Review: For All Mankind, "Sons and Daughters" | Season 5, Episode 9
Although more like Grandsons and Granddaughters, amirite?
We’re at the penultimate episode of For All Mankind’s penultimate season, and I realized early in “Sons and Daughters” that I don’t necessarily understand the significance of the search for life on Titan.
To be clear, I understand it on a basic level of scientific inquiry: we’re desperate to know more about the idea of there being life beyond Earth, as evidenced by the core of the successful (and very effective) Project Hail Mary. But within the context of For All Mankind, I am not sure that I have a clear grasp on why the space race naturally evolved in this direction. What is it about what’s on Titan that would inspire both Helios and Kuragin to spend trillions of dollars to try to capture it? Why is it that the race for life became the new Moon or Mars?
My hangup is mainly because the Moon and Mars saw scientific progress sitting alongside the base colonizing instinct of humanity. For all the ways that you could claim that the goal was to discover new frontiers, the ultimate goal was controlling potential resources, and thus power. At least within the show itself, they’ve never really articulated why proof of life on Titan would achieve the same goals. Choosing to make it a mission for Helios and Kuragin (rather than the M-6 itself) suggests a capitalist advantage, perhaps in developing new medicines or some such, but it mostly just seems like we’re doing it “because.”
I raise these points because the stakes of the Titan mission have been an issue late in this season, especially when we’re cutting to the story amidst an outright military invasion of Happy Valley with a significant body count. Sure, Elena—one of the undeveloped crew members—has an accident that puts her in danger on a cliffside, but even if they find nothing and wasted all their time, so what? It’s unfortunate, certainly, but what are the consequences of not finding life on a big picture level? There’s stakes in the communications blackout from Happy Valley—which is keeping them from getting their ascent trajectory and thus being able to get home—but if they had chosen to leave their research site without scaling that cliff, would that be so bad?
