Review: For All Mankind Season 5, Episode 8: “Brave New World”

Written by Nina Braddock & Kate Burns Directed by Dan Liu

With only a few episodes left for the season, there seems to be a lot left to resolve. While the Sons and Daughters of Mars (SDM) appear to have a possible lifeline with the potential changes in Soviet leadership, everything is on a tenuous timeline. Especially with the much-anticipated arrival of M6 military forces.

The previous episode ended with the Sojourner crew stepping onto the surface of Titan, so one might have expected that to be more in the spotlight. While this subplot does get a good amount of time, it’s hardly the focus of the episode. Kelly does give a good speech during the opening, however.

She’s also on very thin ice with the Titan mission, even if she’s the only one who knows it. Walt is losing his mind trying to figure out why his flight plan to return to Mars didn’t work correctly. Kelly’s sabotage was apparently just that good. He puts Kelly in charge when the mission requires some adjustments to search for life, because he’s obsessed with finding the truth.

Kelly ultimately uses her newfound authority to assign Walt to the excursion team. It’s not at all clear if this is truly because he is the most qualified member of the team, or if she simply wants him to stop his inconvenient forensics. My take is that she doesn’t care if he learns the truth after they determine if they’ve really found life on Titan. Perhaps she’s even thinking that it won’t matter if they do, because everyone will be so focused on the importance of the discovery.

At the current pace, I don’t see how they are going to resolve all the Titan-related threads effectively. They have to conduct the fact-finding excursion, figure out how to fuel up to return to Mars, and decide whether or not to hold Kelly accountable for hijacking their mission. I suppose not everything would need a lot of time to resolve, but it still has to compete with the resolution to the Mars rebellion. And we’ve seen which plot and character threads are more important to the writers.

When it comes to the Mars situation, as much time as it takes up, it’s fairly straightforward. Mars may have a food crisis on their hands, but if they can wait out the Soviet political situation, they might have a chance to gain a major ally on Earth. I still think this ignores the time needed to transport food from Earth to Mars, which feels much longer than the existing food supplies could possibly last. But there’s been a bit of hand-waving with such things this season.

Dev and his allies are completely absent from the episode, which doesn’t entirely make sense. One would expect that Dev would be pressing his advantage, but instead, he seems to be letting things unfold without further action or comment. There’s even time for Boyd to set up a new militia among the resistance: the Happy Valley Corps. Unlike the Peacekeepers, they are beholden only to the SDM and have a less antagonistic mission statement.

They become aware of the impending arrival of the M6 forces on the asteroid at the heart of the trade war, so the SDM plans a difficult mission to sabotage the docking station on the asteroid and prevent those forces from establishing control. The SDM expects to arrive before the enemy, but that’s not how it works out. They end up killing Ruiz. While one might consider the terrorist attack on the food domes in the previous episode to be “first blood”, I doubt the M6 will see it that way. And it feels like the SDM are all too aware that casualties will just escalate matters.

The whole point of sabotaging the docking station on the asteroid is that the SDM has no chance of resisting a military incursion. And now, intentional or not, they’ve given the enemy a lot of incentive to work out an invasion plan. It should be interesting to see how this plays out over the next two episodes.

Unlike the Titan mission, where I fear things will be rushed or glossed over, I think two episodes is more than enough time to explore the Mars rebellion. It seems a foregone conclusion that Mars will somehow prevail, but that doesn’t mean everyone will survive the process. And I also suspect that Miles’ past will catch up with him before the situation resolves. There’s been far too much foreshadowing for that to be ignored.