Review: For All Mankind, "Home" | Season 5, Episode 3

“I’m just going to leave you here?”

It would be wrong to say that For All Mankind is a show stuck in the past. Even if we could argue that they failed to transfer the show’s narrative weight to younger generations, and there were instances where opportunities to move past bad storylines between seasons were ignored, the continued focus on characters like Ed Baldwin and Margo Madison never stood in the way of progress. The show was always invested in the complications that come with an old guard who has to watch the world change around them, whether that means you’re a convicted traitor roaming Mars with an ankle bracelet or a convicted traitor jailed for defecting to the Soviets. We can joke about Joel Kinnaman’s old man makeup all we want, but that doesn’t mean that Ed isn’t a load-bearing part of this alternate history, or that Margo should simply disappear into the prison system.

That said, the fifth season started with a clear signal that this was the end of their journey. Margo was alive and having seemingly weekly meetings with Aleida about Helios’ plans, but you could see the tension created with Aleida being our one remaining tie to Earth in a season focused on the future of the red planet. When Margo pitches Aleida on the idea of using Sojourner to travel to Titan (for science reasons that we can mostly ignore), it’s also her pitching herself out of this narrative. Once Aleida discovers that she’s the only one with hands-on experience with the ship, and that no one on Mars has any idea how to give her the information she needs to retrofit it for the new mission, it’s clear that For All Mankind is untethering itself from Earth. Margo may still be alive as the episode ends, but she’s riding off into her version of a sunset, as progress now demands she be left to reflect on events from her prison cell.

It’s plausible the show checks back in with Margo before her death, but it wouldn’t be necessary. The same was never going to be true for Ed Baldwin, though, and “Home” doesn’t waste a lot of time pretending that Ed Baldwin has much life to live. As I noted last week, there was no way he was dying as a direct result of his role in Lee’s escape, but this episode swiftly indicates he doesn’t have long before his cancer catches up with him. Once the flashbacks to his time in Korea started, my gut told me that this was the end for Ed Baldwin, and that became even clearer when Kelly and Alex became aware of the disease ravaging his body. Although the episode has Kelly go through the motions of trying to contact cancer experts at NASA, there’s an elegiac tone to “Home” from the moment it begins. This is the end for Ed Baldwin.