For All Mankind took a simple premise—what if the Soviets beat America to the moon?—and ran with it. By season 4 of the hit Apple TV+ series, humankind has an outpost on Mars. But alas, all is not well on the Red Planet.
Let’s run down what happened to all our favorite astronauts and earthlings in the season 4 finale, “Perestroika.” Spoilers ahead!
The asteroid heist is successful
There’s mayhem, torture, and a dramatic fight on the side of a spaceship before the fate of the Goldilocks asteroid is settled. But Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi), and their team of Mars workers win in the end: Goldilocks will not go to Earth, and will instead be Mars’ salvation.
Slightly less of a winner is Miles Dale (Toby Kebbell), who was hideously tortured by intelligence agents trying to find his co-conspirators … but a newspaper report at the end of the episode indicates that Earth knows about this incident and there will be political consequences.
The Mars workers revolt
Remember Chekhov’s gun—or, rather, Lee’s gun, the one Dani (Krys Marshall) buried on Mars? In the very first scene of this episode we see it being uncovered and smuggled back to base. Isn’t it certain to go off at the worst possible moment? Yep!
When the intelligence officers try to force their way into North Korean quarters to uncover those responsible for stealing the asteroid, they trigger a riot. The manual workers on Mars have had it up to here, they’re tired of being treated like second-class citizens, and now there’s a gun in play. Ed and Dani try to stop the rioting but then the gun goes off and the bullet hits Dani. It seems to dawn on Ed that this is all his fault (Ed is not good at taking responsibility) but will his old friend survive …? The bullet is enough to stop the riot and everyone watches with horror as doctors operate on Dani to save her life.
Margo avenges Sergei
In a silent, devastating scene, Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) learned that her great love Sergei Nikulov (Piotr Adamczyk) was killed on the orders of Irina Morozova (Svetlana Efremova). Margo decided to honor him by helping reroute Goldilocks to Mars orbit, like he would have wanted. And Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña), whose connection to Margo never fully severed despite the older woman faking her death, decided to help.
The two women sneakily implement some override code into NASA’s commands and, with help from Sam (Tyner Rushing) aboard spaceship the Ranger, manage to set the asteroid back in Mars orbit at the last second. Irina is furious and suspicious. (The rest of NASA isn’t too happy either.) She instantly blames Aleida—but Margo takes the fall for her. She declares the hack was her fault and hers alone, and she’s led away in handcuffs. But before she goes, Aleida hugs her.
And no one died
For a minute or two, it seemed certain that Sam would lose her grip on the side of the Ranger during her fight with Palmer (Myk Watford) over the override switch. But she lived!
In fact, this episode was remarkably free of the bloodshed that usually accompanies a For All Mankind season finale, because although Dani was seriously injured, she survived the gunshot wound. Her fate is drawn out for a while but at the end of the episode we see her with her arm in a sling happily cradling her grandchild. A happy ending at last.
It’s also a happy ending for Lee Jung-Gil (C.S. Lee) as he finally gets to be reunited with his wife. In fact, the only character whose fate is not a relatively happy one is Irina, last seen entering a room of KGB agents. But she kind of deserves whatever she has coming to her.
What happens during the jump-forward?
At the end of every season of For All Mankind, the action jumps forward to about a decade in the future and we see a set-up for the next season. So at the very end of “Perestroika” we see Dev on the surface of Mars, looking up at Goldilocks, and then we flash forward to 2012: Goldilocks now has a base of its own, Kuznetsov Station (named after the astronaut who died in the first episode of season 4), and appears to be thriving. But where’s Ed now? Where’s his daughter Kelly (Cynthy Wu), who was strangely absent this episode? We’ll have to wait until season 5 to find out.
(featured image: Apple TV+)
