Behind ‘For All Mankind’s Season 3 Opening Polaris Disaster

There’s a single shot in For All Mankind‘s Season 3 premiere that will make my skin crawl forever. It’s not cloaked in darkness, nor does it focus on some otherworldly monster. It’s simply a shot of a wedding cake in a brightly lit lounge. Spoilers for For All Mankind Season 3 Episode 1 “Solaris,” but that frightening twist is that the cheery bride and groom topper are sinking into the cake. That’s because this wedding is happing in outer space and there’s something wrong with the gravity. Polaris, the space hotel in question, is spinning so quickly that gravity is steadily rising to deadly levels and none of the wedding guests realize it. They’re just drinking and dancing and laughing, as the wedding cake topper foretells doom.

For All Mankind Season 3 Episode 1 “Polaris” on Apple TV+ doesn’t just herald the return of one of TV’s most beloved cult hits, but it gives viewers perfect space horror film in under 60 minutes. It’s tight, tense, brilliantly plotted television. The episode somehow manages a magic trick in an otherwise bloated TV landscape. It catches us up on what the characters have been up to for the last decade while building a pulse-pounding action spectacle — all in the space of a normal episode of TV drama. For All Mankind Season 3 comes out swinging.

For All Mankind Season 3 opens in 1992. NASA, run by Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt), is gearing up to race the USSR to Mars by 1996. Former astronaut Ellen Wilson (Jodi Balfour) is running to be the Republican Party’s candidate for President. Karen Baldwin (Shantel VanSanten) is now a powerful entrepreneur, having franchised the NASA hangout bar, The Outpost, and invested that money into space tourism. Her and partner Sam Cleveland’s (Jeff Hephner) latest gamble is on a lavish space hotel called Polaris, which is structured like a giant ring that creates its own gravity by spinning.

Months before the hotel’s official launch, Karen and Sam welcome aboard some familiar faces, including Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall), for a wedding. However when debris from a faulty North Korean space launch hits the hotel, the problem escalates into a veritable disaster. The hotel begins picking up speed, making it harder for someone to space walk out to fix the problem while the gravity swiftly amps up.

For All Mankind co-creator and co-executive producer Ronald D. Moore told Decider that the inventive idea to build the episode around the threat of gravity came straight from the show’s writers’ room. “We were talking about doing something with the space hotel. Okay, we wanted something to go wrong and what are the various things that can go wrong and we were looking for a crisis that we hadn’t seen a million times before or that the show hasn’t done.”

“As we were talking about the idea that it spins to create an artificial gravity environment, we just went, ‘Well what if it started going faster? And what if the gravity increased?’ None of us had really seen that before, about the danger in space being too much gravity on a spaceship and we thought that would be fun and interesting and let’s do that.”

“Yeah, it was a perfect little Sharknado,” For All Mankind star Krys Marshall told Decider. “The Polaris set is wild. It’s shaped like this massive half dome so when you’re on it, if you’re on the far side, it really is a high pitch. It’s almost like an amusement park ride. Every move you make, you’re kind of walking on an angle.”

Marshall’s co-star Joel Kinnaman said it was difficult walking on the Polaris set. “When you’re walking down, you had to lean a little bit forward and when you’re walking up, you have to lean a little bit backwards. It was hard to get that right and get that walk right,” he said.

“It was pretty difficult physically because for the characters it’s supposed to feel like they’re just walking because this thing is spinning to create gravity so wherever they are in that spinning circle it’s supposed to be, they’re just walking on a flat surface. But for us who are playing it, we’re walking in a half pipe and it was pretty tricky.”

Ironically, the actors had an easier time playing Polaris’s big gravitational leaps. “The artificial gravity is easy to play because the set is just so ‘fun house mirrors,'” Marshall said.

“After a certain point you can’t even walk. You just lie down and you’re being pushed up. It’s like being on a pretty intense merry-go-round,” Kinnaman said. “We were just watching all these kinds of centrifugal experimental things where you see people walking in a similar kind of device and seeing how they behave when they were walking and were just trying to replicate that.”

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Marshall said that the For All Mankind Season 3 premiere was an example of “simple, good sci-fi storytelling,” that offered an extra treat for her.

“The blessing of our show is that we’re all really close. The curse is that because our stories take place literally on different worlds, there’s some of us who spend the whole season [in space], some of us who spend the whole season in Houston. So we literally never get to work together,” Marshall said. “Shantel [VanSanten] and I are super close in real life but we never get to work together! So that Polaris episode was really lovely because we got to spend a lot of time together.”

See? All that death and destruction and drama was really just a celebration of friendship. For Krys Marshall and Shantel VanSanten, that is.

For All Mankind Season 3 Episode 1 “Polaris” is now streaming on Apple TV+.