For All Mankind - an (ongoing) review of a what-if series.

When I read Apple had made an original alternative history series about NASA and the space race with the Soviets, I was over the moon (pun intended). I really was looking forward to the first episode. And it was good. Okay, I realised they took a lot of liberties and immediately there were discussions online on whether it was realistic enough with all the initial deviations from our timeline. I didn't bother to elaborate on them, it is after all a work of fiction, just starting out at a point in real time.
I was prepared to put all of those incorrect things aside to just enjoy a different point of view, with some ficticious names and storylines. The first five episodes were very good. They focused on the somewhat clumsy efforts NASA took to get something done, some personal drama here and there, but they followed that history line. That was the base of the series. Good. It had good characters, the set dressing was meticulous and superb in its attention for contemporary details.

The last 4 episodes changed my opinion. After making a couple of well-placed jumps in time, they got stuck in 1974, with an absurd amount of huge disastrous events piling up on one another. So many, that it has not even degraded to a regular SF drama but to just plain unrealistic, in spite of all the detail and realism in all the props and sets.

Let me elaborate (and rant) a bit:
(**SPOILERS AHEAD**)

The series is created by the people who made the remake of Battlestar Galactica, which I haven't seen. Someone on Reddit told me that BSG also consisted of a follow-up of disastrous moments. Now, with a war-weary old battle cruiser and a battered fleet with ships in disrepair, I think such is very plausible. Things can fall apart. But For All Mankind is a series on Earth with an agency like NASA that tried to keep a kind of quality control over their missions and crew. You just cannot pile accidents up like that. In just four episodes, we now had:

• An exploding Saturn V on the launch pad, killing ground crew, 
• A stranded astronaut crew on the moon, one of which is slowly going mad,
• Female stranded astronaut intentionally breaks her arm to get them returned.
• An FBI agent on a commie-gay/lesbian witch hunt, 
• An astronaut's wife struggling to cope with the enormous stresses of her husband stranded on the moon and an apparently delinquent young son.
• Aformentioned delinquent young son gets fatally injured in an accident, 
• Stranded astronaut dad drinks a bottle of whiskey after hearing of his son's death and switches all communications off,
• Aforementioned stranded astronaut angrily destroys hidden Soviet spying equipment in the U.S. lunar mining operation. 
• a disastrous and very complex accident in space, killing one astronaut, and another one tumbling head over teakettle into space.
• The stranded astronaut apparently cold-bloodedly seems to kill a soviet cosmonaut in the airlock of his lunar base.
  

... what.

All of this above was happening in just about four episodes. That. Is. Too. Much. Much too much! It is not plausible any more, and just watching things go horribly wrong isn't exactly my idea of fun. So I decided to stop watching the series now. I was hoping for something at least vaguely realistic but this is beyond ridiculous. It might be a good symbol for the trainwreck that is America at the moment but I am afraid that the creators didn't have that in mind when they wrote the plot.

One of the things which are disappointing in this series is the odd change of pace half way through. The first half of the show kicks off in 1969 when a Soviet cosmonaut lands on the moon before the Americans. (Meaning the alternative storyline must start before 1966 when Korolyov died , leaving the N-1 unfinished.). After a nearly disastrous (you see, the calamities start already) Apollo 11 landing, we jump forward to Apollo 15 in 1971-72 and then another jump to Apollo 23 in 1974. Then, in the second half, it all grinds to a halt and for the rest of the first series we stay in 1974, with that pile of disasters. (did Apollo 13 happen? would they not have learned from that?)

Now I wished they had Focused a little more on stuff I found important as a space history enthusiast. Some personal stuff gets highlighted a lot but for example the death of Gene Kranz isn't. Another storyline I found disturbingly deriving from the main plotlines was the FBI agent with an obsessive anti communist ant gay attitude. That plot line didn't go anywhere except breaking up the romance of two female lovers, one of them being an astronaut candidate. Could have been done without the investigation and consecutive plotholes.

