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It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4 through June 9, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, ebook and audiobook from Princeton University Press. Just go to press princeton.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation and Beyond Belief. How Evidence Shows what really Works. There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press princeton.edu and use the code spring50. That's S P R I N G50 press princeton.edu. the sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books.
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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I'm Professor Stephen Dyson.
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And I'm Professor Jeff Dudas.
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C
And we are two political scientists who have just watched the season finale of for all mankind. Season 5 finale. The episode is called this Land Is Our Land. We're here to give our initial reactions to some of the themes and ideas that were explored in this episode, mainly focusing on the political themes, but also encompassing some of the other themes and also give an appreciation of the narrative and aesthetic qualities that were apparent in this episode. Geoff this was, I think, a fitting finale to the season. The meta themes that had been established throughout the season were paid off. I think those themes have been the struggle for the discovery of a new form of political life on the Mars colony and the search for a literal new form of life on Titan. And both of these things happen in this episode. I thought there were sort of three broad things that were going on in this episode. I thought there was a lot of philosophy talk or a lot of philosophizing, a lot of kind of narration of the show, ideology, and maybe we can talk about that. I thought there was a very interesting theme to do with maps and blueprints and whether the map is the territory and how you adjust your planning kind of along the way as you're engaging in great endeavors. Maybe we could talk about that. And then I thought there was a re emergence or actually a taking to new heights of an overall theme of not only the season, but of the show, which is the replacing of the old with the new in generational terms, in ideological terms, in all sorts of different terms. And to that degree and to that extent, for me, Geoff, it was a pretty satisfying and effective finale to the season.
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B
Yeah, let's take those three themes in reverse order and start with the generational change, because I do think that that, for me, was the most obvious and apparent theme throughout the season. And there are again, you know, if you think back, right, Ed Baldwin dies off in, I mean, pretty early episode three, I think, of the season. And remember, we were both a little surprised at how quickly that seemed to happen. Then we've got this really transformational moment in kind of mid season when Kelly Baldwin essentially commits mutiny on board the vessel to Titan and therefore sort of symbolically consecrates herself as a Baldwin as someone who takes that kind of reflexive anti authority perspective and puts it into play in the most consequential of ways. And now we get the end of sort of what appears to be the end of Kelly's journey here at the end of the season and the continued elevation of her son Alex, right throughout the season. That's complimented by Tabasco, her storyline, and I thought the way that she comes to that in her final vignette to kind of go seek out the death scene of her father, Dany on Mars, ends up sort of in a certain way completing her loop as well as being elevated into an important new Stevens character. We get. But there's more stuff going on as well, right? Generationally, like there's something happening in the Dale family as well. Right. And we talked about this a little bit off screen and you mentioned this. So on one hand, this is Miles's consecration as a great colony leader. He seems to be sworn in at the end as the new governor. He's also looked at askance and given the side eye by his daughter Lily, who has been also herself increasingly important. Right. As the show has gone or as the season has gone on. So for me, the most interesting parts of this show were the. Of this season, I should say, were the generational components and the degree to which you get a new generation of people who are both self consciously and not wrestling with the legacies of the things that their parents have done or that the generations before them have done, the good and the bad. And so I think that that was. I think the season was effective in introducing those characters and effective in sort of passing the torch in that way. Generationally. I do wonder, I mean, to me it's what you make of the show, right. If you like that kind of generational storytelling where it's a couple of kind of elite families who consistently are driving the show, then I think you're all in on this character development. If instead you'd be more interested in the development of kind of ordinary characters, people who seem to lack that kind of superheroic affiliation with founders and with legacy, then maybe you find the show not quite as satisfying.
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C
Yeah. And it's obviously hard to. That's a place where I think you often find the collision of what might be a political philosophy of change that kind of collides with dramatic requirements. You know, it would be really good to tell these kind of bottom up stories and so on and so forth and things that had fewer effectively social superheroes at the center of them. Great people of history, you know, but in narrative drama you do need the plot to move through the lives of your central characters and they need to be people that the viewers are familiar with. At least that's the conventional wisdom. And so you often find someone like Miles becoming a great person of history, even though he's supposed to stand in for, was always supposed to stand in for the common, the common person. And you know, you could take him as literally being a person of that high historical consequence, which is what the show's presenting on its surface, or you could kind of look a little deeper to thematically what's going on with him, which is he, he's a character who has done morally compromising things in the, in the service of larger social change. And so maybe, maybe it's implausible that one person would always have been that kind of historically consequential. That would be the arc of one person. But, but I think it's trying to say that's how history moves forward and generationally what's going on between Miles and his daughter, what's gone on between Danny and, and his daughter, what's going on between Kelly and her son is, is, I think a very common way of telling a revolutionary story or a story of political change, which is, it requires, it requires kind of law means in service of high ends. And, and, but the people who do the things that are compromising Miles, literally incinerating a room full of people, for example, Kelly, as you say, committing mutiny. All the things that Danny did, all the things that bring you to the point of political change, they're morally compromising. And you know, kind of, if you are the older generation, you take that sin upon yourself so that the younger generation can know a greater freedom and, and I don't know. Purity.
