Review: For All Mankind, "Perestroika"
“Progress is never free. There is always a cost.”
The narrative maneuver that comes with the end of every season of For All Mankind is a significant burden. We’ve talked about this in the context of the beginning of the next season, which has to deal with the gap in characters’ lives as we pick things up years after the fact. However, it also means that whatever narrative momentum a finale is going to generate, the actual end of that episode is going to be a gesture to the future that has to serve as both an epilogue to the story that just finished and a hint at a potential path should the show be renewed for another season.
In this respect, the third season’s flashforward was the most character-driven. Whereas past seasons have largely focused on teasing new frontiers—the launch of the Sea Dragon rocket at the end of season one and the preview of the first steps on Mars at the end of season 2—the third season used its flashforward to the 2000s to reveal the truth about Margo’s defection to the Soviet Union. There was really no hint at what elements of the space race would drive the season forward, instead framing the show’s future around how Margo would navigate her new reality.
That story’s clarity is a sharp contrast from what brings “Perestroika” to its conclusion. Technically speaking, the ending is in line with what we saw in seasons one and two, cutting from character moments—for Ellen and Margo respectively, in those cases—to a glimpse into the future in space. But in this case, that character moment comes with Dev, who silently walks out onto Mars to…survey his new domain, I guess? Margo delivers some episode-ending voiceover (presumably from her sentencing), but her story ended a few scenes earlier with her being taken into FBI custody, so this isn’t really about her. And we really have no clue what Dev’s situation is when he walks out onto the surface, which makes it harder still to parse what we’re meant to think went down in the intervening nine years before the Kuznetsov Station is operational on Goldilocks circa 2012.
It’s a sequence that is basically following the show’s pattern, but with two key problems: the end of this season’s story was such a mess that there’s no sense of the closure we need to feel satisfied, and the lack of development of new characters means that there’s little to invest in for the future we’re being presented. Did I jam out to “Midnight City” like a person with a pulse? Yes, but there’s such a narrative vacuum on all sides here that the risks of this structure are far outweighing the rewards.
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