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Rating: 4/5 stars
Verdict: Season 5 of For All Mankind gets off to a slightly uneven start, weighed down by its own sprawling history. But the ambition, scale and character work are still there — and if the show finds its footing, it’s set up to stick the landing.
Release schedule: Episode 1 is available to stream now. Episodes 2-10 drop weekly on Fridays.
Where to watch: Apple TV
"For All Mankind" season 5 opens not with a bang, but with a nagging question: Um, what exactly happened last season? After the customary “here’s the state of the world” montage, I found myself pausing to pull up a recap of season 4 (this YouTube video was very helpful).
"For All Mankind" is one of the most ambitious shows on television, constantly leaping forward in time and reshaping its world. And look, I love that big-swing energy, but we’ve reached a point where the timeline is moving so fast it’s starting to feel like homework is required. If you forget a character or plot point, you'll feel a bit lost.
After the recap and watching the premiere episode, the good news is that once you re-acclimate, the show does what it’s always done: pull you into a world that feels both expansive and oddly intimate, even when it’s in deep space.
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Kelly is currently watching "The Pitt," "Top Chef," "Shrinking," "Survivor 50," "High Potential" and "Age of Attraction." Yeah, that's a diabolical watch list.
What is 'For All Mankind' season 5 about?
At this point, "For All Mankind" has moved well beyond its original “what if the Soviets landed on the Moon first?” hook. The show is now less about space exploration and more about what comes after: Colonization has consequences; progress creates friction.
Season 5 picks up in 2012, with Mars no longer a frontier but a functioning — and increasingly restless — society. Happy Valley has evolved into a real community, complete with families, jobs and a new generation that’s grown up almost entirely off Earth. That includes Alex Poletov Baldwin (now played by Sean Kaufman), Kelly’s son, who’s now coming into his own alongside other young Mars-born characters figuring out what their future looks like and whether that future is tied to Earth at all.
Because that’s the real conflict of the season: Mars vs. Earth. The colonists want autonomy. Earth, unsurprisingly, wants control, especially since money, resources and political power are on the line.
Even as the show shifts focus to the next gen, it continues to track its legacy characters. Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) is — somehow, at the age of what must be 120 — still very much part of the picture. Aleida (Coral Peña) remains a key player, tethered to Margo (Wrenn Schmidt) in a relationship that’s as complicated as ever. And Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) and Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi) are still chasing their big-picture visions.
The premiere episode also introduces a murder mystery, adding a procedural element to the story that's a bit unusual for "For All Mankind." More on that later.
Here comes the next generation (but old faces are still in the picture)
That's just the tip of the asteroid. The premiere is trying to juggle a lot of plot threads and characters at once — maybe too many of them. The thing that made me pause and watch a recap was the appearance of Miles Dale (Toby Kebbell), the oil rig worker whose existence I'd completely forgotten.
I'm kind of shocked at how much of the show still revolves around Ed Baldwin. How is this man still alive? And why isn't he in some kind of elder prison for his role in the Goldilocks heist? The show acknowledges his age, but doesn’t really reckon with what that should mean.
In a more believable turn, Aleida continues to be one of the show’s strongest characters, and her relationship with Margo (in prison, as she should be) is one of the few emotional threads that consistently lands. There’s deep history there, and the show wisely plays on it.
The newer additions help balance things out. Sean Kaufman, coming off "The Summer I Turned Pretty," is a strong fit as Alex. I'm intrigued to see how this Mars-raised kid grapples with adulthood in the coming interplanetary conflict.
Back to the murder mystery element ... I genuinely don't know what to feel. It feels tonally mismatched with the other storylines, though I'm sure the writers have a plan that will slowly be revealed over the course of the season. (I'm also perturbed that Gordo Steven's name has become a kind of throwaway joke to refer to people who die of atmospheric exposure.) That aside, I'm glad to see Mireille Enos as the cop investigating the case, and I hope we get a true "The Killing" reunion between her and Kinnaman.
Verdict: Big, messy and still one of the best shows on television
Based on the first episode alone, season 5 of "For All Mankind" feels like a show in transition. It’s still wildly ambitious and operating on a scale most series wouldn’t attempt. But it’s also working through some growing pains as it figures out how to balance its legacy characters with its future, and how to keep its sprawling story from becoming unwieldy.
Even with a slightly uneven start, "For All Mankind" remains exactly what it’s always been: a little messy, thoroughly compelling and impossible to quit. And with the show recently renewed for a sixth and final season, there’s at least some reassurance that all of this is building toward a defined endgame.
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