And why? Well, Flight 007 was somehow hundreds of miles off-course, flying over Sakhalin Island north of Japan. Indeed, despite General Bradford’s best efforts to play the dual role of military-to-civilian agency interlocutor and the most mature adult in the room, Margo, Ellen, and Molly are all somewhere on the spectrum of vexed to furious with him, all while grieving. These actions ratchet up the already-palpable tensions among those nations, pushing NASA farther down the path of being subsumed by the Department of Defense. In the aftermath of the Soviets shooting down a commercial flight filled with civilians and subsequently making no comment, much less offering an apology, the U.S., USSR, and China are making increasingly aggressive military moves. Of the six women in this sample, only two are in relationships with men who have taken on the NASA wife work of putting their wives’ careers first. Now, we have Ellen, Margo, Molly, Karen, Dani, and Aleida, who are, respectively, a lesbian in a healthy platonic marriage with a gay man who she has asked for a divorce so she can pursue a relationship with the love of her life a hyper-competent engineer married to her job a prideful, prickly astronaut who exposes her soft underbelly to no one but her unfailingly kind and loving husband a former model of NASA wife perfection who is just starting to understand her own business acumen the first Black female astronaut in NASA history, widowed but in a pretty good place overall thanks in part to being named NASA’s first Black female mission commander and a brilliant engineer at the dawn of her career. It’s so much cleaner that way, isn’t it? In the era where we first met the astronauts and everyone revolved around them, the astronauts were all men, and those men all had wives to manage everything for them that wasn’t training for or being in outer space. Here begins another episode examining one of For All Mankind’s favorite subjects: the difficulties and conveniences of being forced by circumstances to rise to the occasion at work while equally important stuff in one’s life is put on the back burner. We see it unfolding, and are powerless to do anything but yell at the screen.
He has no idea that a Soviet fighter jet has locked on to the jumbo commercial jet, no notion that his life, and the lives of everyone aboard, will be snuffed out in a literal flash. Tom is in the zone lately, on good, easy terms with Margo, mentoring Ellen, and best of all, relishing his precious 14 airborne hours of being able to focus on a complicated budget matter rather than the hundred little interruptions that usually mark his day at JSC. Part of what makes a good cliffhanger so effective is our viscerally sickening dread of the inevitable while the characters onscreen go about their soon-to-be-unimaginably-disrupted lives. I love the opening credits of For All Mankind, but the second Korean Airlines Flight 007 exploded after being hit by a Soviet missile mid-air, I hit that skip button so fast I thought I’d tear a ligament. You know what takes chutzpah? Starting an episode with a cliffhanger, especially one where a great character dies.
It’s not that they’re easy to pull off, it’s just that good cliffhangers work well at the end of a chapter of serial storytelling, and it’s a narrative device that audiences are trained to anticipate and enjoy as an inflection point in a show’s plot development.
Just about any TV show can end an episode on a cliffhanger. Season three debuts on June 10, and what better way to whet viewers’ appetites than by recapping the season that skyrocketed For All Mankind to greatness? Welcome to the retrospective recaps of For All Mankind season two.