For All Mankind Reckons With Humanity's Worst Impulses in Perilous Season 4 Finale

No show does a season finale quite like For All Mankind. In its four seasons, Apple TV+’s alternative history series about a perpetual space race has cracked the equation of a ticking time bomb season closer like it's the key to NASA’s next planetary destination.

It’s all in the framework. Jumping into a new decade each season, the series from creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi catches us up on the intervening advancements we missed in an opening montage, sets the new stakes for its legacy characters, and then slowly unveils the real threat of the story ahead. In Season 2, For All Mankind did it with the escalating tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that ultimately compromised the delicate balance of power at the Jamestown moonbase and cost two main characters their lives. In Season 3, the increasingly desperate race to and subsequent escape from the burgeoning base on Mars put most of its astronauts in peril millions of miles from home.

But in Season 4, which wrapped on January 12, the finale evolves into a different kind of fight to the finish line. For a show defined by its relentless push further into the stars, this new season was simply about not losing ground or getting distracted by a universe of other possibilities. In this alternate 2003, the Happy Valley Mars base is thriving. The U.S. and Russia have forged a mutually beneficial partnership, and they’ve even found a way to cohabitate with North Korea. Peace on alien soil seems possible, which is what makes the violent finale so shattering. Previous missions to the Moon and Mars were staffed with tight-knit crews of astronauts pursuing the same goal, but Season 4’s extended stay on the Red Planet brought with it one of Earth’s most cancerous creations –– the class system.

Veteran astronauts like Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) live in luxury in Happy Valley, while the everyday work of growing a functioning society from nothing has created an upstairs-downstairs dynamic. Average citizens are flown in to do grunt work for minimum pay and little to none of the resources granted to their privileged counterparts, like edible food and stable video links to phone home.

When an asteroid made of a priceless mineral capable of thrusting Earth’s countries into a new age of prosperity is discovered, those on the bottom of the food chain see the cycle of disparity starting all over again. Suddenly, NASA recognizes that capturing trillions of dollars floating through space is far more attractive than sinking billions more into the Mars base. Desperate to save their jobs, the workers team with their own benefactor, Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi), to steal the asteroid, affectionately known as Goldilocks, before NASA and Russia can redirect its path toward Earth for harvesting.

Things come to a head in the finale when Dev’s team successfully derails NASA’s plan –– with a stealth assist from the mended partnership of Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) and Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña) back on Earth. But one man’s victory is another man’s fuel for revenge. As the victors celebrate, NASA’s embedded operatives on Mars are authorized to invade North Korea’s base, which is harboring Dev’s thieves. The invasion sparks a violent civil war in the halls of the now ironically named Happy Valley, with battle lines drawn based not on nationality, but by class.

It is a sobering escalation of where For All Mankind has brought its story after four seasons and nearly four decades of alternate history. What got humans to Mars in this alternate history was an inspiring brew of ambition and competition. It has been a journey of progress and survival, but the rebellion on Mars shows how greed and inequality can travel just as far. The finale’s violence leaves the show to live in a world of its making and, perhaps, ask something bigger of itself –– who is this space race really benefiting? Dreaming big for an entire civilization comes at a cost, but who is paying it?

While there are medals and merits for those leading the charge on the final frontier, it is the average man and woman who shoulders the burden of those leaps. The series has never glossed over that, and has even shown Earthbound resistances to the costs of the space race, like last season’s domestic terrorist plot against NASA. But up until this season, For All Mankind didn’t have the infrastructure to truly explore the class divide either.

Enter Miles Dale (Toby Kebbell), one of the show’s first non-astronaut cast additions. An oil rigman by trade, he eagerly takes what seems to be a lucrative blue-collar maintenance job at Happy Valley to support his family. But the sheen of the opportunity rubs off quickly as taxes eat away at his earnings and the possibility of quitting incurs steeper penalties. Miles is trapped, existing in the bowels of this new world to earn a living rather than make history. Heroes like Ed and Dani brought the world to the precipice of a bright new future, and people like Miles are set to inherit it. Yet, Season 4 wisely makes the case that what’s being handed down generation to generation isn’t all that different from what Earth has to offer.

For Dev’s merry band of thieves, stealing Goldilocks in the finale isn’t just about securing money for themselves. It is about keeping NASA, Russia, and all the world’s countries focused on delivering the boundless future they promised everyone –– not just the astronauts with god complexes. After all, gone are the days of this story being led by Ed and Dani, who are officially entering the irresponsible age group from which we like to elect our presidents these days. A new class of characters, with more than just flight training under their belt, was always going to be ushered in to sustain NASA’s work, and that time is now.

All of it sets up a reckoning on For All Mankind as it ages into what the streaming era would call a veteran show. One of Apple TV+’s original at-launch series, if the show gets a fifth season, it would tie the recently renewed Slow Horses as the streamer’s longest-running title. By nature of its time-jumping structure, this show that was once a period piece is rapidly becoming a futuristic story. With For All Mankind likely closer to its end than its beginning, there is no better time for the show to grapple with its own existence, by answering what we as a civilization truly missed out on by letting our own space race go dormant.

With a transitional moment for its cast and bigger narrative swings around greed and class, the show is finally ready to ask what a cosmically enlightened civilization can really do. Can the cure for what ails us really be found in the stars if we just take our problems with us?

For now, all we have is the glimpse For All Mankind gives us of the future in its signature flash-forward stinger at the end of each season finale. Season 4 closes on confirmation that the rebels won. In 2012, Dev watches from Mars as Goldilocks orbits the planet, with the Kuznetsov Station constructed on its surface to harvest the mineral.

That is likely good news for the workers of Happy Valley like Miles, but the beauty of For All Mankind is that unseen ramifications wait just off screen. Beyond Dev’s POV, what has the coup wrought in this timeline? Who has the power? Sure, Mars may have retained its viability, but Season 5 seems ready to remind us that every giant leap for mankind still leaves footprints back on Earth.

For All Mankind Season 4 is streaming on Apple TV+. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Hunter Ingram is a TV writer living in North Carolina and watching way too much television. His byline has appeared in Variety, Emmy Magazine, USA Today, and across Gannett's USA Today Network newspapers.