‘For All Mankind’ EP Ronald D. Moore Breaks Down That Mars Baby Twist

For All Mankind Season 3 Episode 8 “The Sands of Ares” deals with the horrific aftermath of last week’s seismic disaster. Spoiler alert, but some of our favorite Helios astronauts and Russian cosmonauts perish in the fallout of the drill’s destruction, while Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and Danny Stevens (Casey W. Johnson) are stuck buried in the middle of nowhere. As always with Apple TV+‘s For All Mankind, ingenuity saves the day — for Ed and Danny, at least — while a totally mundane hiccup brings about tragedy. After initially surviving the disaster, Aleksei Poletov (Pawel Szajda) succumbs to internal bleeding and dies, leaving his Mars hookup Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) heartbroken and, uh, pregnant.

For All Mankind’s latest dramatic cliffhanger deals with the surviving Russian cosmonauts discussing the fact that Kelly doesn’t realize she’s pregnant with Aleksei’s Mars baby. The Russkies see the pregnancy as a major liability. After all, they didn’t set out for Mars with a baby-sized space suit or even one fit for pregnancy. (They also didn’t leave Earth with condoms, apparently?)

So what happens next? Will Kelly decide to keep the baby? Will she be forced to terminate the pregnancy? Will the baby emerge from her belly like the alien in Alien? Most importantly, how did For All Mankind‘s writers come up with the idea of an unplanned Martian love baby?

For All Mankind co-creator and co-showrunner Ronald D. Moore told Decider, “As we were talking about the Mars mission and these Mars missions are so much longer, that they’re years long things… Well, you have men and women out there. Are they not gonna have sex? Is this not going to happen? That felt unrealistic.”

Moore went on to point out that it was possible that in the rush of beating Russia and Helios to Marsh, NASA maybe didn’t plan for every single hiccup. And maybe that includes packing contraceptives with the astronauts’ supplies.

“What are the consequences of that? How much has NASA planned for this and how much are they flat-footed by it?” Moore said. “It just seemed like something that was interesting to sort of play in the show.”

So now on top of everything else, a grieving Kelly is going to have to deal with being potentially pregnant on Mars. Oh, and to make things all the more dramatically raw? Her own over-protective dad, Ed, is going to be right there by her side.

Let’s just say the last two episodes of For All Mankind Season 3 are being set up to be extremely interesting indeed…