Review: For All Mankind, "Svoboda" | Season 5, Episode 5

I was hardly alone in wishing that For All Mankind could move past Ed Baldwin, and I don’t think that was wrong. The character was an albatross! The show needed to move on from what he represented, and face the future of space exploration on new terms! We were on the right side of alt-history!

Except that now For All Mankind is without Ed Baldwin and there’s an even bigger vacuum in space than before. “Svoboda” ends with a massive riot on Happy Valley, with people beaten and shot by the MPK, and the only moment that made me feel anything was when the camera conspicuously zoomed in on…a photo of Ed Baldwin as his memorial was caught in the crossfire. Everything else might as well have been a Wikipedia summary, because there wasn’t a single character within it who feels even half as loadbearing as Ed Baldwin once was.

I was particularly struck by the moment when Toby Kebbell’s Miles joins the fray in defense of his daughter, and his compatriots react like it’s a hero coming into battle. Who cares about Miles? He’s been depicted as a rat who continues to equivocate when his fellow rebels are actively trying to make a difference, and while he gets off the fence here, to what end? He remains a generic stand-in for the idea of a working class Mars, forced into Ed’s shadow last season and then given nothing to shine this year. I know we’re at the halfway point, but there wasn’t nearly enough Miles in these first five episodes for this to resonate. It was just a bunch of generic rebels engaged in a story that brings political violence to the Red Planet…in a way not dissimilar to how we saw it play out on Earth back in season three, but not in a way that felt all that compelling (and paled in comparison to Daredevil's similar take this week, in fact).