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B
Yeah, yeah. And there's a, there are a couple of other generational figures, right, who. Or one in particular who reappears. So Margo Madison, who I thought we had seen the last of, you know, in whatever season or episode one or two, whichever that was, when Elena last visits her, she reappears. And you know, so there's always been this kind of surrogate parenthood relationship between Aleyda and Margot Madison. And so we also get here Aleyda really becoming in a lot of ways the figure that Margot was right before she eventually commits treason. Right. That it's very clear now that there are significant qualms that Aleida has about the, the kind of. The politics of all of this. Right. And the loyalties, the partisan types of loyalties that are driving political decisions. In this case, it's Miles's decision to go ahead and to go through with the incineration of the command unit. That is very similar to the kinds of dilemmas that Margo was finding herself in towards the end of. I guess it would have been towards the end of season two and into season three, or I guess the end of season two. Right. Where she's consistently finding herself working with her counterpart in the Soviet Star City apparatus in ways that get her in significant trouble politically. Right. So there are these kind of cross cutting loyalties that are emerging. So there's a way in which Aleyda's storyline here at the end of this season parallels the one that we've already seen from Margo. And it leads me to wonder if Aleyda is going to become a Margot Madison type figure in season six. Sort of someone who finds themselves at a kind of crossroads of royalties.
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C
Yeah, well, when I said, you know, there's. One of the themes of the episode I thought was there was a lot of philosophy or the show narrating its ideology or a lot of philosophizing. If you want to be a little, a little more negative about just how on the nose some of the dialogue was. Aleyda was the central character I had in mind. She has this sort of extended skirmish, verbal skirmish with Irina in which she outlines an ideology of, you know, her understanding, a transcendental goodness that exceeds or is above earthly concerns. Whether the kind of national concerns that Margo had and institutional concerns that Margo had rebelled against or the sort of political concerns that Arena's talking about. It's a leader keeps talking about a. A higher calling or a. Or a higher purpose. You know, and some of the dialogue is quite interesting. You know, Irina is giving the classical kind of realist war is politics by other means. She literally says that at some point. She says, you know, Irina says, you know, better angels of our nature is nice. Leader is enunciating this kind of better angels of our nature goodness philosophy. Better angels of our nature is nice, but not very plausible. We're a few generations removed, removed from animals fueled by anger and spite. The cycle will Go on. You know, no progress is possible because humans are just kind of selfish, violent animals. And the best you can do is kind of a relative stability often encompassed in national political structures that kind of check and balance each other. And Aleyda says, no, you know, I think I just. I think you're wrong and I think your philosophy sucks.
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B
Yeah.
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C
She says to Miles, you know, you can't lose your humanity by incinerating these people. And Miles says, we're fighting for our humanity. These are very classic kind of rhetorical tropes in this kind of drama, you know, positions that are set in contrast to one another.
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B
Yeah, yeah. And Aleyda's position is she's sort of articulating the Technocrats dream in the same way that Margo Madison articulated the Technocrats dream and in the same way that her Russian paramour did as well, whose name I can't remember. Sergei. Yeah, right. And so essentially what they're all articulating is that there is a dream of technological progress, of human progress that outstrips any kind of conflicting or constraining or polarizing conflicts that outstrip things like national loyalties. Right. And that those are the things, that kind of nationalism, that kind of parochial politics is the thing that is holding humanity back. It's those things, I suppose Aleyda would say when she were saying something more about how Irina's philosophy sucks. It's those things, she would say, that actually create that cyclical character of human conflict. And so transcending those things is the key to finding a more elevated state of human life and human capacity, which I think is also the point of. Or one of the points of Kelly's kind of, you know, deathbed monologue. Back to Alex. Right. And you had mentioned this off screen as well, that the discovery of new life resets the possibilities and the parameters of humanity. And, you know, she ends up sort of also articulating that technocratic dream of progress.
