The fifth season of For All Mankind sees humanity colonizing Mars as astronaut Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnamon) faces one final mission
If you have followed the Space Race on For All Mankind since its first season, you knew there was a good chance this day would come. After leading early efforts to put a man on the Moon in the late 1960s, then climbing the ladder at NASA in the ’80s before joining private company Helios Aerospace in the ’90s, which led him to Mars where he would live out the rest of his days, dapper astronaut Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) finally reached his zenith.
The alt-history drama — set in an alternate reality in which the Space Race between the Soviet Union and the USA never ended — was rarely precious about keeping characters alive, but, somehow, a farewell to Ed Baldwin always seemed unlikely. Having portrayed the character from age 35 to 82, even Kinnaman found it hard to let go of Ed. “I was overwhelmed by how emotional I got. It was like saying goodbye to a close friend,” he tells TV Week. “Usually when you’re touching on different ages, it’s a couple of scenes in an epilogue. But to sit for six months [at a time], in these different ages and going through all these different phases of life, it really puts you in an existential mind frame.”
Before Father Time comes for Ed, there was still one last mission. Let’s be honest, this man was never going to go out with a whimper. “I loved the last two episodes [of Ed’s arc],” says Kinnaman. “I loved the writing so much because I felt like his last act was so character-defining. He decided to sacrifice his life to save a friend.” Indeed, those first three episodes of the season — the last three of Ed’s life — were ultimately emblematic of the character’s core foundation, even as he evolved and matured as a man. “Ed was always courageous and he always had a big ego that got him in trouble, and he could be really selfish, but he was the most loyal friend, and he had a moral centre,” says Kinnaman. “He would not break his morals. And the older he got, that started to pit him against the establishment. It pushed him into being a rebel. That was one of my favourite turns — that he started saying ‘F*** you!’ to the Man.”
That Kinnaman departed the long-running series just as his The Killing co-star Mireille Enos joined the show is nothing but ironic. While Ed Baldwin and Celia Boyd, a member of the Peacekeeper Security Force on Mars, share just one brief scene, Enos still felt like her former colleague was able to help her into the fold. “My very first scene that I shot — a small scene where I’m sitting in Ilya’s bar — he had been shooting on that set just before me. That was a nice way to start my journey, having my friend there to lead me in,” she says. “But he was in his 80-year-old age makeup — that was a trip! I kept staring at his face, how the prosthetics were working, and it was distracting.”
For Enos, making her entrance this late in the critically lauded series added some extra pressure. “Those characters are so beloved,” she says. “The fanbase is so loyal to them that it felt a little like stepping into your dad’s shoes, trying to fill them. These brand-new characters, in season five, that have to carry the story to whatever the finale of this series is, it felt like a big responsibility.” Thankfully, she didn’t face that challenge alone, but alongside fellow newbie Tyler Labine (New Amsterdam) as Celia’s partner, Fred Stanislaus. “We realized very quickly that we were going to be actual friends and not just scene-mates,” she says. “Both of us whispered to each other, ‘I feel like it’s funny that I’m on this show. I wouldn’t naturally think of myself, the kind of work that I do, as a shoo-in for this.’ But we became allies, and I really think it reads [onscreen], because so much of the relationship of these two characters is that they only have each other.”
The Peacekeepers are going to need all the collegial support they can get, as Mars increasingly starts to resemble Earth, with all its social and institutional problems. Tasked with keeping the colony from descending into chaos is Mars governor Lenya Polivanov, played by yet another newcomer: Costa Ronin. “This is the first season, I believe, that we are not looking at clear allegiances to the United States, the USSR or other countries. We see the development of allegiance to Mars,” he says. “If you look at history, there’s a mother state that discovers the colony and the colony gets populated. It starts to develop its own rules, laws and problems. Then it develops trade. And, at some point, it becomes a little bit too big. It starts to make its own decisions, and those decisions go not necessarily aligned with the mother state.”
Although Polivanov is entangled with the corporate interests conspiring to crush the working class, he is also a man of the people. “He comes from the country where nobody was bigger than the common goal. To him, the idea of ‘himself’ is not as important as the idea of ‘us’ as a collective,” Ronin explains. “So, he’s facing this duality of what’s important for him and for his job. His plan is ideally to go back and become the next president of the USSR. He has to maintain all these relationships with the USSR, the president of the United States and other nations. But at the same time, he understands the plight of the people. He understands the trajectory of Mars because it’s the same trajectory that any other country on Earth has followed.”
What For All Mankind continues to perpetuate is hope, even in the face of an uprising on Mars. “The whole show is built on this revisionist history idea that positive competitiveness can drive you to excel — and that in this version of the world, these scientists, these amazing minds hope for something bigger beyond what is ‘achievable,’” says Enos. “And, individually, they each hope to discover the best version of themselves, and hope that they can continue to evolve and make alliances with other nations — that intelligence and common goals can build relationships that cross the aisle or national boundaries.”
For All Mankind, streaming Fridays on Apple TV