‘For All Mankind’ Co-Creators on Those Devastating Finale Deaths — and What the Jump to the 21st Century Means for Season 4
variety.comHunter Ingram Spoiler Alert: Do not read if you haven’t watched “Stranger in a Strange Land,” the Season 3 finale of “For All Mankind,” now streaming on Apple TV+.In its third season, Apple TV+’s “For All Mankind” encouraged viewers to turn their attention to the possibilities of Mars.
But that deceptive invitation meant taking their eyes off the dangers on the homefront — until it was too late.In the finale, the Mars-bound crews for NASA, Helios and Russia band together to launch a very pregnant Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) back to the Phoenix station to safely give birth in its controlled gravity above the Red Planet — a successful mission that effectively strands the rest of them for 18 months until they can be rescued.
But just as victory is declared from the control center back on Earth, a domestic terrorism plot targeting NASA’s increasingly divisive space program came to devastating fruition when a bomb was detonated outside the Johnson Space Center.
After the dust settled, Karen (Shantel VanSanten) and Molly (Sonya Walger) — two of the show’s original cast members — were counted among the dead.“This decision was not taken lightly, and we struggled with it,” co-creator Ben Nedivi said of Karen’s death, specifically. “But there had to be a death on Earth that felt powerful enough that it resonated all the way to Mars.”The jarring and eerily familiar attack (yes, the writers are aware of the 9/11 imagery) closed out a season that shook the foundation of the series’ alternate timeline, which imagines what happened if space exploration never stopped with the moon landing.
Read more on variety.com
