Posted by Joey Peters on Apr 28, 2025
For All Mankind is an alternative history science fiction series created by beloved Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica alum Ronald D. Moore following an alternate history where the Soviets landed Alexei Leonov successfully on the moon before Apollo 11 and this caused the space race to continue indefinitely. It had a promising start and eventually degenerated into an unhinged mess that is still somehow fun to watch.
There’s a lot of space nostalgia these days. Bethesda’s blighted Starfield billed itself as “NASApunk,” whatever that means. I guess low spec, grungy analog tech? Lots of industrial white? Don’t give Bethesda money for it; the game itself is garbage and Microsoft, Bethesda’s parent company, is a priority target of the BDS list. But on the topic of space nostalgia, I’m writing a science fiction series about the Starship Gagarin. I’m not immune. A version of history where the soviets keep winning the space race is like catnip to me.
I’m going to explore the alternate history of For All Mankind. I won’t go too far into detail about plot and character but on a certain level the alternative history is the plot of the show. Yeah, expect serious spoilers, especially of one hilarious twist that made me fall out of my chair laughing.
The cast starts off with a mix of actual historical people mixed in with a few original creations, then it mostly creates it’s own original characters and maybe sneaks Sally Ride into the back of the frame for a few episodes, at least until Kenyan Elon Musk shows up.
Wernher von Braun is indeed NASA’S director, at least at the start of the series. Likewise, Deke Slayton, one of the original Mercury Seven Astronauts, is an important character for the first season. Alexi Leonov is talked around rather a lot but does not appear as a character. He was a real cosmonaut and the first person to perform a space walk outside of his own vessel (and selected by the soviets as first in line for their doomed moon mission).
After the initial shock of getting sniped one more time in the space race by the Soviets, Nixon blames von Braun’s caution and his history with the Nazi regime is leaked to the press. Von Braun is very quickly sidelined and his career destroyed. Then soon afterwards the Soviets land a woman on the moon and she does a Tiktok dance, which causes Nixon to demand that the astronaut office pump through a new class of lady astronauts as a publicity stunt.
The male astronauts are to me completely unlikable. They’re somehow both poindexter nerds and contain superfund site level toxic masculinity. The important astronaut to discuss here is Ed Baldwin, mission commander on Apollo 10—no, not in our world. He’s functionally main character of the series. He has a chip on his shoulder because he could have landed on the moon, but that wasn’t part of the plan and he didn’t pull the trigger himself.
A lot of time in the first season is spent with their wives, who are all perfect 1960’s tradwives. They end up being a lot more interesting, and driving the back half of the plot for the first season. But this changes with the introduction of the female astronaut candidates, or ascans.
Molly Cobb is probably my favorite out of them all. Ironically, she’s basically the same type of person as any of the male astronauts, but in the thrall of second wave feminism that type of character hits different. Likewise, I really relate to her weed smoking, emotion feeling husband Wayne. They actually have a much more functional relationship than any of the male astronauts and their wives, because both of them can accept that the 1960’s America is fucking stupid.
Of important characters I have to introduce for later, is Ellen Waverly. Molly is often accused of being a lesbian because she like to smoke cigarettes, drink whiskey, fly fighter jets and get in street fights, but Ellen likes to fuck women.
The final character I have to introduce is Margo Madison. She is a protege to von Braun, at least until she discovers that he was Werhner von Braun. She is a white lady working as a computer at NASA and as the show progresses she rises through the ranks.
The world portrayed here is a somewhat realistic re-contextualization of popular narratives about the 1960’s. They live in perfect suburban Houston. The men are hard working hard drinking troglodytes. The wives are luuded out of their minds and bringing increasingly horrific aspics to dinner parties. The children have no functional adults in their lives. It’s nothing ground breaking but it’s fine.
