The One Unforgivable Sin: For All Mankind Season 5 Is Boring

How the Soviet-beat-us-to-the-Moon alternate history epic degenerated into a purposeless, lowbrow Martian soap opera with wooden characters and squandered stakes.

“The one unforgivable sin is to be boring” Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22

Season 5 of For All Mankind has committed the unforgivable sin. It is boring. I have to force myself to stay tuned in, or to care about the characters, or to be interested in the plot. I even have to strain to remember the characters’ names. I just don’t care. It’s become an insipid, lowbrow soap opera set on Mars. It is replete with wooden, purposeless characters orbiting one another in a purposeless universe.

The show has a fantastic alternative history premise: The Soviets beat us to the moon. What happens now changes the trajectory of the world’s future history! And in Seasons 1 and 2, that was the premise that guided the show. It was buttressed by fairly animated characters who were trying to do the right thing, sometimes failing (Margo giving information to the Soviets) and sometimes succeeding (Ed didn’t kill the Soviet cosmonaut trespassing in his mine). Their struggle, however, was always clear and their choices interesting if ill-considered.

Fast-forward to Season 5. For whatever reason, in this most recent season the writers decided to jump nine years in the future. The protagonist, Ed Baldwin, is old, wears heavy prosthetics, and comes off as dyspeptic and aggrieved. Margo is curdled, imprisoned in what I imagine to be a federal penitentiary. (The prison allows touching and gifts?!). Dev is acting as if what he’s building matters, but we are clueless as to why to whom. Ed’s daughter, Kelly, is still searching for life on Mars. And there seems to be some kind of race to find life in the solar system with Titan rover signals somehow factored in, and life’s discovery seems to have some kind of commercial use, but we’re not told what that is. Some old stoic North Korean refugee is in the mix too, and he’s remarkably nonchalant about being arrested for murder.

Adding to the pointless malaise, the sets are uninspired. There’s a lot of space in their domiciles, the gravity is treated the same (Mars is about 38 percent of ours) as Earth’s with no explanation given or shown in the CGI, and the promenade looks eerily similar to shows like Babylon 5 and Deep Space 9, but more sterile and less frequented (despite police officer’s warnings of overcrowding).

For all the rhetoric coming from Earth, there’s really no fundamental difference, as far as I can tell, between Earth’s inhabitants and Mars’. People come and go between the two planets, with seemingly little diplomatic hassle and medical quarantine required. Contrast this to the Expanse, where Mars and the Belters had their own dialect, traditions, and culture. In For All Mankind, the inhabitants of Mars and Earth are homogeneous, even fungible, and the tension between them comes off as forced, artificial, and manufactured for some unknown plot tension.

Like Man in the High Castle’s alternative history premise in which the Nazis won WW2, For All Mankind has a lot to work with but for whatever reason the writers have chosen to not lean into why viewers who enjoy this genre would tune in. We have incredibly cool space technology and a colony on Mars, but what are the tradeoffs? What was sacrificed to achieve this? I was stunned that the inhabitants of this parallel world have phones remarkably similar to ours and 3D goggles that look like Apple’s. The writers could have played with that so much more, showing what this parallel universe did not develop at the expense of what they did. But that is not explored.

Nor is the geopolitical intrigue that we saw in early seasons plumbed. The US-Soviet tension has simply vanished: It is unclear whether it was resolved, how, or when, but the overarching ideological conflict that once defined this universe—one of its most compelling features—is entirely ignored.

This limited exploration of divergence is both a lost opportunity and baffling. If you want to see a fantastic exploration of divergence in parallel worlds, see the grossly underrated show Counterpart. It aired on Starz almost 10 years ago, and it’s a model for parallel worlds, as is Apple TV’s more recent Dark Matter (2024).

For All Mankind’s early seasons leaned harder into stakes, moral gray areas, and “what if” consequences. Season 5’s premiere and episode 2 shift toward personal grudges, family tensions, and table-setting for a space-elevator/murder subplot. It’s very soapy.

With all the fantastic sci-fi shows on Apple TV alone, like Silo, Pluribus (Review part 1 and part 2), Dark Matter, Severance, Season 1 of Invasion, Season 3 of Foundation, etc., Season 5 of For All Mankind is a missed opportunity that cannot be waved away as “maybe it’s the time between seasons.” The Soviet moon victory was always a vehicle for exploring sustained geopolitical trade-offs, not a launchpad for generic colony soap. With Season 6 already confirmed as the finale, the series has one season left to recover the premise that made it distinctive. As it stands after two episodes, Season 5 has traded that distinctiveness for familiarity, and the disappointment is not premature. It is earned by what is already on screen.