This post contains spoilers for the Season 5 finale of For All Mankind
To borrow a line from the South Park feature film, all the Baldwins are dead as For All Mankind wraps up its fifth season. Well, okay… not all. The Season 5 finale, “This Land is our Land,” leaves one member of the Apple TV space drama’s first family standing: Alex Baldwin (Sean Kaufman), the grandson of pioneering astronaut Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and the son of ace scientist and alien life discoverer, Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu).
The poor kid has had to endure a season-long Baldwin killing spree that started with Ed’s death from cancer in the third episode, and culminated in Kelly’s heroic sacrifice on Titan, the moon of Saturn where her story — and the show’s penultimate year — comes to an end. And that’s on top of the deaths of his father Alexei Poletov (Alexei Poletov) and his grandmother Karen Baldwin (Shantel VanSanten) way back in Season 3. Clearly, being a Baldwin in the space program is a dangerous business.
As Mankind creators and showrunners Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi tell Gold Derby, though, Alex’s mom almost escaped the Grim Reaper’s scythe. “We knew Ed was going to die this season — that was always the plane,” Wolpert says. “But Kelly was a surprise to us. I remember when the idea first came up, we were like, ‘We can’t do that; her father just died, that’s crazy!’
“But then the closer we got to the finale, the more it made sense both narratively and emotionally,” he continues. “It’s an appropriate choice for Kelly, because she’s embracing her father’s ‘Go for it’ attitude. She’s also the reason that her team is on Titan, so she feels like she should be the person to stay behind. So it felt like the right choice, but it was still a really painful choice.”
And, to be clear, Kelly is definitely dead despite two elements that may fuel internet rumors to the contrary: the fact that we never see a body and that our final glimpse of her comes as she’s wading through a pool of water filled with gleaming bioluminescent microbes. If For All Mankind were another kind of science fiction yarn — like, say, Cocoon — viewers might suspect that Kelly had wandered into a fountain of youth that could save her life. Or, as Nedivi jokes, it could also serve as the start for an intergalactic horror tale.
“Kelly is going to come out of the water as a giant space alien,” he teases. “It’s going to possess her, and then she’s going to start eating all of the other planets in Season 6. We’re taking a horror turn!”
“It’s not regenerative or transformative,” Wolpert breaks in, bringing the conversation back down to Earth… uh, Titan. “It’s just a lot of bioluminescent microbes inspired by ones that exist here on Earth, only these are methane-based. We were talking to our science advisors about finding another type of life that’s not carbon-based and how if you find those two in the same solar system, that means life is common. It was such a cool idea that we really leaned into and Titan was the perfect place to do that.”
Look for the discovery alien life on Titan to be one of the major story threads that runs through the show’s sixth and final season, which is headed into production later this year. On a break from breaking the storyline for the last ten episodes, Wolpert and Nedivi offer a glimpse of where they’ve been, and what’s to come.
Close encounters of the microbe kind
If Kelly’s death wasn’t part of the duo’s original plan for Season 5, the idea of her confirming that life exists on other planets than Earth definitely was.
“That goes all the way back to the very first episode of the series,” Wolpert says. “We had a road map for where we wanted to go with the show, and that eventually we’d want to get to this point of it being about life. This is us planting our flag in the sand and setting up what will be the driving force of Season 6 — this exploration of where her discovery leads people.
“It’s also a journey that Kelly has been on since Season 3 or 4,” he adds. “We wanted to show how any exploration into science or nature leads down the wrong path many times. There’s a lot of failures on the road to success, and that’s been both her journey and the journey of the show.”
For All Mankind‘s dedicated fanbase have always been drawn to the show’s commitment to creating an alternate history of the space race that’s filled with fantastical technology that’s all rooted in fact. And the showrunners emphasize that will be driving the way they approach the question of what extraterrestrial life looks like as humankind pushes further out into the stars. In other words, don’t expect to meet aliens that look like E.T. or even Rocky.