The series is at it’s best when it’s in full Apollo 13 mode. When there’s a problem in space and they need to figure out how to reconfigure the meager resources they have into a solution to a catastrophic problem… the landing vehicle needs to get flipped back right side up after a rough landing, a rocket discharged wrong and doesn’t have enough fuel to course correct to get to the moon, a solar storm is going to irradiate the shit out of everyone on the moon… a pregnant lady on Mars needs to get evacuated back to Earth but none of the rockets have enough fuel. Here is how you reconfigure a mechanical toothbrush to give the rocket just a little extra kick.
For All Mankind borrows one of the very rare good aspects of the Watchmen movie. Bob Dylan shows up and starts playing “The Times They Are A-Changing” over photoshops of newspapers or real videos of politicians being Forest Gumped. Reagan beat Ted Kennedy in 1976. The Americans whine about the Soviets doing space better. NASA launches a Mars rover. Elvis dies. Israel is still a nation of assholes. Gary Coleman exists. Roman Polanski was arrested for being Roman Polanski. The Soviets refuse to get dragged into a quagmire in Afghanistan. Stagflation hits in 1980. Computers exist. Reagan doesn’t sabotage solar energy for some reason? The Superman movie I think arrives a couple years late but unchanged. Three Mile Island doesn’t happen. Hostages are taken in Iran but Reagan doesn’t do the arms for hostages thing. The Soviets kick the lib Polish labor unions’ asses. Mount St. Helens still erupts. Reagan still builds Star Wars. He also refused to bail out Chrysler? America gets it’s shit pushed in by the Soviets at the 1980 Olympics. Dallas (the TV show) still exists unchanged. We trade John Lennon for Pope John Paul 2, and Anwar Sadat for Margaret Thatcher. Reagan still fires the air traffic controllers. Tootsie still exists unchanged. Prince Charles doesn’t marry Diana. The first space shuttle is still named Entrepreneur, in honor of Star Trek.
We didn’t start the f—I mean, the times they are a-changing.
I get a few things from this sequence. I’m assuming the way it’s laid out implies the passage of time. There’s a lot of events in here that just have the opposite thing of what happened in our world happen. Otherwise they don’t seem relevant and don’t seem to have any effect. I guess John Lennon and Pope John Paul the second are pretty interchangeable. Either one would do about the same things. The Reagan stuff is interesting though. It’s fascinating that the Iran hostage crisis still happens but it plays out very differently because Reagan didn’t need to ratfuck Jimmy Carter. Otherwise it gives the impression of being written by gormless liberals who believe he had two brain cells to click together, which tracks with everything else in the series.
I’m not going to go full research mode and figure out exactly the meaning of the tech magazine saying computers exist in 1980 means. It’s opposite a headline about solar power being a thing that exists. It could very well be a real magazine from our world (sometimes they slap in a real magazine unchanged), or completely fabricated. Personal computer kits were not exactly common in the late 70’s but they weren’t completely unheard of. 1980 is about exactly when personal computers first emerged. Is it supposed to imply computers are a little more advanced in this world?
The series progresses through the early 80’s. It turns out the NASA moon base was established near a rich vein of lithium and the Soviets are jealous. Significant tensions between the two leads to small instances of violence. Meanwhile, the Experimental Soyuz/Apollo mission is being prepared on Earth. This is emblematic of the show’s approach to alternative history. The Korean Air Lines Flight 007 incident just happens exactly like it did in the real world. A civilian flight from New York City to Seoul, South Korea veered massively off course into Soviet air space and gets shot down. I shouldn’t have to point this out, but the idea that the butterfly’s wing flapping slightly differently because the Soviets got to the moon first causing Ted Kennedy to not drunk drive off a bridge makes sense. The exact same flight, involving the same type of plane, identifying number and company and killing at least one of the same exact person decades later is just a weird one. I guess you’d have to put more work into reusing file footage of the real event. But if you’re trying to create a real universe there are going to be differences between it and our world.
Yes, some things happen a little bit different, but big, well known events happen still have to happen somehow. The real Soyuz/Apollo mission happened in the 70’s and in For All Mankind it happens in 1983. The astronauts at the American moon base discover a pen with some wires coming out of it that is supposed to be a spying device planted by the devious Soviets ten years earlier. I enjoy the Le Carre portrayal of the Soviets.
