASSIVE FUCKING WIN FOR US. ELLEN. ELLEN I LOVE YOU. ELLEN

[famsource]

A group on Mars takes drastic measures. Margo grapples with a new assignment.

Preview images of Episode 6 "Crossing the Line", premiering December 22!

[theleafling]

MARGO WALKED SO MARS COULD RUN!!! I say, with false enthusiasm knowing she is going to jail for the rest of her life and we will probably not see her in future seasons

[onekisstotakewithme]

here’s how toxic Stevens failmarriage can still win

[forallmankindverse]

FOR ALL MANKIND ↳ Episodes: Happy Valley (3x04) "Ms. Baldwin, I believe we're in need of a chantey." "Aye, Captain." * Yo hо (A Pirate's Life for Me) *

[edwardshundredyearoldspunk]

I just finished season 3 of for all mankind and I just…did not like it. it's frustrating more than anything. there's good ideas here that aren't being given the appropriate amount of weight or time. what do you mean a north korean was the first man on mars and it gets a five minute montage and is not addressed again? I don't care that it'll probably be addressed in the next season! because it's not the plot that I have an issue with. I have an issue with it not tying in THEMATICALLY. what does it mean thematically that a north korean man was secretly the first man to set foot on mars? I hate pregnancy plots but c'mon! if you're going to do a "first baby born in space" plot, at least give it the thematic resonance it deserves on a show called fucking For All Mankind. I was so taken aback about how lost they got in the plot so I was curious if ron d moore was even still the showrunner and I was not surprised to find out he stepped back after season 2. it's like with season 3, the show forgot it's core themes which are, y'know, space exploration, humanity working together for something bigger than themselves! you're telling me the first baby born in space was born OFF SCREEN?? the first man on mars being a north korean is given one passing comment and that's it? that just seems antithetical to everything the show was about the first two seasons

[not-a-fucking-mermaid]

Margo’s face when Ellen came out was the best thing this season

[litcityblues]

For All Mankind Seasons 3 & 4: Some Men Would Rather Steal An Asteroid Than Go To Therapy

It's been a minute since I saw this show, but to recap: at the end of Season 2, Cold War tensions between the Soviets and Americans boil over. There's a firefight on the moon. Tracy and Gordo manage to keep Jamestown's reactor from melting down but die in the process. Danielle docks with Soyuz and astronauts and cosmonauts finally greeting each other does a lot to defuse tensions. In the final shot of the season, we see a human walking on Mars.

When Season 3 starts, it's 1992. Ed (Joel Kinnaman) and Karen (Shantel VanSanten) are divorced and Karen is in the Space Hotel business after a disaster at Danny Stevens' (Casey W. Johnson) wedding nearly takes out the hotel and takes out her new husband Sam (Jeff Hephner), Karen decides to sell to Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi), found of Helios Aerospace who wants to use it for his own commercial mission to Mars.

Ed and Danielle (Krys Marshall) are in the running to be commander of NASA's Mars Mission with Molly Cobb (Sonya Wagner) (now blind, because of her solar storm adventure in Season 2) clashing with Margo (Wrenn Schmidt) over who to choose. Molly picks Ed, but Margo fires her and picks Danielle instead. Ed switches teams, leaving NASA to join Helios as the commander for their Mars mission, which sets up a three-way race to Mars.

(Margo is under increasing pressure-- as her 'gentle back channel' to the Soviets in the form of her friend Sergei is rapidly becoming the KGB insisting that she sell secrets to them.)

With everyone on the way to Mars, Danny's new wife and baby are hanging out with his brother Jimmy (David Chandler) who- like Danny- is struggling with the legacy of his parents, Tracy and Gordo. Unlike Danny, who seems to have doubled down to follow in their footsteps, Jimmy wants nothing to do with NASA and is increasingly friendly with anti-NASA radicals.

On the way to Mars, NASA deploys solar sails to race ahead of the Helios crew, but an accident on the Soviet ship, which sees Ed attempt to go to their rescue, as Helios is closer, gets overruled by Dev and ultimately, it's NASA who has to go rescue the cosmonauts. They do so and while Helios arrives at Mars first, Ed's landing attempt is aborted due to bad weather and ultimately, it's NASA and Russia who land first, with Danielle and the Soviet commander wrestling their way onto Mars... together.

