For All Mankind Season 4 Episode 10 Review: Perestroika

For All Mankind Season 4 Episode 10, “Perestroika,” is a supersized finale that brings the space drama’s fourth season to a dramatic and tension-filled end. 

In our timeline, the word “Perestroika” specifically refers to the program instituted in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s to restructure his country’s economic and political policy, in an attempt to bring it up to par with capitalist countries like the United States. In the world of For All Mankind, while the Soviets have a booming economy and a close friendship with the U.S. as a result of the space race, the battle for the Goldilocks asteroid — and with it, the future of Mars — may serve a similar purpose. 

(First: apologies for the tardiness of this review, yours truly had COVID, but it feels wrong to not cover the end of the season!)

“Progress is never free,” Margo tells Aleida, echoing the words that she herself was told long ago by Nazi defector Wernher von Braun. “There is always a cost.” 

Your mileage may vary about how seriously Margo ought to take the advice of a guy who may or may not have ignored the existence of concentration camps in the name of scientific progress, but this statement rings increasingly true as the For All Mankind finale continues. Progress isn’t free. And everyone — including Margo — will have to pay a price. 

Yes, some of her behavior is clearly motivated by her fury over Sergei’s murder — something the episode dedicates surprisingly little time to, outside of the two knockout soundless scenes where Aleida and Margo separately learn the truth of his fate — but she’s also right: If Irina and the rest of the M-7 manage to bring Goldilocks to Earth, the Mars experiment is, for all intents and purposes, dead. What country will spend billions to explore a planet when there’s the promise of untold wealth just drifting about in Earth’s atmosphere for the taking? 

That Margo ultimately decides to sabotage the Ranger mission and help Ed and Dev’s plan to keep the asteroid in Mars orbit makes a ton of sense. That it also finally makes her the traitor everyone already believes her to be is heartbreaking in the special way that For All Mankind is particularly deft at pulling off. 

If only the larger heist storyline were as deftly handled. To be fair, this supersized hour is wildly tense with a literal countdown running in the background of half its scenes. From a spacewalk fistfight to a massive brawl that not only puts workers against officers but Americans against North Koreans, there are a ton of dramatic moments. 

For all the tension and danger, there are no real casualties. Dani is shot with the literal Chekov’s gun inserted into the finale’s opening scene but miraculously survives a dangerous-looking surgery. Massey, despite getting kicked off the side of Ranger without a tether manages to hang on and clamber back up in time to prevent Palmer from stopping her override. Ilya somehow knows where Miles and Gerardo are being tortured and shows up to rescue them before either can reveal any of the rebels’ identities. And a rioting mob of Helios workers determined to show the world who really controls Mars arrives in time to battle the crowd of CIA officers attempting to break into the North Korean module where Ed, Dev, and the others are hiding— and none of them is killed, or even particularly hurt. 

This all doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it sure does make for entertaining television. Would it have been more realistic if one of the underdeveloped secondary Helios workers was sacrificed on the altar of Making This All Mean Something? Probably. Though it’s not clear if that would have made for a better show or not. 

What it does it all mean, though, is something we should probably ask ourselves as we look toward For All Mankind’s future. Is it a good thing, that less than a double people were able to so thoroughly shift geopolitical and even interplanetary policy in this way? Is what was best for Mars actually what was best for the people on Earth? (To be fair, the show didn’t do a very good job explaining why it was so necessary to mine Goldilocks in Earth orbit outside of it being better for the pocketbooks of various world governments, so maybe the question is actually kind of moot.)

But Ed’s longstanding point — that Mars can be more than an outpost for scientists and venture capitalists — is an important one. What does a Mars concerned with its own permanence, rather than the needs of the place its colonists came from look like? What does it mean to make a home on another world, rather than an outpost? And where does humanity go next? Here’s hoping we get the chance to find out.

Stray Thoughts and Observations:

• And that, as they say, is that. Margo is arrested after the Soviets pull her diplomatic immunity but she leaves NASA for prison with her head held high. (And a heartwrenching hug from Aleida.) Dev is seen standing alone on the rim of a crater that looks an awful lot like the one where Kelly was searching for life as the abuse dished out by U.S. and KGB agents on Mars is headline news back on Earth. Dani, who has thankfully survived her gunshot wound, goes home for good and meets her grandchild. 
• Poor Dani was definitely done dirty in For All Mankind Season 4, though. Despite displaying a unique understanding of the complex tensions among the various groups on base upon her initial return to Mars, she became little more than a background character in the first half of the season, there to argue with Ed and serve as an ill-fitting mouthpiece for the establishment point of view. I struggle to believe that Dani would have been this gung-ho about the Goldilocks 
• In the season’s final moments, as is tradition, we jump forward in time. Suddenly, it’s 2012, and M83’s 2011 banger “Midnight City” is playing in the background. There are mining operations on multiple asteroids around Mars. Happy Valley is booming. It’s a fully-fledged colony, as Ed and Dev so desperately wanted it to be. Whether that is a good thing is a question only Season 5 can answer — will Mars push for some sort of planetary independence? How were Ed, Massey, and the rest of the insurgents punished? (Were they punished? Did Dev manage to keep them all on Mars?)  What’s next for the space program that Margo turned traitor (for real this time) to save? 

What did you think of this season of For All Mankind? Share your thoughts in the comments below! 

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All four seasons of For All Mankind are currently streaming on Apple TV+/

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