John le Carre imagined a world of adult, sophisticated spycraft where clever agents tried to defend their nation’s interest in the grim environs of the Cold War and died horribly. He wrote James Bond for adults. The problem with this is that this was no more realistic than terrorist organizations named B.O.A.T.M.U.R.D.E.R. run by a mad scientist from his underground volcano base built in the skull of a giant ape who want to blow up the moon (the terrorists, not the ape skull). The reality of spycraft in the 20th century is the most evil rich idiots in the world going to rich people parties, weird creeps drugging people and watched what they did while jacking off from a toilet behind a two way mirror, or fucking an assassin sent to kill you so good that she decides to not do the job. The first example is just a vibe about the founders of all the spycraft agencies in Europe and America, the guy jacking off on a toilet behind a two way mirror comes from MK Ultra, and the guy who fucked an assassin so good she refused to kill him was none other than Fidel Castro. That’s all to say James Bond was always more realistic than le Carre, but reading le Carre makes you feel reasonable and sane. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the problem with a liberal world view.
It’s the best you could possibly hope for slightly gormless liberals to come up with. My real problem with the listening device is insanely autistic. The thing is demonstrably the size of a pen. It had to have been smuggled in during a scene in season one where the cosmonaut who must have smuggled it in comes into the American moon base alone and with only his environment suit. The only real reasonable explanation for how he smuggled it in is that he keistered it. Which is fine. Except that I know just enough about technology that it makes me think about what kind of power source could remain active for ten fucking years. Indeed, there are power sources that can operate for literal decades, the first one I would think of are radioisotrope thermoelectric generators, in essence nuclear batteries, and they are commonly used in space exploration contexts. But even the smallest of them are very much larger than a pen you could hide inside your ass.
Back on Earth, Ellen marries a merkin to disguise her sexual orientation. Korean Air Flight 007 leads to her being thrust into politics. Real historical figure Lee Atwater shows up for a meeting where he looks directly at the camera and says in a perfect Peter Griffin voice, “Hey Lois, remember that time I had a long screed about the n-word and how we have to abstract the racism we use to get votes so we don’t look too evil?” When I first watched this I could see where her plot arc was going and doubted myself because it was too stupid. What I didn’t expect is that he whole show would fly off the rails in such a way to make it work in a hilarious way.
Tensions between the Americans and Soviets peak and briefly there’s a shooting war on the moon. Luckily, the astronauts and cosmonauts elsewhere get so pissed off about not being able to do the Soyuz/Apollo handshake that they say fuck it and do it anyway. The space handshake so dazzles Ronald Reagan that he cools on the Cold War. He was very stupid and out of his mind senile in our universe at this time, so honestly I’ll give this one a pass. Dumb symbolic bullshit always had an effect on Reagan’s simulacra of a human mind. But this brings us to the end of season two.
“The Times They Are A-Changing” pops up. Gary Hart runs for president in 1984. There’s a boom in construction in space. The Americans and Soviets sign a lunar peace treaty. Hart wins. The astronaut’s favorite bar opens franchises as the theme restaurant boom takes off a decade early. Alex Trebeck exists. This is actually where the IRA gets Maggie. I mentioned it above to balance it off with another event. I just wanted to to mentioned that Margaret Thatcher didn’t get lucky once again. The movie Aliens is released with no changes. The light of socialism spreads from Mexico to Chile. Michael Jordan is drafted by the Portland Trail Blazers. Kenyan Elon Musk invented nuclear fusion. Ellen became the senator from Texas. Space tourism becomes a thing for rich idiots. China makes a space base of it’s own. The Beatles do a reunion tour. Jonathan Pollard still got nabbed for spying for the Israelis. Helium-3 is discovered on the moon. The baby that fell down the well still fell down the well and was rescued. North Korea switches over from ballistic missiles to space rockets. The movie Short Circuit exists unchanged, white guy in brown face and everything. I guess there isn’t a stock market crash in 1987? Baseball still exists. The media knows what global warming is in 1988 and also it’s being defeated by the combination of solar power and nuclear fusion? The James Web telescope is launched in like 1990. Gary Hart refuses to get involved in the Gulf War. Nirvana still exists. The presidential election in 1992 is going to be between Ellen and Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton hints that technology is slightly more advanced than in our 1992.