The Soviets and Americans are sharing Happy Valley, while Helios has its own base. Danny is spiralling hard and after he gets injured, develops a Vicodin addiction. Kelly (Cynthy Wu) has a romantic liaison with one of the cosmonauts. One of the astronauts, Will Tyler (Robert Bailey Jr), reveals that he's gay- which gives former Astronaut and Current President Ellen Wilson (Jodi Balfour) an opening to take down 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.'

(Ellen's plotline is probably the more underrated of Season 3: still married to Larry (Nate Corddry), they're both still gay, they have one kid and she runs for President as a Republican, defeating Bill Clinton in 1992 to win election. The twist is that it's Larry who gets caught in a lie about an extramarital affair to Congress, which you think is going to be the start of Ellen's 'Lewinsky Scandal' that takes her down but instead, after going to see Pam, Ellen makes the one move that I think no one expects her to make: she comes out of the closet.

IRL, I honestly think that scenario would play out exactly the way Ellen intended. It would have changed the story in a massive, massive way- especially in the mid-90s media landscape, IMO)

Danny's spiral leads to a drilling accident that results in an accident that leads to more deaths and Ed and Danny being trapped in Hab 1, buried and running out of air.

The noose is tightening around Margo, as the Soviets continue to pressure her and Aleida realizes that it was she who gave NASA's engine design to the Soviets and Jimmy's radical friends help him steal the statue of his parents. Things in Season 3 come to a head with Kelly- who is pregnant and suffering from pre-eclampsia, having to be evacuated back to Earth. The North Korean rocket that damaged the space hotel way at the start of the season? Turns out it was a Mars mission and the Americans/Russians find the sole survivor and the *actual* first man on Mars: a North Korean. Back on Earth, Jimmy's friends blow up the Johnson Space Center killing Karen and Molly Cobb in the process and Margo is presumed to be amongst the dead, but is in fact, alive, well, and living in the Soviet Union.

Season 4 opens with the Mars base having grown considerably. Ed is commanding a mission to bring an asteroid into Mars orbit so they can mine it and unemployed oil rig worker Miles (Toby Kebbell) (because they've discovered something called helium-3 that's become the main fuel source, devastating the oil and gas industries) was headed to the moon, but chooses instead to go to Mars for more pay and a long stint. After the accident with Ed's mission, NASA sends out Danielle to replace him for the remainder of America's term commanding the base while Ed, as it turns out is experiencing hand tremors.

Margo is finding that the Soviet Union isn't all it cracked up to be. She's out of the space game, but after a coup removes Gorbachev and brings in new management she finds herself working for the Soviet space program again (after a fairly brutal interrogation.)

On Mars, Miles finds that Helios doesn't pay that well but gets into the black market game to supplement his income and does so quite successfully.

Aleida is suffering from panic attacks after the bombing, Kelly is getting screwed by NASA so they take her robotic explorer program (whose goal is to search for life) on the road, looking for private funding and eventually, they get some from Dev.

Political tensions are rising on Mars with the Soviet crew forming factions over their power struggle, the North Koreans are keeping to themselves, and the Americans are kind of caught in the middle if we just fast forward through to the end of this, eventually, Ed, Dev, and company hijack a shiny new asteroid and park it in Mars orbit where it will be mined. (Margo is also revealed to be alive, comes back to America for awkward moments at NASA, and has the brief, tiniest possibility of running away to Brazil with Sergei dangled in front of her before someone- presumably the KGB shoots him dead.)

All right, so let's unpack this a bit.

From what I'm reading on the interwebs, this show is still waiting for an official renewal for Season 5. I don't know what kind of metrics Apple uses to make those decisions for its streaming platform, but at this point, if the creators/writers, etc, want 7 seasons, I think Apple should just do it at this point- but, that being said, having gotten through all of Season 4, I could also see why they wouldn't do that as well. I think Season 4 feels like the show was either laying the groundwork for a heavy 'reboot' season in Season 5 (because how old can Ed get, really?) or was designed in such a way that it could serve as a series finale without too much trouble either.

