So, For All Mankind closed with a slightly loner-than-usual season finale that perhaps signalled that when next we see these characters they might have moved beyond the Apollo era.
Be sure to stick around for the post-credit scene for the first season finale. I really hope that signals another jump forward in the timeline, because for all that I've enjoyed the course of the show's first season I'd also been mildly worried that we were going to spend forever on the alternate Apollo programme and I really want to see this show go further along the alternate timeline than that. (I did joke about Ron Moore ending the show with an appearance from a Cylon, but one commenter over at MeFi Fanfare last week posited that the show will end with the discovery of a black monolith on the lunar surface and morph into a 2001: A Space Odyssey prequel Works for me.)
The finale revealed that the first commander of the first US base on the moon wasn't the cold-blooded murderer we'd thought he might be last week, but I do wonder whether some time in season two someone will discover evidence that the base had been visited by the enemy and our putative hero will find himself having to own up to what went down in the preparation for his rescue mission for his rescuers. Will NASA file it under "Who cares? It all worked out in the end (except for Deke.)" or will there be a scandal when it turns out that our hero Ed (assuming he remains in the programme and ends up, say, as head of the Astronaut Office some day) realises that he recognises Mikhail, his newly-appointed opposite number on the Soviet side?
I'd still love to know whether Ron Moore's plan is to spend seven seasons exploring how a different timeline plays out in the lifetimes of the current characters, or whether they're going to throw in enough time jumps that we get a picture of the ramifications of a different start to the space race. Given that we've spent significant time following the story of Aleida, our immigrant space enthusiast in the first season, I can't help but wonder whether her character 1 will pop up again before long, possibly after a couple more time jumps to give her time to have a reason to be in the story again. I mean, she might just show up years later as a member of the public watching what's going on in the space programme rather than working in it, or it might be that her story was mostly a way to reveal her father's story and how the FBI's efforts to enhance security were mostly pointless, but I have a feeling she's destined to be more involved than that.
I have a feeling, just given the economics of how TV casting works and the notion that it's risky to press the reset button and demand that audiences get used to a largely new cast in a different scenario in the next season, that they'll stick with rolling out the story covering the near future. A show that sticks with the 1970s generation of astronauts could well be every bit as much fun as the first season has been for folks like me2 but my preference would be for a show that ends up a few hundred years hence, one that reveals that because the Russians and the Americans were working in parallel on the Moon3 they ended up customarily working together and ended up extending that practice as they fanned out into the depths of the solar system. Heretical thought: might it have made very little difference, what with all the major players being basically extensions of the military powers' armed forces and thus somewhat disinclined to cooperate with their potential enemies?
- Probably recast, so we can see her all grown up, having earned her place in the space programme on the basis of her mathematical expertise post-college. She can be in her mid-thirties, ideally having a nice reunion with soon-to-retire veteran NASA Flight Director Margo Madison when Aleida arrives to start her new job. That whole illegal immigrant thing would be a problem security-check-wise, you'd imagine, but who said Aleida had to work for NASA? Perhaps she ends up emigrating to Europe in her early twenties and finds herself working on the EU's fledgeling human space programme and gets seconded to NASA as part of the EU's attempt to catch up. ↩
- The sort of people who recognise which characters in the show were real people and which were folks the show's writers made up, and which technologies were in the pipeline when the Apollo programme was wound down after the key aim of beating the Soviet Union to the moon was achieved. You know, geeks. ↩
- And the Chinese, and the EU, and the Indians, and the Saudis, in time. It's science fiction: who can say what'll come to pass? ↩