The times they are a-changing.
And then the show jumps off the rails.
This timeline jump montage is tantalizing. I want to know a lot more about what’s happening in Mexico and China, really in any country that isn’t America or the Soviet Union. But this isn’t a show about that. There are a few Mexican characters but we don’t get much of a taste of what they actually do south of the border.
The portray of technology is very uneven. There were a few instances of slightly more advanced computers than you would expect in 1983 but by the 90’s the main difference seems to be they’re using flat screen monitors.
NASA and Roscosmos (the Soviet Union still exists but they still spun the Soviet space program out into Roscosmos…. I don’t know) are planning Mars missions for 1996. So far this set up sounds like a significant divergence from our own timeline. But before we get to that we get a self contained episode set aboard a space hotel. A North Korean missile launch crashes into the hotel and causes it to spin uncontrollably, much faster than the speed it was supposed spin at to simulate Earth gravity.
Margo finally becomes the main administrator over at NASA. She and Ed are kind of the main characters. She has maintained a close relationship with her opposite number among the Soviets. This is mostly used at least so far, as an excuse to do penny ante pastiche of Le Carre, and it’s fine.
Now we have to snap back and explain some other plot developments. Ellen is running for the Republican nomination for president in 1992. Meanwhile Kenyan Elon Musk, along with his weird cult of personality company Helios Aerospace, sees the possibility opened up by the derelict space hotel. Helios is played off as some kind of horizontally oriented tech company that exists to harvest Helium-3 and use that for fusion tech. But in reality Kenyan Elon Musk runs it through his sheer force of personality.
One of the things that has happened time and time again in my life is the political left will say something obviously true, like Barrack Obama sucked and was right wing, or that Elon Musk is a fucking idiot, but nobody listens to us. Or maybe they take our talking points and refuse to actually do anything that would logically follow if you actually believed the things you were saying. Just about as soon as Elon Musk became a nationally recognized figure Something Awful had a mock thread dedicated to him, picking through the details of how and why everything he says is stupid. Elon Musk becomes an idiot as soon as he starts talking about a topic you know anything about. The goons on SA got out ahead of him, because if anybody knows about running old memes into the ground it’s us, god damn it.
Dev Ayesa is a catastrophically stupid idea for a character. He is a liberal’s idea of who Elon Musk was before he bought Twitter. He’s actually a genius. He actually invented stuff. He is worshiped by all his employees like a god, not just the incel programmers he surrounds himself with. His ideas are actually good. He knows how to make a joke. He knows how to properly break a labor action. He actually wants to and is capable of setting up a Mars colony. I can’t hate Kenyan Elon Musk because he’s a hilarious insight into what the writers of the show actually believe. There are some eyeroll worthy moments before his introduction, but the show slides into fully into a silly satire of the liberal mind once he appears. You miss out on the really funny stuff, like being obsessed with naming anything X and impregnating tons of women through artificial insemination because he had a botched penis implant and his schlong is completely fucked up. But those are failures of the liberal imagination that illuminate it further.
Kenyan Elon Musk has decided that he’s going to buy the derelict space hotel, put a big fusion rocket on the back and fly to Mars in 1994 to snipe NASA and Roscosmos. This is a hilarious plot development and it drives the story for the rest of the season. Actually sending a manned mission to Mars is a ludicrously difficult engineering problem. The show underestimates how difficult a manned mission would be to Mars. NASA with an actual budget would struggle to do it. The idea that a private scam company set up as a grift for Kenyan Elon Musk would credibly be able to cludge together a Mars mission is ludicrous. When Dev Ayesa dressed up in a Wario costume on SNL he was hilarious, sure buddy.
