Thoughts on For All Mankind

31 May, 2026

This post contains spoilers for Season 5 of For All Mankind. If you’ve been meaning to watch it, save this post for later and go watch it! And if you’ve never seen any episode of the series before, there’s never been a better time to get into it. Coinciding with the finale of Season 5, Apple premiered the first two episodes of Star City, a spinoff series providing an alternate perspective on the events of Season 1.

I love that Apple gave the honour of debuting the first ever trailer for an Apple TV+ production to For All Mankind. The trailer was shown right at the start of WWDC 2019, and I could immediately tell that this series was going to be right up my alley. Billed as the exploration of a Space Race that never ended (because the Soviet Union beat the US to the Moon), the show delves into all sorts of concepts that I dearly wish had materialised in our timeline — stuff from the Apollo Applications Program, lunar surface bases, Sea Dragon, VentureStar, and so on. The first season premiered during a pivotal moment in my life, when I’d just completed my life-changing elective with the Royal Australian Air Force, and I’d just started my final year of med school. I used to cherish returning to my dorm room on Friday nights, when I’d celebrate the end of a tough week of ward work and lectures by ordering a pizza and watching the latest episode of the show. It was a chance to revel in the aviation and spaceflight environment that I’d become enamoured with during my elective. Just as Kerbal Space Program served as a fantastic form of escapism, so too did For All Mankind. Season 2 also came at a pivotal moment — the pandemic. Apple released an immersive augmented reality app to bridge the gap between the seasons. Yet again, the show helped me get through a particularly shitty placement, when all I wanted at the time was to be back home in Australia. While all of the lunar scenes in the second season were astonishing, the highlight of the season for me was the Space Shuttle launch sequence. At a time when life was full of bad news, it was so heartening to see Shuttle operations once again.¹

(spoilers incoming — this is your last warning)

I have to applaud Joel Kinnaman’s performance as Ed Baldwin, the show’s analogue to John Young — the astronaut’s astronaut. He reminds me so much of every fighter pilot I’ve interacted with, right down to the slang (“BOHICA” and “Go pills” come to mind). The death of his character in episode 3 of Season 5 hit pretty hard. It’s what inspired me to write this post. I’ve come to realise now that he is the personification of my love for aviation and spaceflight. Even though this is a show about space exploration and life on the frontier, there is a reverence for aviation, even if there’s relatively little screen time for it. The first seasons show astronaut candidates going through flight training, T-38s flying in formation, and a dogfight over the Gulf of Mexico.² One of Ed’s last lines to his grandson is, “We need to get you in an airplane.” As someone whose life was forever changed by aviation, that one line brought me so much joy. And episode 3 in particular was quite moving. Through his Korean War flashbacks, we get to see the beginning of a decades-long personal mission (to save his wingman, which he finally does in the previous episode), and we get to catch one last glimpse of Michael Dorman as Gordo Stevens!

I have one more thing to praise the series for — the choice of music. Whoever is responsible for that has excellent taste. Frank Sinatra in Season 1, John Lennon and Nirvana in Season 2, Soundgarden and Toadies in Season 3, DMX in Season 4, and The Weeknd for the Season 5 finale — absolute cinema.

This was a great season. We got to see Happy Valley become a real independent city on Mars, and the discovery of extraterrestrial life on Titan. I’m so happy that Apple has already renewed the series for a sixth and final season. I wish the very best for the team working on it. “Hi Bob!”