And I go back and forth about that. I think the show is at a weird transition point in its story because we're moving out of the alternate history aspect of all of this and more into the science fiction aspect of all of this and I think that might be a trickier balancing act to pull off than we realize. There were aspects of Season 4 that I liked. The introduction of Miles was a brilliant choice because it created kind of this Upstairs/Downstairs aspect to the show where you get to see the people who are doing the grunt work to keep Happy Valley going as a pose to our HEROES who are upstairs doing astronaut things. The black market/secret bar aspect all worked for me- you'd expect to find that in a situation like that as well as the labor tension that eventually leads to a strike amongst the workers. No problem with any of that.

The problem I did have was Ed and Danielle. I think the show should have just gone there. They kind of do, but it's more implicit than explicit and they've danced around this before in prior seasons-- but I think Ed could have seen some interesting character growth had Danielle explicitly called him on his sexist/racist bullshit-- especially given Kelly is a woman of color. There was an opportunity here for self-analysis and reflection for a character who badly needs it and you could have more of an arc between Danielle and Ed trying to repair their relationship throughout the season. They kind of do that, but I think had they doubled down on it a bit, it would have given both characters a better arc throughout the 4th season.

(Also, Ed, man... go home and deal with your fucking feelings, already! "Men would rather stay on Mars and figure out how to hijack an asteroid than go to therapy." Though, to be fair to Ed, when Kelly finally pins him down on why he is the way he is, his explanation seems genuine enough. I just don't understand why it didn't come earlier in the season and why a guy who has had two children of his own is so gosh darned awkward around his Grandson- though admittedly, that too gets better by the end of Season 4.)

We also have to go to talk about Danny Stevens: why the fuck didn't they just send his ass home? I can understand exiling him at the end of Season 3 when they were still trying to get fuel made to get everyone back home, I get that. But now workers are being shipped into the base, surely there's a shuttle he can go home on? Instead, he just sort of sits in the North Korean capsule until he cracks and is found dead and that's just sort of the end of it. (Personally, I think a better ending for Danny would have been them finding the capsule straight up empty. With no tracks or nothing.)

Margo not getting a happy ending seems inevitable, though I would have liked it far better had she gone to Brazil, even without Sergei-- but I do appreciate the fact that she takes accountability for her plan, if not her actions by season's end which I think is a good first step for her character who has been avoiding accountability for her choices for quite some time.

Eli Hobson as the new NASA administrator had me checking IMDB constantly because I was so convinced it was Bruce Boxleitner I got very excited at first, but it was Daniel Stern who was equally as awesome.

Overall: I do love this show. Season 3 was top notch and Season 4 felt like it lost a step or two but was still good. (I'm hoping Season 4 is setting up stuff for Season 5 we have yet to discover!) For All Mankind is a great show that everyone should be watching. Apple is really impressing me with the quality of the shows they've got on there and this one is a 'must watch' that should be getting way more hype than it seems to be out in the world. My Grade: Season 3 **** out of ****, Season 4 *** out of ****

[tv-moments]

For All Mankind

Season 3, “Stranger in a Strange Land”

Director: Craig Zisk

DoP: Ross Berryman

[good-fwiend-in-wome]

For All Mankind is good you should watch it if you have any interest in space or sci-fi

[milkwithginseng]

I've introduced my Dad to FAM so he's watching for the first time and I'm rewatching it with him. We're up to 3x06, it's also good for researching the FAM fic.

According to Bragg, so take it with a heavy dose of salt, 73% of Americans oppose people being gay which means at most 27% of people are in support. Whereas in our timeline according to Gallup it was 38% for in 1992. So the ATL was more homophobic than our universe.

Which is not inherently a problem (narratively speaking of course), I do think it's perhaps a missed opportunity at this point in the show to hew so closely to our timeline. But at the same time, having 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' and the Impeachment as the foundation works a lot better the original plot points they're making. Apart from the Will stuff, almost every one on Mars drops the idiot ball.

I don't think this season is that bad but I think it's only because the first two were so good that it's made worse by comparison.

But tbf having 'Ellen coming out' is Steven Moffat levels of 'clever' which I do like quite a lot 😂