This forces NASA and Roscosmos to come up with some bullshit to do a new space race.
We cut ahead a few years. Ellen went up against Bill Clinton and ended up defeating him because this is an alternate timeline and things go differently sometimes, and because you could use her and her merkin to do bits about how Bill Clinton accreted sex scandals like a black hole. Don’t think too deeply about all the credible accusations of sexual assault against Slick Willy Style. But anyway, Ellen’s merkin continues getting deep dicked on the down low. Of course it is only a matter of time before a sex scandal starts to brew. This is the 90’s and you need your Monica Lewinsky moment. Ellen’s merkin has to testify before congress and he looks directly at the camera and says in a perfect Peter Griffin voice, “Hey Lois remember that time Bill Clinton asked congress what the definition of ‘is’ is?”
The one thing that is actually realistic in the portrayal of Kenyan Elon Musk is that he is too chickenshit to get in his own flying death trap to go to Mars. He needs someone to command the mission. An increasingly old and unhinged Ed is passed over for command of the NASA Mars mission, so he joins up with Kenyan Elon Musk. Kenyan Elon Musk’s plan is to have the space hotel flying on self-driving mode but Ed immediately realizes this would be completely suicidal, so he balks and makes them install a Star Trek bridge so he can feel like a real space hero.
The implication is that the more advanced space technology has led to a general higher level of technology. The computers portrayed do generally look like 90’s computers, except that they have flat screen monitors. I guess they have super advanced ion drives that are ludicrously more efficient than anything we could imagine. America flies a space shuttle to Mars somehow. The thing is supposed to be able to land on Mars and get back up into orbit and come back to Earth. What!? A later plot development highlights how ludicrious this is. The soviets fly a gigantic fucking Mega Soyuz rocket.
Former oil workers I guess have a big protest out in front of the Johnson Space Center. This hints at some interesting things that would be happening if we transitioned away from fossil fuels to something objectively better. It’s a minor sub plot through the season, unfortunately. It has some important consequences later in the season and they mine this theme more in season four (har har, mining).
There’s some drama en route. The Russian rocket gets pushed too far to beat the others, then the rocket craps out. The space hotel would have an easier time flying to evacuate everyone but Kenyan Elon Musk puts it into self driving mode so his rocket can be first to Mars. Ed is pissed and has the self driving module ripped out, but the damage is done. The shuttle has to rescue the cosmonauts before their rocket explodes, and that means they won’t be able to beat the space hotel to Mars. But they figure out they can siphon some gas out of the Mega Soyuz. Yeah, that’s right, the Mega Soyuz rocket and the NASA shuttle use the same fuel. There’s some Apollo 13ing, but ultimately the shuttle with a combined American and Soviet crew edges out the space hotel after a hard landing and the Americans and Soviets jointly take the first walk on Mars.
While stunned by the sensation of being one of the first human beings to walk on another planet, one of the American astronauts sends a video back to Earth where he comes out as gay. This inflames the ongoing crisis about Ellen’s merkin back on Earth. Ellen’s merkin looks directly at the camera and in a perfect Peter Griffin voice says, “Hey Lois remember the time I implemented a don’t ask, don’t tell policy in the military?” Their fellow Republicans are out for blood. Ellen gives a press conference where she looks directly into the camera and says in a perfect Peter Griffin voice, “Hey Lois, remember that time Ellen Degeneres came out as gay on national TV, ahehehheehehe!” That’s right. First out lesbian president. Let’s fucking go.
The NASA shuttle made a hard enough landing on Mars and won’t be able to lift back off again. That leaves them with only the dinky little portapotty rocket thing to go back and forth between the red planet and the space hotel, which can still return to Earth. One of the dipshits working for Kenyan Elon Musk gets all fucked up and distracted and the portapotty rocket gets damaged. To fix it they need to do some Apollo 13ing. There is only one viable circuit board on the red planet. The North Koreans sent a probe to Mars in just ahead of the stupidest space race, and that should have the right kind of circuit board somewhere in it.
