Review: For All Mankind, "The Sirens of Titan" | Season 5, Episode 7

The strength of For All Mankind in its early seasons was its ability to tell stories that felt enormous and intimate at the same time. In the glory years of its alt-history space race, the stakes were always high, but the show focused its attention on the human stories built into each season’s climax. Was it always a little convenient that every situation in a massive global conflict boiled down the characters we focused on? Sure, but it hit such dramatic high points that it didn’t matter.

The show’s fifth season has demonstrated how challenging this symbiotic relationship is to maintain as the show jumps through time. The big picture storylines of the season feel like a natural progression of where the show has been: a coup on Mars is the natural extension of the labor storyline from last season. But the stakes have never felt real, because there’s no strong characters to hang them on. Miles has been a nonstarter, Celia was introduced too recently to matter, and the teens feel like part of an entirely different show. When we return to this story here in “The Sirens of Titan,” six months have passed, but the facts remain the same: Dev’s the only character directly involved in this conflict with enough history to really say anything, and his perspective is so thin and muddled that there’s nothing to really say about it.

And yet, “The Sirens of Titan” works because it finally gives Kelly’s Sojourner mission its moment and starts telling a version of the Happy Valley story that basically dispenses with the idea that this is about the individual as opposed to the collective. It’s not the heights the series once achieved, but it delivers a moment or two in the larger arc of the show in a way that feels at least adjacent to its former glory. The difference is that this is happening in spite of the characters instead of because of them, a shift that we can’t ignore even if the episode mostly works on a dramatic level.