There is one storyline which I really liked, the one of character Karen Baldwin, the wife of the stranded astronaut. Actress Shantel VanSanten plays the super-stressed out, stuck-up conservative woman extremely well. She is so stuck in the world of maintaining an even strain, never showing any sign of stress, she is completely lost in it, she lost herself, especially after seeing her man stranded on the moon and losing her son in an accident. The way she finds solace from an unlikely ally, the hippy husband of one of the female astronauts, is fun to watch, sometimes even endearing and the only thing which still feels realistic.
But that just could be any story of a stressed-out woman becoming more loosened up and finding herself. Nothing to do with the space race. Also the unstable marriage of the Stevenses is a good storyline. 

But the last leg of the first series was way too much, disasterwise.

 [EDIT 20210228]: Yes it still is sometimes a bit- no, really over the top. There still are things I hardly can accept to be even vaguely realistic. The second series has started and we jumped to the early 1980s. With even our own Dutch astronaut Wubbo Ockels on the moon! That was a nice discovery. Although what happened was sad. The thing with FAM is the details. I guess the showrunner wants too much to happen in too short a time.  I have been keeping on watching the show and well, now it has reached the eighties I am willing to take almost everything. They left the 'historical' period anyway.

Still. Shuttles to the moon? Guns on the moon? DOD deeply influencing the civil space effort? I haven't seen episode S02E02 yet but I'd like to see the USA a little more totalitarian then. They kind of are anyway. (-;

[EDIT 20210419]: I actually really enjoy this second series a lot. It is a bit unrealistic of course but on the other hand there are many things which are very enjoyable. The storylines are not brimmed with disasters, which I appreciate a lot. Just one airplane accident without fatal consequences. The rate of stuff happening has been lowered a lot and I feel this is helping with the realism. The big weird thing is weapons on the moon. We only get to see the story from the American side and I would have liked to see it from the Russian/Soviet side as well to get a little more perspective. The personal storylines are well-written and often surprising. I really enjoy seeing Tracy Stevens having changed from little underachiever to arrogant overprivileged socialite astronaut with a drinking and nicotine problem. I enjoy Molly Cobb's storyline. I absolutely like Shantel van Santen's acting. She's very good in the stressed-out astronaut's wife not even trying any more to 'maintain an even strain' . There was a family fight scene in one of the episodes where even wooden actor Joel Kinnamon was great.
That new shuttle design, it's weird and I don't know whether it would actually work in real life but for some reason I can accept this alternative timeline better than the one they had in the first series. I guess it is because back then, between 1960-1972, what happened in spaceflight was very condensed and clear. 

All in all, the series is getting a two thumbs up from me. It surely has gotten better the second series.

(On another note, I read a couple of days back that they canceled the NatGeo/Disney 'The Right Stuff' series. And that's good. Because that one was really, awfully, astonishingly bad. That story originally was deeply rooted in realism and history but the writers took everything they could and enlarged it into a frankenstein's monster-like depiction of what really happened. And they kept the spaceflight action to an absolute minimum. In all episodes I saw I almost never saw a spacecraft or a jet. No 'top of the pyramid', no Yeager, no Beemans, no Pancho's, no airbases, almost no training for flights, nothing about the space effort, just talking men and women, in a setting like it was a suburban 1960s period series. Nothing more. Intrigues, competitive people, envy, stuff like in any soap opera. Tom Wolfe, who endorsed the seris before he died, will be finally stopping rotating in his grave. This was a disgrace for the book and the original film. And just to think what they could have made from it. The X-1, the X-2, the X-15, Neil's rising star, a better detailing of the Mercury flights, a better and honest depiction of what happened when Gus Grissom's hatch blew off, maybe even a little rehabilitation for Carpenter? Maybe taking it even further and do Gemini and Apollo? No, they decided to degrade it to an ordinary soap fight between two men who in real life didn't fight like that at all. Good they cancelled it. It was awful.)

To be continued?