Season five of Apple’s popular space drama For All Mankind launches today. (See what I did there?) Episode one will be available for streaming today, with new episodes becoming available every Friday through the end of May.
The fifth season of For All Mankind begins in the 2010s, nine years after the “Goldilocks” asteroid heist was pulled off. While the Happy Valley base on Mars, which now has a population in the thousands, continues to thrive, tension continues to grow between the colony and the folks back home, as Earth governments seek to be more involved with the operation of the base. An unsettling event adds fuel to the debate about how law and order should be maintained on the red planet.
The series, which is set in an alternate timeline where the Soviet Union beat the United States in the race to put a man on the moon, began in the 1960s, and each succeeding season has been set in a time period around a decade or so after the events of the previous season.
(A personal aside, I was a bit less than 10 years old when the US put a man on the moon with the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, and I would sit directly in front of the family TV, drinking it all in until my parents forced me to go outside and play. Then, when I watched the first episode of For All Mankind, I was genuinely upset that the Ruskies had beaten us to the moon. The actual moon landing had that much impact me when I was a boy.)
Many familiar faces return this season, including Joel Kinnaman as astronaut Ed Baldwin (under layers and layers of old man makeup), as well as Margo (Wrenn Schmidt), Miles (Toby Kebbell), and Ed’s daughter Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) who all have thier own intertwining storylines this season.
Season five is the penultimate season of the series, and the sixth and final season has already begun production. A spin-off, series called Star City, which will focus on the Soviets Union, will premiere on May 29, 2026.