Finally, we reach the end of the second to last episode of the season where the funniest plot point of the series is revealed and I genuinely cannot imagine how they could top it. It turns out Space X couldn’t reach Mars first. It turns out the Soviets couldn’t reach Mars first. It also turns out the Americans didn’t reach Mars first. Because that North Korean probe wasn’t just a probe. There were two cosmonauts inside. One of them was killed in the crash landing. But all the time our heroes have been dicking around doing dumb bullshit on Mars there’s secretly been a North Korean dude hiding there. He beat them all to Mars.
This is not a serious plot development in a serious show. I’m not sure what the writers were trying to communicate with this.
Over the course of the season Kenyan Elon Musk has been undermining his own position in his company and not realizing he’s been doing this. His obsession with getting to Mars, and his wormy attempts to sneak the space hotel through, ended up screwing him over after he failed. The company is horizontally oriented, that isn’t just kayfabe, but he assumed everyone worshiped him like a god. He was wrong. He is removed as CEO.
Back on Earth the out of work oil riggers drive a dump truck full of ammonium nitrate up to the Johnson Space Center and look directly into the camera. In impeccable unison all of them said in a perfect Peter Griffin voice, “Hey Lois remember that time Timothy McVey bombed the Alfred P. Murrah federal Bombing in Oklahoma City?” Then the Johnson Space Center explodes.
This is fortuitous for Margo. Her relationship with her Soviet counterpart is about to be revealed, now she can just fake her own death and escape to Russia.
Weirdly, after all the crazy bullshit in season 3 the show calmed down and became more grounded. After the horrendous mess of season 3 there really wasn’t anywhere to go but sane. The top 7 nations in space exploration form an alliance for the Mars station, and Helios aerospace hires the work force to operate it.
We have firmly entered the early 2000s. “The Times They Are A-Changing” starts playing. The movie Jerry Maguire still somehow was created with no other changes. It implies Garry Kasparov lost his first match the Deep Blue super computer, which, if it was still the Deep Blue supercomputer means computers were only somewhat more advanced in this timeline, LCD monitors notwithstanding. Mike Tyson is pretty much still Mike Tyson. Helios Aerospace has developed “plasma drive” whatever the fuck that is. Ellen won again in 1996 and legalized gay marriage. Baseball still exists. Hilton opens a moon hotel. The oil riggers were put on trial for their terrible Peter Griffin impersonation. The technology exists to survey asteroids for useful compounds. Having a lesbian president I guess made ABC keep renewing Ellen’s sitcom for a few more years. Hillary Clinton kicks Bill to the curb after failing to become president. The Mars baby survived. Clint Eastwood made some jackoff movie about the mission to Mars. The Mars base expanded significantly. Woodstock 99 was till a giant pile of shit. Harvey Weinstein is arrested for being Roman Polanski. Tom Brokaw wrote the exact same books he wrote in our timeline about the dick and fart jokes Star Trek podcast. JFK Jr didn’t fake his own death. Moon workers went on strike. The Y2K bug fucked up the International Space Station. Helios Aerospace increased it’s work force on Mars, beyond where labor laws could follow. Castaway came out with no changes. George HW Bush ran for president in 2000 (?) and got owned by Al Gore. Ellen marries her long time girlfriend. There’s civil unrest in Saudi Arabia. John Lennon plays the big owl. Reality TV slithers out of the toilet of culture. Soviet Russia did what China is currently in the process of doing, selling out to foreign capital so that the Soviet people can be included in the treat economy. Al Gore declares that the cold war is over.
The times they are a-changing.
Some of this stuff is foreshadowing for the next season and some of this stuff is just flavor. The cultural artifacts that are still produced exactly the same really bug me. Back in season 2 they imply that Wrath of Khan was the first Star Trek movie in this universe, an insane swerve. In our reality the first Star Trek movie was extremely expensive to produce and Paramount wanted another bite at the apple, so Wrath of Khan was made on the cheap with existing sets and props. It was really the thing that cemented the Star Trek franchise as a cultural juggernaut, leading to the eventual creation of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Ronald D. Moore’s career, along with Denise and Michael Okuda, who are tech and art design consultants on this series.
