For All Mankind season 3 showed how hard Star Trek’s utopia is to achieve

Two seasons of the extended Cold War have ended. All Mankind moved into the technology boom of the ’90s. If the real ’90s were driven by a techno-optimism, All MankindThis article explores the idea of a technologically-driven utopian America. In this alternate space-focused timeline, the go-go ’90s are filled with electric cars, videophones, and moon-mining. This sounds great! However, the seasons pass quickly. For all Mankind shows how even if the utopianism of the actual ’90s could have been translated into reality, we couldn’t have left our problems behind.

The third season will be completed. For All Mankind’s alternate history has moved leaps and bounds beyond where our ’90s found us. To build military bases on Mars, the larger powers have ended their wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Due to female astronauts’ prominence, the Equal Rights Amendment was added to the Constitution. Today, electric cars are easily available due to technology investments. The Soviet Union did not collapse.

The Aldrins and Rides were accompanied by their heroes: Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), Danielle Poole, and Gordo Steves (Michael Dorman). After Nixon and Nixon respectively, Ted Kennedy was elected president, while Reagan followed suit. Voice actors as well deepfakes are used to communicate with the characters.

Real-world characters exist in season 3, but they start to take the backseat to the show’s world. The rise of computers and the internet doesn’t factor much into the show, because all of the exciting technology, for decades, has been focused on sustaining life in space. While it’s not a one-to-one analogy, replacing “computers” with “space travel” allows For All Mankind To make interesting commentary. Instead of exploring Jobs, Gates, Andreessen, and the culture of ’90s Wired, For All Mankind Wraps all of them in Dev Ayesa, Edi Gathegi.

Dev Ayesa leaning over a desk with computers on it; his team around him is smiling and looking on

A charismatic billionaire who wants to go to Mars has obvious parallels to Elon Musk, but Ayesa doesn’t resemble the hyper-visible billionaire. He is the sole owner of Helios. He does not own four companies. He doesn’t believe in title and corner offices, preferring to work among his employees. Helios workers practice office democracy by voting on company policies. And, most tellingly, Elon Musk doesn’t compete with NASA — SpaceX works extensively with the government.

Ayesa feels more similar to the techno libertarians from the ’70s through the ’90s who saw technology as a means of personal liberation, who historian Fred Turner called the New Communalists. As Turner describes in his book Cyberculture: From Counterculture to Cyberculture, they saw “the cybernetic notion of the globe as a single, interlinked pattern of information” as “deeply comforting.” The “invisible play of information” would bring about “global harmony,” a break from the harsh lines drawn in the Cold War.

All MankindAyesa watches in terror as the moon is turned into a battlefield for world power and then divided in two, one for the U.S., and the other for Russia. Ayesa wanted to defeat them both to Mars and create a zone of free enterprise that would be virtually invisible to the majority of Earth’s population, yet would challenge each ideologies. Being first is the key. And, considering how advanced space tech is at this point, he didn’t even need to build everything himself. Taking advantage of a terrifying space hotel disaster in season 3’s first episode, he buys the technology Helios needs to take on NASA and the USSR in a race to Mars.

Ayesa’s buying spree continues, with NASA employees being disgruntled at the low wages and lack of sense order. It’s hard to blame them, considering that while NASA’s economic position in All Mankind has radically improved, they haven’t seen a salary increase in years. When employees at Helios debate the company’s issues, like who should lead the company’s mission to the Red Planet, they start to feel heard. It is romantic to see a combination of capitalist enterprise with a community structure.

A space station in For All Mankind season 3

Two astronauts in For All Mankind looking out at the Martian landscape

The president and her husband in the Oval Office, her at the desk and him standing across from her and looking down smiling

Four astronauts sitting and eating in a space station hallway

All Mankind Star Trek co-created it Ronald D. Moore was an Alum, and there are occasional references to the franchise in the show. Long associated with utopianism, it is derided as out of date in the ’90s of season 3, where astronauts prefer the hellish fantasies of Aliens they are the stars of their own melodramas. Both Helios, and very lucrative NASA have already promised utopia.

However, space can be dangerous, and the show reminds the characters of this fact. There’s no oxygen or gravity, no atmosphere to protect from radiation, and a massive distance between points of interest with no means of fast-traveling. There’s the isolation from most of humanity, as well as the confinement in close quarters for years at a time, which, on a trip to Mars, would lead to what NASA (in our universe) deems “inevitable” behavioral issues. All Mankind Fans have seen the issues on Jamestown’s base, alongside other episodes of Bob Newhart’s Show.

The phrase “space is hard” has become such a standard saying within the industry that the U.S. Space Force has used it in commercials. But it’s more than hard, it’s horrifying, and For All Mankind doesn’t shy away. Characters die brutal deaths in All MankindThey have been burned to death in spacesuits or bled to death after being exposed on a lunar surface.

These deaths are mourned and memorialized, but they don’t stop anyone from heading up into the skies. Neither Ayesa’s space-libertarianism or NASA’s trust in military-style structures stop disasters in the most unforgiving environment imaginable, a place where the tiniest piece of debris can destroy an entire ecosystem. Only one option is available. For All Mankind argues, is to eventually, somehow, in all sincerity, even if it’s just a little bit at first, work together.

A group of astronauts looking out at Mars

Karen and Dev sitting in an office cubicle smiling at each other

Although the Mars mission has been successful, in that it put boots on the ground, its performance begins to falter. Much like in the actual ’90s, an underground movement of anti-government extremism is downplayed in For All Mankind until it’s tragically too late. Like Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrators of the terror attack at the season’s end are ex-military. The real world is being transferred to All Mankind’s space focus, the events of Jamestown become as radicalizing as the Waco siege.

The world is in chaos For All Mankind’s final episodes: The President is openly gay, neither the Soviets or Americans were first to Mars, it turns out, and Johnson Space Center lies in ruins. Ayesa Madison and Margo Madison, dreamers in space, are now facing financial and political liabilities.

The heroics of Gordo and Traci Stevens couldn’t be further in the past. As the twinkling of Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” introduces the 2000s, characters find their lives completely upended as an age of space heroism moves into a time of deep uncertainty. Thom Yorke’s haunting vocals, born out of his mental breakdown following the success of OK Computer This fits perfectly with Margo’s quick shot as she wakes up in her new life in 2003 Soviet Union. Americans Have you ever seen a show with so many needle drops?

But still, amidst all the chaos, the show feels like Moore’s version of the dreadful Star Trek: EnterpriseThe Star Trek beginnings, an examination–Like society. While the Earth might have changed, there is no denying that space exists and calls for exploration.

Despite what any billionaires tries to sell you, the road to a life among the stars wouldn’t be easy. It would ruin lives. There would be no sense of adventure. It would become a drag to the future for humanity, carrying the hatreds, inequalities, and petty disputes of the Pale Blue Dot along with the food and fuel on a journey across the solar systems. However For All Mankind Arguments that “shit hitting” the fan doesn’t have any ideology or language are made by him. If anyone wants to succeed out there in the Great Beyond at all, there’s just no other option.

All MankindSeason 3 available on Apple TV Plus

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