‘For All Mankind’ Stars on the Tragedy & Triumph of ‘The Sirens of Titan’

Talk about highs and lows. Friday’s (May 7) newest episode of For All Mankind took the show where it had never been before, with both moments of both tragedy and triumph. Warning: The following post contains spoilers for For All Mankind Season 5 Episode 7, “The Sirens of Titan.” 

The episode began on a somber note. Six months had passed since the Sojourner 1 mission to Titan began, and the crew, including Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu), was inching ever nearer to Saturn as they got a distress call from Kosmos 1. They were going too fast to enter Titan’s orbit and would instead be pulled into Saturn’s atmosphere.

This left the Moxie team scrambling to figure out where the mission went wrong so that Sojourner 1 wouldn’t suthan calculating the atmospheric element, Sojourner’s commander, Walt (Christopher Denham), decided to pull the plug, much to Kelly’s consternation.

After he said he wouldn’t suffer the same “go fever” that cost lives in NASA’s past, she snapped back and said, “Let me tell you something. NASA didn’t lose the moon to the Russians because they lost their ‘go fever.’ It was because they lost their godd*** balls. When the moment came on Apollo 10 to break the rules and do the gutsy thing, the dangerous thing, my dad chickened out. And you know what? He regretted that decision until the day he died.”

For Cynthy Wu, saying that line that invoked Ed’s tone was a spiritual moment — literally so. “It was a really touching moment when we filmed that, just reflecting on my dad’s accomplishments and also accomplishing what my dad had wanted and go moving forward,” she told TV Insider. “Those moments on set. I feel like there were like ghosts among us, and I joke around, but like, even in Season 2, when we filmed family stuff with me, Joel [Kinnaman] and Shantel [VanSanten], there was this lamp that would flicker in the living room. And we would joke, ‘That’s Shane!’ … When I got to say those words, I just felt like, ‘Oh, there’s Ed’s ghost here,’ in a good and beautiful way.”

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Despite the power of her protestation, Walt didn’t waver and ordered a return to the Red Planet. As the crew began to ignite their trek back to Mars, though, there was an error. The course was still set for Titan — no doubt, Kelly’s own sabotage of the system — and they didn’t have the resources to do anything but follow the original plan to Saturn’s biggest moon, no matter how dangerous the journey. Though it was touch-and-go, with the heat shields beginning to melt during their scary descent, the crew ultimately made it and took their first step onto Titan and into a bold new future in unison.

Though Kelly could’ve easily stepped forward first and taken the honor of being the first human on Titan for herself, the gesture of sharing that with her crewmates was symbolic.

“I really did love that moment. It was a wonderful moment to film. And I think what it was is, as you saw, the lead-up to getting there and if we’re going to even make it, it’s so life or death. And when you go through a mission like that with a team of people who really are a team, you feel like you’re one organism. And it wouldn’t feel right to kind of be the sole person who is saying, ‘Oh, I’m the one who did it,'” Wu remembered. “Kelly couldn’t have done it without her team there, and we all did it together. And so excited for the audience to see the mission this team, because it’s this crew is really special. And I had so much fun filming with all of these new castmates that you guys are going to see. I think the dynamics are really fun.”

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It was just the moment of achievement the Marsees needed, too. Earlier in the episode, Lily (Ruby Cruz) was devastated when, after she staged a flash mob surprise for Alex’s (Sean Kaufman) birthday, Dev’s (Edi Gathegi) goons launched an attack on the farming pods they were dancing in, leading to the death of their friend and further stress on their already-depleted rations. (The call for people to be sent back to Earth was growing ever stronger by the second until that touchdown.)

About Lily’s anguish, Ruby Cruz explained, “It’s a really pivotal experience for her and feeling such responsibility and… What is she even focusing on? Why did she orchestrate and organize this whole thing when, in the grand scheme of things, putting all of these people in this place at this time [was dangerous]. It’s hard, the guilt she feels.”

Seeing the human toll that attack took also emboldened Celia Boyd (Mireille Enos) to finally, fully join the Marsees’ cause, after she’d been helping but not completely committed to it.

“I know it’s a tragedy for Dev, but it’s really illuminating the blindness that can happen when power and money just keeps believing that the end justifies the means, no matter what,” Mireille Enos explained. “I think that makes her lose her last bit of faith she had in those big power structures, and I think that’s when she fully commits to the idea of the Mars community has to have ownership of their own lives and resources.”

Will this for-all-mankind achievement finally bring the Earthlings into the Marsees’ orbit once again? We’ll have to wait and see next week.

For All Mankind, Fridays, Apple TV

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