This is one thing that Watchmen, the classic alternative history comic from the 80’s really got right. In their universe vigilantes really did dress up in stupid costumes and fight criminals. As such superhero comics died out early on and were replaced with something, anything else. Watchmen has a story-in-a-story where we see a cultural artifact from their world: a pirate comic. The pirate comic comments on and foreshadows events that happen elsewhere in Watchmen.
A butterfly swinging it’s wings slightly differently in the 1960’s is going to have more downstream effects than merely having a movie studio make the second movie in a franchise without the first. Jerry Macguire isn’t going to be exactly the same movie. Ozzy’s reality show would not exist in a world where there are moon reality shows. Get real.
Finally the world feels like it has some divergence. In our world we were roiling up in panic about terrism and invading random countries. In the world of For All Mankind this is pretty different. Despite the technological explosion the economy in America seems fairly dire. Normal people struggle for the opportunity for a “good job” on the moon or, even worse, Mars. The reality of these jobs is that they mostly nickle and dime your pay because even if you’re getting what seem like generous wages on Earth they have to ship everything millions of miles to bring it to Mars, and you’re not getting a favorable exchange rate for scrip at the planetary store.
Russia ends up being an important setting for much of season four. It’s the boiler plate liberal version you would imagine. Every morning Margo’s kommissar puts a potato on the desk in front of her and her job is to not try to grab the potato. She bristles against this and tries to get a better job. The kommissar puts a smaller potato on the table.
Happy Valley, the Mars base, is run by the seven nation alliance. Mostly, relations are normalized between them, with the exception of North Korea. I’m not really clear on what the other four nations are anyway and it doesn’t seem important to the plot.
As far as I can tell, the cultural consultant that the writers have on hand to help with North Korean culture is Yeonmi Park. They live in a hole in the ground. Every day they have to get the Kim Jong Un haircut. And every other day the Kim Jong Un haircut is illegal so they have to get another haircut. Every day they assassinated their sister. Every day I don’t know what you’re talking about, their sister is fine. The way they portray North Korean culture is like if they were trying to parody how they use the Soviet Union as a plot device. It’s like the writers are not even trying to think through what North Korean society would be like in a world much less hostile to it. It’s not an indelible genetic aspect of North Korean culture that they’re authoritarian. The authoritarian orientation of the real nation of North Korea is downstream from the incredible stress it finds itself in.
Like the existence of Kenyan Elon Musk I can’t help but laugh.
The astronauts and cosmonauts working for their government directly at Happy Valley are the “officers” while the random poor fuckers working in the mines work slave labor jobs for Helios. I appreciate that the writers seem to be directly comparing the working conditions to the company towns coal miners had to deal with in American history. I get the impression they’re trying to write well. I can’t give them points for this, though. I only give them points for failing in an amusing way.
It turns out trying to harvest asteroids is quite difficult and Happy Valley is turning into quite a giant waste of money. The pay for the enlisted workers is circling the toilet and the science missions for the actual astronauts are getting defunded.
Since getting ousted as CEO, Kenyan Elon Musk has been hiring little people to dress up in spandex and tells the media he’s building robots.
Meanwhile, in Soviet Russia there’s like a coup or something, so Margo ends up kidnapped and given an even smaller potato to not snatch. Then suddenly she is freed and enlisted to meet with her former American friends and co-workers as part of some kind of spy game for Roscosmos. I think this is a little goofier than le Carre would have written.
The arc plot of the season is that an asteroid made of magic candy has been discovered flying by Mars. The seven nation alliance has been working to harvest asteroids in general, but this magic candy is so delicious they want to redirect it with a couple rockets and send it into Earth orbit for easy harvesting.
The asteroid looks so delicious that Kenyan Elon Musk scams back his company and sends himself to Mars.