“We always try to keep our feet as firmly planted in science as possible,” Nedivi stresses. “There are times where the drama compels you to slightly diverse, but the DNA of our show is to do what feels real. That’s going to be our guiding principal with the continued search for life going forward into Season 6.”
Children of the revolution
The central arc for Season 5 found Alex and his fellow Martian colonists seeking independence from any and all terrestrial powers, resorting to armed revolution when their desires went unmet and ultimately winning their independence. If that syncs up nicely with the 250th anniversary of another successful revolution that Americans are primed to celebrate this summer, the showrunners insist that specific bit of timing didn’t register in their minds.
“We didn’t think about that, which is maybe crazy,” Wolpert says. “But we did think a lot about the American Revolution and what led to it. Certainly, traveling from Mars to Earth is not dissimilar from going to England to the U.S. at that time, and the idea of trying to hold power over people that live far away never quite works well in our history, and it doesn’t work well on Mars either.”
In a notable shift from Seasons 3 and 4 — when humankind first made it to Mars — much of the action this year played out entirely on the red planet, with only cursory trips back to Earth. Nedivi expects some of that balance to be restored in the final season, but indicates that Mars is going to be the new center of the show’s universe due to its proximity to the worlds where previously undiscovered life may exist.
“We definitely back to Earth in Season 6, but there’s this interesting evolution of whether the divisions between the two planets still exist or if they find ways to come together,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of fun playing with that.”
Better call Ken
Speaking of the American Revolution, the showrunners would love to see Ken Burns give the For All Mankind universe his signature documentary treatment. “That’s my dream,” Wolpert says, laughing. “Slow zoom-ins on pictures of the characters, love letters; I’d watch that documentary!”
Joking aside, the creators did brush up on their Burns — specifically his landmark Civil War series — as they went about writing the Martian conflict. “We really connected with the idea of brother versus brother,” Wolpert recalls. “That was part of a lot of the stories you hear from the Civil War era, and also the idea that wars are decided by men who frequently aren’t fighting in them. Our show has never shied away from showing the ugly truth of these decisions or the morally complex choices people have to make. If we didn’t dive into the whole bloody truth, it would feel like a cheat.”
For the actual warfare sequences, the duo took inspiration from later conflicts, including the trench combat that defined World War I. That sense of confinement made sense for this particular revolution given that the soldiers had to fight inside twisty space station corridors instead of on outdoor battlefields.
“Staging warfare on another planet is an interesting challenge, especially because we’re not the kind of show that’s just going to break the rules of physics or space,” Wolpert notes. “Even when it comes to the guns, there’s a danger of firing bullets inside these pressurized spaces because if you hit the wrong wall, you’re done. We wanted to capture the planning and the strategy, but also the chaos of war.”
Things to come
Season 5’s epilogue reveals that For All Mankind‘s final time jump will deposit viewers in the year 2020 when the series returns next year. While the show’s alternate timeline always incorporates some of events that happened in our reality, the creators remain tight-lipped about whether their characters have lived through the Covid-19 pandemic or the first Donald Trump administration. “We’re going to leave those surprise open,” Wolpert says. “There’s always our spin on what actually happened in that era, and I’m sure we’ll do it again.”
One thing they won’t be doing, though, is recasting any of the remaining characters, including Alex, who will be almost a decade older when we meet him again. “Our makeup department has gotten really good at aging people, but it’s easier with a younger cast because you don’t need to put on as many decades,” notes Wolpert.
And while it’s up to Alex to carry on the Baldwin legacy from Season 1, at least two other major characters from the show’s ’60s-era freshman year are still alive: Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) and Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt). Their fates will likely be determined by or before the series finale, although the showrunners note that they’re not making it a mission to continue populating the For All Mankind graveyard.
“In the beginning, we found ourselves falling into the trope of people having to die to leave the show,” says Nedivi. “But then we decided that they can just leave the story and their lives go on! So there are characters that are still kicking around that may come back at some point during Season 6. There’s definitely the potential for that.”
