Review: For All Mankind, "This Land is Our Land" | Season 5, Episode 10

Hey free subscribers—it's a double dose of FAM today, with first a preview of my take on the show's fifth season final and then later today our coverage of spinoff Star City kicks off. To stay in the conversation, become a paid subscriber (or wait until our full June schedule comes out early next week).

“Some problems can’t be worked. Some you just have to live with.”

It was clear in the immediate aftermath of Ed Baldwin’s death that For All Mankind season five didn’t have a chance. There were too few characters we cared about, and the central plot was ultimately just a rehash of similar conflicts we saw in the labor story last season. After four previous seasons where it felt like each year made it to a new frontier in the ongoing space race, this wasn’t another chapter in this story in the same way. There was simply not enough substance here to justify stopping the show’s timeline in this moment with these characters, even if skipping it was never really an option.

In writing about the show on a weekly basis, the instinct is to try to fix this. You try to imagine how the writers could have made us care more about Miles and the rest of the Sons and Daughters of Mars, or how they could have made Dev’s intentionality even 50% less opaque, and it’s honestly exhausting. There’s at times been a strain of comments on reviews like this one where people complain about critics reviewing the show that could be instead of the show that is, but what else are you supposed to do when a show is just not working? Particularly in the case of a long-running show where you have plenty of evidence of what’s worked in the past, how can you not think back to the clear failures on the part of the writing staff to create the substance necessary to sustain ten episodes of storytelling at this juncture?

Whether intentional or not, “This Land is Our Land” has Margo Madison answer this very question. In a welcome return to a character we could have theoretically left behind, Margo is hearing about the invasion of Mars like everyone else back on Earth, and is surprised by a visit from Aleida’s daughter Graciana. Living in the uncertainty of the comms blackout means the teenager has no idea whether her mother is still alive, and she reaches out to Margo because her mother always talked about her as the person who could solve any problem. And to her credit, Margo tries valiantly, calling every number for every person she knows at NASA or anywhere else. And while she gets Will Tyler to pick up, it doesn’t get her anywhere. It doesn’t change anything. She has to tell Graciana that she did everything she could, but sometimes a problem can’t be solved. Sometimes you just have to make do with what you have in front of you.