Apple TV’s For All Mankind is back with another season, and we already have a murder on Mars! (I’ll come to that later). At least from the first episode, it is evident that the fifth season will heavily focus on the Mars settlement. People on Earth were disappointed when Goldilocks ended up in Mars orbit. The theft of the asteroid continued to be an important talking point for politicians and activists. Although Ed was facing trial, he couldn’t be brought back to Earth for health reasons. The new president refused to spend any more money on Mars, while Helios continued to expand its settlement. A new class of workers emerged on Mars known as the ‘Craters,’ because they made the journey in pressurized cargo crates. Mars now also has a governor appointed by the M6 nations, Leonid Polivanov, to maintain order in the Mars settlement. The heavy presence of the MPK (Mars PeaceKeepers) on Mars was constantly felt, but the people of the settlement had to make peace with it. Some time has passed, and Kelly’s son, Alex, is now an adult who has graduated from high school, although he’s completely clueless about his future. Alex is someone who was born and raised on Mars, and Kelly, though she’d thought she’d made the right decision by staying on the red planet, wasn’t sure anymore.
Spoiler Alert
Is Aleida the new Helios boss?
Aleida is the CEO of Helios, which is now a public company, and Dev had very little say in its day-to-day operations. Dev had made a radical announcement, stating that Helios intended on building a city on Mars called Meru, that could accommodate the living and working space of one million citizens. He wanted to build a self-sustaining city that would use the resources of Mars to their full potential. Dev had announced that within the next year, Helios would begin working on the project. It wouldn’t be just another base; he aimed to build homes where families could reimagine the red planet as their own, and even start a garden there! Aleida was not happy about this unapproved announcement. She couldn’t believe that Dev went on-air and discussed his plan to build a city even though it hadn’t been approved by the company. Aleida was told Dev had a pretty strong fan following on Mars, but she didn’t care. She was convinced that his plan was quite far-fetched, and they were not in a position to work on it. She knew her decision would upset Dev, but she didn’t really care. Aleida’s focus was on carrying out missions aimed at finding life in the solar system, and she believed that the board should invest in a worthwhile scientific discovery rather than fund Dev’s silly dream. She needed Helios to be the first to find life beyond Earth, especially since they already had a few competitors.
What was the objective of SDM?
Sons and Daughters of Mars (or SDM) was a committee that was formed in the Mars settlement and was headed by Miles Dave. Their goal was to have an elected member from the group represent them in the M-6. Miles and his team didn’t think it was fair that others got to decide how they should live, while they were not allowed to have any stake in these crucial decisions. As people living on Mars for years, they believed they deserved this basic right, and while they’d been sending petitions, no one seemed to care. They’d already sent five petitions, and some of the members feared that maybe the wording of the document wasn’t right, and perhaps that was why the authorities didn’t seem to understand what they wanted. Ed didn’t think that was the case; he believed that M-6 only cared about the iridium that was sent from Goldilocks to Earth every week. SDM thought that the people on Mars were being used and they had no control over their destiny. Even though they’d spent most of their lives living on Mars, they didn’t have any certainty when it came to their future. Any day they could be sent back to Earth against their wishes if they ‘stepped out of line.’ While Miles believed filing petitions was the way forward, Ed didn’t think so. He felt that they needed to take extreme steps if they wanted their voice to be heard and their opinion to be taken into consideration. But not everyone was up for doing something radical that could threaten what little they’d managed to achieve. Instead of a fresh start at human civilization, life on Mars was far more complicated!
Why did Kelly feel hopeless?
Aleida had been backing Kelly’s mission of finding life in Korolev Crater for ten years. Millions of dollars had been invested in the mission, but there was no positive result. Aleida wanted to keep pouring money into it, but her associate asked her to be honest and face reality. Well, Aleida couldn’t deny that the mission was a failure, and putting more money into it instead of other experimental missions, including finding life on another planet, was quite a waste. She had no choice but to reduce the funding for Kelly’s project, and while it wasn’t an easy decision, especially because they were friends, Aleida didn’t really have a choice. Kelly was visibly frustrated after another negative reading in ten years. She’d dedicated her entire life to the mission, and after ten years of negative results, she couldn’t help but think that maybe it was all for nothing. Ed didn’t lose hope; he encouraged Kelly to not give up, because he was confident that she was very close to her goal. Kelly felt all the more hopeless because of the funding cut; it was quite obvious that Aleida was also losing faith. She wondered if she made the right call by raising her son on Mars, and while Ed thought she was simply overthinking the situation, Kelly feared that she’d been unfair to her son. She’d denied him the opportunity to experience a normal life for the sake of her career, and now that even that was not turning out the way she’d hoped for, she was left wondering if it was all a big mistake.
