Week-to-Week: For All Mankind's Car Crash of a Character
The Trouble with Danny Stevens, who didn't need to be as big a problem as he has become
Danny Stevens is a car crash.
When For All Mankind—which I’ve been reviewing for subscribers here at Episodic Medium—returned for its second season, it made sense to have Gordo and Tracy’s eldest son become a more significant part of the show, but as the season progressed I realized that the show didn’t really see him as a character in his own right. He was, instead, a blunt object the writers could use to disrupt the existing order of things. There was no point during the affair with Karen where it registered as a story for Danny, his role in the story purely to wreak havoc. This made it easy to identify him as the one conflict in the season that didn’t really work—while the rest of the show’s conflict spun out from a long-term geopolitical struggle, Danny Stevens was pure soap opera, the aged-up child brought into the story to “shake things up.”1
In the show’s third season, however, the writers have attempted to flesh out this car crash of a character into something more meaningful in the wake of his parents’ death. After his own near-death experience aboard the Polaris, Danny enters into a spiral, and the only reason he doesn’t completely destroy his career as an astronaut is that Ed feels a responsibility to Gordo. With his parents gone, Danny has gained more of the story’s focus, and this should in theory have made the character and his motivations feel more dynamic and connected to the season’s storytelling. In practice, however, Danny Stevens is still a car crash, and the writers continue to struggle to grasp how to make that story work for that storytelling instead of against it.
Danny’s “Car Crash” moment this season was a tragic one: the explosion at the Helios/USSR drilling site in last week’s episode risks destroying the entire mission, and had a very good chance of claiming multiple lives. And there’s no question that the writers “showed their work” when it comes to why it happens: we have spent (too) much time with Danny showing up in space with a chip on his shoulder and then going full Swimfan with Ed as he works through his Daddy Issues, resulting in a disassociation with reality and an addiction to painkillers to numb himself to the world. With the show’s central thesis being how easy it is for things to go wrong in space, Danny was a liability the second Ed ignored Danielle’s demotion and put him on the Phoenix, and the drilling explosion was the car crash we had been waiting for ever since.
And while I am tempted to just say that Danny is a bad character, shouldn’t exist, and the show is wrong to be focusing on him, I don’t think a car crash is necessarily a problem for a show like For All Mankind. The issue, I’d argue, is that they failed to recognize the way to tell a car crash story without activating the kind of response I had to last week’s episode (and the Danny story as a whole as I’ve been reviewing the show weekly). There are two types of car crash stories that work, and the show’s decisions separated them from either of those paths.
The first type of car-crash story that works is the slow-motion car crash. In this case, you know the car crash is coming, but you see every nuance in a way that the characters themselves cannot. This is a natural type of story to tell in this context, as space exploration has so many moving parts that often only the audience often has the perspective to see an inevitable collision ahead. The key here, though, is that only the audience is watching things in slow motion, meaning that the other characters likely can’t see the crash ahead.
The second type of effective car-crash story is the fast-motion car crash. In this case, the many parts of space exploration are moving so quickly that we’re unable to see the crash coming. In this case, despite the fact that everyone knows a car crash is possible, neither the audience nor the astronauts could have predicted a particular outcome, meaning that we’re left to pick up the pieces afterward the same as they are.
The problem with Danny’s story this season is that it has been a normal-speed car crash. From the moment he went into space, we’ve known Danny is a liability, and he has continued to spiral further as the season has progressed. But beginning in last week’s episode “Bring It Down,” Danny’s problems became unavoidable for the characters within the show. Ed clearly identifies that he’s on drugs, while his run-in with Corrado’s dog shows erratic behavior, meaning that there is no way anyone within Helios could feel like he is just another, normal part of the crew. By bringing Danny’s behavioral shifts so into the open, there is no more claiming that the audience is seeing nuances that the other characters could be missing. When Ed makes the decision to keep Danny on Mars instead of sending him back to Phoenix, and when Corrado chooses to leave his post to run some numbers without giving it a second thought, those characters are ignoring the car crash that should be evident to them. And so when the car crashes, it doesn’t feel either satisfying or shocking—it just happens, selling out the characters around him who should have known better.
