Review: For All Mankind, "Stranger in a Strange Land" | Season 3, Episode 10
An often-thrilling finale can't overcome the season's miscalculations
The climactic moment of For All Mankind’s third season is a pregnant woman strapped to the top of a spacecraft preparing to propel herself the last 5% of the way while her father driving the spacecraft prepares for a death-defying landing back on Mars, all while her mother/his ex-wife discovers an in-progress domestic terror attack ongoing at NASA in Houston.
You could argue that this isn’t that different from a Soviet invasion of an American lunar base while the base in question is about to meltdown, all happening at the same time as a proposed symbolic handshake between the two countries. As For All Mankind has dug deeper into its alternate history, its space opera has naturally become the backdrop for very real human conflicts, situations that would naturally extend beyond our own planet in an environment where space travel and exploration remained a key force of political will and technological progress.
But there’s a number of distinctions between these two climaxes…