For All Mankind is always fantastic, but it’s best known for its incredible finales. In each of the previous four seasons, Apple TV’s alternate history sci-fi show has always built to some massive, tense, game-changing moment, followed by a mind-blowing tease of what’s to come. The season five finale was no different, and, with it teasing what’s to come in a sixth and final season, we had to break it down.
Most of For All Mankind season five centered on two main stories. First was the independence of Mars, which was in danger of becoming automated and found itself at war. There was also the need to continue exploring the galaxy, which we saw with the journey to Titan. Both of those came to a close in the finale.
The Mars thing ends semi-peacefully, with Mars claiming and reestablishing its independence thanks to some wild heroics. And, once communications came back, they had incredibly exciting news from Titan. Kelly Baldwin and her team found life on another world. Yes, For All Mankind just introduced aliens. But not your typical buggy-eyed ones. Simple organisms that challenge the notion of life itself. You see, the organisms are made of methane, not carbon, which fundamentally flips all knowledge of how life is created. If life doesn’t only originate with carbon and can, in fact, be created from methane, isn’t it possible it could be created from any, or every, combination of elements? The Titan team all agrees that the discovery confirms there’s life everywhere, in every possible iteration.
That, alone, would have been a pretty exciting tease for the following season. How much more will we learn about these creatures? Are there more of them out there? How many more?
But things went further. Because of oxygen issues (there are always oxygen issues on For All Mankind), Kelly chose to sacrifice her life to save her friends and make sure their discovery made it out into the world. Once she’s on her own, we see her approach a pool of liquid, looking for a place to place her dad’s iconic sign. Then, in the distance, she sees… something. It’s a shimmering blue something. A bioluminescence. The bioluminescence she saw back on the cliffside led her to the discovery of life. She walks into the water as it continues to brighten and surround her, almost as if the whole pool is filled with it.
The obvious implication is that Kelly is about to die, but we still think this scene can be viewed in a few ways. One is that, because her oxygen is low, she could be having some sort of end-of-life hallucination. Maybe it’s not real. Or, maybe, she’s actually seeing these organisms in their natural habitat, which is the most logical explanation. Either way, though, and this is crazy, maybe she’s seeing something with the ability to save her life.
Now, this is For All Mankind. It’s not going to just introduce aliens that can save a human out of nowhere. Everything is measured and logical. It’s also a show that has no problem killing off main characters. So we don’t actually think aliens are going to save Kelly. We think she’s dead. But we do think it’s up to us to decide if she actually saw something wonderful, if she was imagining it, or what that might mean. Whatever the case, the truth died with her on Titan. (Or maybe season six ends with Kelly Baldwin living 1000s of years into the future because aliens gave her the secret of life. Who knows? Moving on.)
That, of course, then led us to the best part of any For All Mankind finale. That final scene where the show jumps ahead in time, and this is where it gets really interesting. The show gracefully glides from Kelly on Titan in the present of 2012—Mars has been liberated, and life exists on another world—to 2020. Eight years have passed. With The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” (released in late 2019) playing, we zoom away from Titan, through the rings of Saturn, to discover a ship. USSR ship “MAPC 94,” to be precise. This ship has a hole in it. Has been long abandoned. And as the camera continues to move through its dark, decrepit interior, something happens. We watch a screen spring to life.
Two lines of Russian code appear on the computer monitor. Code that, when put through Google Translate, roughly says something like “Detection” followed by coordinates, the name “Nikulov,” and “Loading…” which blinks, and we cut to black.
Okay. There is a lot to cover here. First of all, the ship is absolutely the Mars-94—a ship we last saw in season three of the show (which came out four years ago, so if you forgot, we don’t blame you). The year at that time was 1992, and Mars-94 was the Russian ship that was racing to Mars versus the U.S. and Helios. When it realized it was going to lose, Mars 94 made some risky decisions and had to be rescued by the U.S. Sojourner 1. In the rescue, several Americans died, and the last we saw of the ship, it was floating out into space, abandoned, about 200 million kilometers from Mars.
The rescue bonded the U.S. and Russian cosmonauts in a way that no one could have predicted, so, in a way, the Mars-94 is very significant. It set up a key alliance that still plays a role today. Plus, Sojourner 1 is the ship that was repurposed in this season to go from Mars to Titan. So there’s a connection there too.
Now, though, almost 40 years have passed, and Mars-94 is nearing Saturn. From where it was the last time we saw it to Saturn is a distance of roughly 1.5 billion kilometers. That’s a long way, but the ship has been floating for such a long time that it’s plausible.
As for the message on screen, we’re guessing it’s “Detecting” that there’s finally a planet nearby. The name “Nikulov” then almost certainly refers to Sergei Nikulov, the Russian engineer that Margo Madison leaked U.S. data to (and had a crush on). We don’t know if the computer is referencing a relation of his, if a program is named after him, or what, but it’s curious.
Even more curious is the message itself. Is the detection purely automated? Is some Russian group, either on Earth or Mars, somehow still in contact with the ship? Why and how is this appearing now?
And, most importantly, what does the existence of this almost half-century-old ship that has been floating in space have to do with a story set in the 2020s? A story that will bring For All Mankind to a conclusion. That, we don’t know. But we will find out at some point because For All Mankind is returning for season six sometime in the future. Probably 2027. And, fans of the show now have Star City, its Russia-set spinoff, to hold them over. It’s currently streaming on Apple TV.
What did you think of the finale of For All Mankind season five? Let us know below.
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