Review: For All Mankind, "The Hard Six" | Season 5, Episode 2

Hey free subscribers—For All Mankind heads behind the paywall for its fifth season. To keep reading, become a paid subscriber below.

It was clear from last week’s premiere that For All Mankind’s fifth season is going to be defined by Ed Baldwin Death Watch, but “The Hard Six” moves faster than I expected. We knew Chekhov’s Doctor’s Warning About Flying would come up eventually, but “immediately” was a bit of a surprise.

I suppose if you bring in the larger context of Ed’s story, this wouldn’t be the worst way for Ed to go out. We know more than anyone else in this world how close he and Lee became in their shared time on Mars, and it’s understandable Ed becomes frustrated when the Governor doesn’t respect this context in the way he does. The world only sees a man who—gone crazy from isolation—pulled a gun on the U.S. and Soviet astronauts who thought they had been the first to land on Mars, and who helped lead the riots where that weapon resurfaced. But Ed and Lee survived something together, and it makes sense that Ed would respect the caution of Miles and others but still move forward with a reckless plan to steal some transports to get Lee to an ISN base nearby.

My problem with the story, and why Ed doesn’t end up actually dying at episode’s end, is that we’re rushing into this situation amidst political exposition. Lee’s trial feels like a writing device to remind us of the complicated place of Mars geopolitically, and the fate that its residents await if returned to Earth—we learn, for instance, that Ed’s romantic interest Svetlana was killed by the Soviets using an alleged prison suicide. Lee is the kind of tertiary character with a good amount of history that is useful for situations like this one, but Ed can’t die when we’re still filling in details in the season’s second episode, y’know? It gives us a high-stakes (if low-speed) action scene at episode’s end, but it is too procedural a location for Ed Baldwin’s Last Stand.