Review: For All Mankind, "Bring It Down" | Season 3, Episode 7
Nothing brings down a great show like a bad character
I know I said last week that I was going to consign my complaints about Danny to the stray observations, but “Bring It Down” has given me no choice. For All Mankind is a very compelling show that revels in the sense that anything could go wrong at any moment, but that doesn’t work when the thing that’s going wrong is a story that is not working on any level, and this hour faces some significant struggles as a result.
To this point, Danny’s storyline has been consigned to a smaller corner of the story by the need to split time between the Helios mission and what became the NASA/Soviet cooperative. But with the Soviets and Helios cutting a deal with the discovery of the water source, NASA is basically excised from the episode—we see Kelly blowing a kiss to Sergei as he departs, and then complaining to both Sergei and her father that their mission is ignoring the scientific advances on microbial life forms, but the aftermath of NASA being stranded is barely a concern.…