The workers have fucking had it after getting jerked around too much, so they go on strike. It’s an interesting juxtaposition because in our early 2000s period we were experiencing an all time low in labor agitation. Meanwhile the governments of this version of the world are going apeshit because they need those workers to rig up rockets on the candy asteroid and send it back to Earth. Astronauts from the CIA and cosmonauts from the KGB target the striking workers. A CIA agent recreates famous photos from Abu Ghraib and says, “Hey Lois, remember that time the United States kidnapped a shitload of Iraqis and tortured them purely because they could?”
Of course, Kenyan Elon Musk reveals himself to be a cunning mastermind. Once he has figured out what he wants to do he immediately ends the strike by bribing a few key people. Too late to stop him, Kenyan Elon Musk steals the asteroid for himself, setting up an interesting status quo flowing into the next season.
Season five wrapped filming in December. It is deep into post production. Who knows when it will be released? That’s not a rhetorical question. I don’t care enough to look it up. It appears that there’s a lot of actors cast as “Martian Guard #1” so that certainly evokes what the season might be about.
But regardless, I’m going to make some predictions about the “The Times They Are A-Changing.” They will find a black Republican to make the first black president. The laziest choice I can think of is Colin Powell so let’s go with that. There will be clips from the first Thor movie (the only space themed Marvel movie of this era), and Avatar. Andrew Tate is arrested for being Roman Polanski. They will have an Occupy encampment on the moon. The Soviets will be even further liberalized, the General Secretary of the Communist Party will be Ronald McDonald or some shit. They’ll have 3D goggles that operate like even more tech the tech cell phones. Clip it. I’ll write a followup once the first episode is out to check my predictions.
Apple brass have also greenlit a spinoff following Star City in the Soviet Union, as a kind of opposite number to the first couple seasons. I am sickly curious what they will make of the Soviet space program. I am expecting something like a less psychedelic The Prisoner, with as much juice wrung out of Le Carre novels as they haven’t already squeezed out. I’m curious.
Maybe this will be more clear after the series is done and you can look at it as a whole, but from where I’m standing I struggle to figure out what the alternative history is supposed to mean. Like, what if things were different man? But that implies there’s a single overarching plan in place, and that’s a sucker’s bet when you talk about TV. The writers might have a vague one sentence understanding of the ending they’re reaching for but they don’t know how they’re going to get there past the episode they just wrote.
Alternate history is a weird conceit. Like any good Marxist, I believe that history is the sum total of material forces. If you went back in time and killed Hitler then some other figure would come to lead a fascist movement in Weimar Germany. History would be different but many shapes would be recognizable. Movements emerge from material forces. Perhaps these alternate German fascists would fail to come to power, or perhaps they would be worse than the Nazis.
Most alternate history asks basic questions: “What if the Nazis won World War 2?” The answers all too often bore me, unless they’re really obtuse. Philip K Dick’s answer to this in “The Man in the High Castle” is “the I-Ching told me I’m a fictional character in a novel by a hack writer.” Or maybe alternate history asks “What if we sent John Brown a fleet of Gundams?” And the answer to that is dudes rock.
Watchmen, the comic, not the movie, does an excellent job exploring these alternate themes of what if. It’s mostly subtle and in the background, and only becomes obvious when in the dull blue glow cast by Doctor Manhattan. In the backgrounds of the alternate 1984 scenes there’s tons of hints about how the world is different. People smoke these weird vape things (I’m almost certain that’s what they’re supposed to be). There’s flying cars. Homosexuality seems to be more culturally accepted. And there is the obvious political differences, like Nixon still being president somehow, and the details of the conflict between the United States and Soviet Union. But the text itself is filled with hidden depths. To fully understand it you need to carefully trawl through the backmatter and juxtapose details hidden in the backgrounds. It’s a rich world that feels real. I think that’s the real secret of good alternative history. It gives you a good foundation to build a rich world that evokes our own, but allows you to explore questions you couldn’t ask in our world.
Like what if Elon Musk wasn’t a complete idiot.