Alex tried to convince himself that he loved his life on Mars, but he craved to experience the little joys that only Earth could offer, such as watching the waves crash onto the shore and feeling the sand pull from under his feet. He could experience a fraction of it using his mother’s VR headset, and that was his only source of joy. It was somewhat expected that Alex would find a job on Mars and continue living there, but that was clearly not what he really wanted. Just like his friends who’d graduated and were either taking up a college course on Earth or joining the military, he too wanted to know a world beyond the red planet, but he was too afraid to discuss what he really wanted with his mother. He didn’t want to disappoint her, and moreover, he didn’t really know exactly what he wanted to do on earth.
Alex found himself attracted to Miles’ younger daughter, Lily. She planned on studying journalism at Tulane, and she promised that she would be back on Mars after her course was over. While I didn’t really believe her, she seemed too attached to the place, and she deeply cared about the ‘Free Mars’ mission; she clearly was a lot like her father. Alex never really confessed his feelings for Lily, although he feared not seeing her again. We can assume we’ll see romance bloom between the two, and who knows, perhaps Lily’s passion to protect the rights of the people of Mars will inspire Alex as well, and together they might well fulfill SDM’s goal. Although Kelly might be feeling hopeless, chances are she will find what she’s searching for in the most unexpected way. Her discovery can completely change the future of the planet, and perhaps that idea alone will keep her digging for more, and hopefully she’ll find success.
Is Lee Jung-Gil the actual killer?
On the occasion of Alex’s graduation, Dev gifted him a dirt bike, and Alex was thrilled. He took it out for a ride, and he finally felt he was alive as he drove over the sand dunes. But his joy was short-lived, as he fell from the bike. Thankfully his suit was intact, and he wasn’t injured. To his horror, Alex noticed a dead body lying a few feet away from him. Soon, the MPK was informed, and while they at first assumed that it was another suicide case, they soon discovered they couldn’t have been more wrong. There had been previous cases where individuals had attempted to see how far they could get without a suit, and while they thought the victim had tried the same, Officer Boyd deduced there was something odd about this case. The man seemed to have run quite a distance from his rover, and that seemed almost impossible. The body was taken for autopsy, and upon analysis it was concluded that the body showed signs of rapid decompression, which meant that he died after being exposed to the Martian environment. The individual was named Yoon Tae-Min; he was a ‘Crater’ who’d claimed asylum from North Korea. Officer Boyd decided to express her concern, and she mentioned that she thought it was impossible that Tae-Min managed to run 400 yards without a suit. The doctor decided to check the eardrums, and they were shocked to discover that they were intact. If the deceased died as a result of exposure to the Martian environment, then his eardrums should have been torn, and the fact that they were in perfect condition suggested that he’d been killed and his body was left out in the open to make it look like a suicide. This was the first murder on Mars, and while the MPK hoped to keep the information to themselves, it soon made the headlines of global news channels. People had hoped that Mars would mark a new beginning for mankind, but at the end of the day, it was impossible to predict and control human instincts.
At the end of For All Mankind episode 1, MPK geared up to arrest their first homicide criminal, and shockingly, they ended up at Lee Jung-Gil’s doorstep and accused him of committing the crime. Jung-Gil was a North Korean astronaut, and the first person to have set foot on Mars. He shared a beautiful friendship with Ed, and in this episode, he’d told Ed that his wife had made a friend from Pyongyang; he was a Crater, and they met at one of the jobs she worked at. Lee didn’t approve of their friendship, and he’d even told her that he could earn enough to provide for his family, but Moon Yeong wanted to be financially independent, and it just didn’t sit right with Lee. Considering the victim was a Crater and a North Korean, does that mean Lee was the killer? Did he lose his temper and kill the man, fearing that his wife was in love with him? Does that also mean that the first man to step foot on Mars was also the first man to commit a murder? We’ll surely find out in the next episode.