We needed to see either more or less for this car crash to work. Seeing more about the inner-working of the Helios crew and their interactions could have helped us understand why no one would push Ed on his decision to antagonize a derelict crew member but leave him in a mission critical position. Having a better sense of Corrado as a character could have made his decision to leave Danny solely in control of Comms more understandable. Heck, you could have even tapped into the fact Dev initially barely wanted to hire a proper space crew at all until Ed became involved. Yet none of this felt like it was highlighted, with the only real explanation being that Ed is blinded by his relationship with Gordo, which isn’t enough to justify the choices seen here. This could have been a slow-motion car crash with additional context, but it simply wasn’t there.
Yet there was another pathway to making the story work: showing us less of Danny’s spiral. We already knew going into the mission that Danny was unstable, but by showing us every moment of his descent into Full Swimfan we are too aware of the liability he represents to the mission. If we had simply been given hints of his behavior shifts as opposed to numerous shots of him popping pills and punching computer screens, the drilling explosion could have turned into a fast-motion car crash, where we knew it was a high-risk situation and that Danny was volatile, but we didn’t understand the degree to which he had become a liability.
I am open to the theory that the ill-will generated by the storyline with Karen last season meant that myself and other critics would have hated anything the show did with Danny this season—I won’t pretend I was not predisposed to being frustrated with the show’s choices around the character. But it isn’t just that the show chose to double down on Danny’s obsession with Karen, or that he’s gotten more point-of-view time than almost any other characters on Mars—it’s that the show is clearly aware that the character is a car crash waiting to happen, but failed to generate a story around that inevitable crash which avoided the frustrations around the character. It’s clear that the writers have more investment in Danny’s story than some viewers, but this has been clear since last season, and failing to manage that successfully undermined a thrilling moment of space tragedy in ways that were avoidable.
Episodic Observations
In terms of things I’m watching but not reviewing, I’m still making my way through the first season of The Expanse, which I’m committed to working through as the year goes on. It’s got that first season thing where it’s a good 90% world-building, but it’s compelling, and you can see the potential for it to deepen its story even as it remains fairly linear.
I started but have not finished the Lana Condor-starring Boo, Bitch, which comes from Awkward. producers Lauren Iungerich and Erin Ehrlich (if you couldn’t tell from the punctuation in the title)—just got distracted by other things, but I intend to work through it eventually. I chatted with Lauren at multiple stages of her Awkward. journey, and would love to hear more about her approach to teen TV after spending the last few years in the Netflix trenches with this, On My Block, and that show’s forthcoming spin-off.
I caught the first two episodes of the return of A&E’s Biography: WWE Legends series, focused on The Undertaker and Goldberg, and enjoyed them even though there’s a hagiographic bent to the approach. However, the third episode’s decision to focus on the Bella Twins felt like a betrayal of the principle behind the program: the idea they would be the first women to be featured as opposed to Trish Stratus or Lita rankles. I understand this is a marketing effort for WWE and that the Bellas represent more of the company’s current offerings, but still not okay. (I didn’t watch it, but I might catch the rerun this weekend to see how angry I am overall).
Although when soap operas do this they don’t actually have a time jump to justify it, the kids just age 5 years off-screen.
My only hope with the Danny character this season has been that at some point the show would, uh, swerve (sorry!) and acknowledge Danny’s trajectory for what it is: a response to the fact that someone who was a surrogate parent for most of his life had sex with him when he was still a teenager, and then (at best) prolonged that trauma with a pattern of emotional closeness-then-rejection that has lasted for more than a decade.
On the one hand, this would feel like a possible pay-off for all of the “Who is Danny to me, really?” business that Ed has been experiencing, and a powerful kind of story to tell on a show that deals in a multi-generational time frame. On the other hand, the "kids" on this show still feel like they exist primarily as supports or antagonists to the "parents," and I'm not sure the show is ready or willing to give them equal standing. (Or, tbh, to acknowledge the darkness of Karen's actions.)
Making this swerve even less likely is the fact that, in their responses to the backlash against the Danny & Karen storyline, the show’s creators have never given any hint that they view what happened as anything more serious or concerning than a generic affair. (On the official podcast, someone—possibly a writer?—said that when they heard some viewers characterize the “affair” as abuse they were really surprised, because that interpretation had never come up as a possibility during writing or filming.) It's an oversight that has dimmed some of my appreciation for their otherwise impressive character work, even as I keep hoping that maybe, at some point, they'll see things differently.
Chrisjen Avasarala is such a great character (and so indelibly played by Shohreh Aghdashloo). I hope you're enjoying her so far.