For All Mankind: Imaginative What If? Series Scores Again in Season 4

By Chris Knight

Rating: A

How cool it would be to work as a… what would you call the job of the people who make up alternate-history facts, replete with newspaper clippings and TV news footage, of a past that never existed? Virtual journalists? The Man in the High Archive?

Whatever the title, the continuing series For All Mankind on AppleTV+ has the best of them. Each season — the fourth premieres November 10 — moves forward in time roughly a decade from the one before. That’s a lot of world history to catch up on. But here’s the thing. It’s not real history. It’s an alternate timeline.

Season one started with an almost hoary what-if. Suppose that, a month before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969, the Soviets beat them to it?

The show presents it as a fait accompli, but in fact its creators, in a fit of nerdiness that can only be applauded, manufactured their own butterfly-effect moment. In 1966, Sergei Korolev, father of the Russian space program, died following a routine operation, aged 59.

But what if he hadn’t? There’s a good chance he would have provided the genius needed to beat America to the moon. And so that’s what the show posits. With the space race never really over — Americans never give up! — by 1973 there’s a U.S. base on the moon.

Season two, set in 1983, imagines a larger base and beefed-up space shuttles, carrying weapons. Season three starts in 1992 and features a trio of human missions to Mars: one American, one Soviet, and one private. And as season four opens, it’s 2003 and the Mars colony has expanded, with its sights set on the dangerous business of asteroid mining.

Needless to say, such changes in space have a knock-on effect here on Earth. Electric cars were already common in the 1990s. Laptops made an earlier appearance too, and with them dmail, short for digital mail. Female astronauts, hired to keep pace with the Russians, help push sexual (and racial and homosexual) equality further and faster than in our timeline.

But the season opener provides an additional rush of alternate history. In little more than three minutes, the first episode includes a recap of world events from 1995 to 2003. Some of the news is germane to the series, such as the Mars-7 Alliance among the U.S., U.S.S.R., Japan, North Korea, India, the European Space Agency, and a Communist coalition. (Canada and China decided not to join.)

But much of it is just a pastiche of real and imagined events. In the universe of For All Mankind, the movies Jerry Maguire and Cast Away were still made, but they were joined on the big screen by Race to Mars, a biopic starring Clint Eastwood and Jada Pinkett. Harvey Weinstein, described as the “Shakespeare in Love producer,” was charged with sexual assault in 1999, more than 20 years earlier than in the real world.

A few other oddities: Michael Jordan played for the Seattle Mariners in the major leagues. TV’s Ellen ran for at least one additional season. And the reality shows Survivor and The Osbournes were joined by another title, Moon Miners. (Wonder if Ice Road Truckers will make it into the alternate timeline?)

Al Gore won the election of 2000 and, in a departure from actual history, also took office. And John Lennon, who survived a 1980 assassination attempt, performed at Super Bowl XXXVI. No word on what happened to U2, whom you may remember actually performed at halftime in that post-9/11 year. Oh, and there doesn’t seem to have been a 9/11 in this timeline either.

The showrunners have done some creative hand-waving with some of their historical changes. For All Mankind posits that in 1986 a working fusion reactor opened up a world of cheap, clean electricity. And at about the same time, the U.S. government clamped down on the nascent internet, dubbing it the Government Computer Network and prohibiting most public use of it. A world without climate change or social media, AND a base on Mars? Sign me up!

No doubt the new season will feature the usual array of tense personal storylines as it rolls out over the next 10 weeks — For All Mankind has, since its beginning, managed to land in a sweet spot of strong writing, excellent performances, human drama, and believable plots that are more science than fiction.

Returning characters include astronauts Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall), and former NASA administrator Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt), now living in exile in Moscow. There’s a planet and an asteroid belt to explore.

But there’s also the weird joy of spending an hour each week in an alternate 2003, one that is at once familiar and alien. Going to Mars has forever changed the Earth, in sometimes unpredictable ways.

For All Mankind. Premieres on AppleTV+ November 10.