The most fascinating episode of this season is the first, where we skip ahead to the 1980s and get a great montage of how world history played out differently in this universe. Margo is now running the Johnson Space Center, and Ellen (Jodi Balfour) is being positioned to take on leadership of NASA. Ed is head of the Astronaut Office, and Karen runs the Outpost, which has been renovated into a nicer bar. Their adopted teenage daughter, Kelly (Cynthy Wu) is considering college options. Gordo and Tracy have split, while Molly and Dani are struggling to stay in the game. Aleida (Coral Peña) is now an adult, but her road to NASA is as rocky as ever.
Other prominent characters include Gordo and Tracy's son Danny (Casey W. Johnson), Ellen's girlfriend Pam (Meghan Leathers), Air Force General Nelson Bradford (John Marshall Jones), and astronaut trainees Gary Piscotty (Michael Benz) and Sally Ride (Ellen Wroe). And if you think that's an awful lot of characters to keep straight, that's a big part of why this season is so much rougher than the first one. The show has jumped over a decade ahead, to when the space program and Jamestown Base have significantly expanded, but the show spends way too much time on Earth following the fairly mundane lives of its characters. And where the excitement of watching space travel progress through the years helped to patch some of the weak characterization in the first season, the second makes a lot of those weaknesses plain, because it covers a much smaller span of time.
Where the first season of "For All Mankind" was more heavily focused on being historical and science-fiction, this year the balance has shifted toward melodrama, with several episodes feeling like "Mad Men" lite. And frankly, it's not good enough to be "Mad Men." I don't like most of the major characters this year. Maybe it's because we have actors of all the wrong ages playing people going through various midlife crises that seem awfully trite and contrived. I don't feel inclined to root for Ed or Gordo in their latest bids to reclaim glory, or to fill much sympathy for Karen and Tracy as they keep making self-destructive choices. It's good to see more prominent roles for Molly and Ellen, who were some of the more interesting supporting players last season, but they don't actually seem to get more screen time or emphasis. None of the new faces really stand out or get much opportunity to distinguish themselves, though the show has set up several of them to become key players in the future.
The one character I still really enjoy is Margo, because she's actively engaged in her job as a NASA administrator throughout, and tackling the bigger challenges of keeping the space program going. It also helps that she looks era and age appropriate throughout, and gets smart, snappy dialogue that wouldn't be out of place on "The West Wing." She's the one who has to juggle the concerns of the White House, the military, and her own people as the Cold War continues to rage, and the moon is quickly becoming its newest front. Things really heat up with the Soviets this year, and I wish the narrative had been more concerned with the escalating arms race instead of everyone's love lives. I miss the little snippets of real news footage and cutaways to historical figures that were used so well in the first season. They still appear in the second, but much more sparingly.
The show's production values remain excellent, especially all the work in space and on the moon. Jamestown Base and all the various ships and other vehicles look fantastic. There are two moonwalk sequences that are among the tensest things I've seen in any media this season. The finale is a big, effects and action heavy piece of spectacle that is absolutely ludicrous in the way it plays out, but so impressively executed that I can't really complain. While I'd like "For All Mankind" to be a more staid, pseudo-documentary style program, that's not what the show is. It may be hard science-fiction, but it wants to be entertaining above all else. So it builds up larger-than-life heroes, indulges in maudlin pathos, and everybody always has the worst timing.
And it's good enough at doing those things that I'll keep watching. I'll probably still be frustrated with the show, but I'll keep watching.
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