Apple TV+’s For All Mankind is based on a simple premise—what if the Soviets beat America to the moon and the Space Race never ended? Things move quickly in this alternate universe and by season three of the show mankind has reached Mars. But trouble is ahead! Colonizing Mars is hard. Thanks to various obstacles, the Mars astronauts begin running out of food pretty fast. And one of those obstacles is Danny Stevens (Casey W. Johnson) whose erratic behavior and substance abuse leads to a major accident. In the final episode of For All Mankind season three, he’s banished to an abandoned capsule with nothing but a Bible, his own thoughts, and the vast unforgiving landscapes of Mars for company. But after that … well.
What became of Danny in season 4 of For All Mankind?
After keeping us on tenterhooks for a while about what exactly happened to Danny, episode five of season four confirms that he died on Mars. In a flashback, Dani Poole (Krys Marshall) finds his lifeless body on the Mars surface when she goes to deliver him the meager rations the crew is barely surviving on. Seemingly, Danny has died by suicide. Looks like the crew will get to eat Danny’s leftover rations, at least.
… But one fan theory posits that they ate more than that.
Wait, did the Mars colonists resort to cannibalism?
Consider: you’re stuck on the beyond-inhospitable world of Mars, there’s barely any food, you’re starving, and suddenly the dead body of a crewmate who’d thoroughly disgraced himself metaphorically falls into your lap. Do you…? You’d at least think about it, wouldn’t you…?
So goes one of the most popular fan theories in the For All Mankind fandom: the crew just straight up ate Danny to stop themselves from dying of starvation. Now admittedly, this fan theory seems to have gotten started because no one really liked Danny all that much to begin with. To be perfectly honest, he’s a bit of a creepy weirdo, especially when it comes to Karen Baldwin (Shantel VanSanten), the woman he had an affair with. (Karen was also at least twice his age and the mother of Danny’s deceased childhood best friend. It’s not a popular storyline.) Everyone was thoroughly sick of his antics by the time he got exiled.
There are quite a few points in favor of the “They ate Danny!” theory. One is that Dani and Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) seem quite cagey about his death, as if there’s something more to it. (Although both Dani and Ed were close to Danny and felt responsible for him, the way they drag out the eventual reveal that Danny died by suicide has an edge of dread and apprehension we don’t normally see on a show where a lot of people die.) Two, as of season four, Ed has a tremor in his hand, which I’ve seen a few people point out could be a sign of prion disease due to cannibalism. (This doesn’t seem to add up in terms of how the disease actually works, but as far as I know, this show isn’t always completely accurate with its science.) And three, the story of Danny feels incomplete. He was such a good antagonist in season three and it just feels like we don’t have closure. Perhaps saving the other Mars colonists via his dead body would have marked a sort of redemption for him.
Did Danny meet an ever so slightly happier fate?
There are plenty of indications that Danny didn’t end up on the Martian dinner table, though. In the first episode of season four, Dani spends some time with Danny’s widow and child, something it’s doubtful she’d do if she’d, y’know, exiled him and then eaten him. The guilt would’ve eaten her up (sorry) even more than is shown in the episode.
Plus, there were so many people on Mars at the time of Danny’s death that it seems unthinkable all of them would be able to hide from the wider world that they’d eaten one of their dead crewmates. (Assuming of course that they would have done—there was a very famous real-life incident where stranded people ate dead bodies, and no one blames them for it.)
Perhaps the idea was never even considered by the For All Mankind writers and we’ll see Danny’s last resting place, an untouched one, in the season four finale before heading into a Danny-less season five. But as a fan theory, “They ate Danny!” certainly has legs, if you’ll pardon the pun. He was hated. And what to do with a hated character other than have them meet a grisly fate?
So, rest in peace, Danny. You were a terrible astronaut, but you might have made somebody a fantastic lunch.
(featured image: Apple TV+)