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C
Well, these. These are, you know, these are just the classic positions of, you know, realism and idealism. Or what would you say, like Hobbes and Kant, Would that be the right. The right opposite? The, you know, the. The. The division versus. Versus, you know, cooperation for a higher end. The very old political, philosophical positions. They're also rather crucially, the. The kind of crux of. For all mankind. They're the crux of that series. They're the crux of that phrase, that. That. That. They're the positions that were set in contrast with one another by the rhetoric versus the reality of the space race. Which is the, you know, the initial motivating sort of philosophy or thing or happening of the series. You know, and the thing the series has always said is, what if the rhetoric of the early space race and the early moonshot for all mankind, you know, search for something greater than ourselves that transcends the divisions we have here on Earth? What if that was not just rhetoric, but we actually followed through on it and believed it? Whereas we know, actually in our timeline what was going on was these were, for Kennedy in particular, and then to some extent, Johnson and Nixon, useful political ways to win, like, budget battles for rocketry programs that were essential for the Cold War, as they saw it.
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B
Right, Yeah. I mean, so we know in real life, as you say, that the space exploration has always been some sort of messy collaboration between national defense, military prerogatives and kind of science stuff. Right. And so, yeah, I mean, I think the show is articulating what we might call a kind of enlightenment vision of human progress. Right. And the notion that there is this kind of linear, if occasionally jagged line that leads humanity towards heightened and benighted purposes. And that for this show, it's kind of exploration. Right. And a willingness to take risks that get you there. Right. Which. Which means that you do have to have these kinds of transitional figures, like a Miles Dale in this episode who do really distasteful things or like Kelly Bald or Ed Baldwin. Right. People who do distasteful things in the service of creating the sort of reality or the new promised land, so to speak, that enlightenment sensibilities would point towards. So there are a lot of throwbacks and consistencies here with the way that American stories are frequently told about progress, Right. That you've got these kinds of trailblazing characters who are capable of doing both very good and very bad things, but the very bad things are always just justified as in the service of creating a new, more civilized, enlightened reality. And so I think this show is subconsciously, you know, articulating that narrative as well. Kind of a classic narrative in American literature and American politics, but.
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C
But also beyond. Beyond America as well. It also, I think, tries to put the, you know, puts arena in that basket. I think, you know, someone who's. Whose machinations are sort of necessary. That's what history is. It's this complex interplay of kind of individual and selfish moments with reaching for the collective good. And sometimes what you need is a very skilled covert operator to break a logjam or to move things forward. And it will be interesting to see if that's where they go with Star City if they try and make that argument about the Soviet system. The Soviet system that. I don't want to be glib about this, but, you know, brought the Soviet Union into the modern and industrial age at huge human cost. Or the same point is often made about the, the Chinese, you know, Communist Party of China, which has been responsible for the greatest uptick in the living standards of the greatest number of humans in human history. But it's not what Americans would be comfortable with as a political system. It's an authoritarian and repressive system. So these, these, these juxtapositions are fairly well worn, I think, in, in both political philosophy and our empirical political experience.
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B
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
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C
Okay, so we had the. I mean, you mentioned Kelly's. I think we should spend some time with Kelly. Yeah, Kelly's kind of adventure at the, at the end there, the Titan stuff all pays off. They face a very classic short straw problem. This often comes up inside. Hey, guys, we've only got enough ox. We've got too many people and too little oxygen. We got to draw straws to see who it is that stays behind and, you know, has the ultimate sacrifice that it, I think, was sort of inevitable that it had to be Kelly who did that. Even though if you were looking at the strict narrative, sorry, the strict logic of the situation they were in, that, you know, it wasn't the particular problem they had, that there was a time and distance problem. We've only got enough oxygen for a certain amount of time, but we have to travel a certain amount of difference. And they managed to find a resolution to that problem that involved the slowest moving person who had an injured leg being the way.
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B
Yeah.
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Being the one who hobbles off and, you know, one of the able. But, but anyway, Kelly kind of had to stay behind both to be the person who delivered that emotional, you know, final narration and started to fully understand the nature of what kind of life had been. Discover it.
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B
Yeah, I, I mean, I will admit, I think in retrospect that's compelling. I, I will admit in the moment I was surprised that, that they were killing off Kelly. Maybe she's not killed off. Though. I, I do think there's a bit of ambiguity there about that final scene where she kind of wanders into the goo. And this is, this is clearly part of the new life form that they have discovered, which we know is apparently methane based rather than oxygen based. I think you're probably right. I ventured that maybe they were going to turn Kelly into Some kind of hybrid methane, oxygen based organism and that she survives. I think you're probably right that that's not particularly consistent with the ethos of the show.
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C
So that would be interesting. And I did have the same thought, slash fear. Cause I do think it wouldn't be quite consistent with the show that there was going to be one of those like, I'm out of oxygen, I'm going to take my helmet off. Wow, I can actually breathe this blue.
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You know, I did think now maybe I should go back and rewatch. I've only watched it once. I did think there were sort of subtle signs of revivification going on,
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maybe that could be happening. But I think it is an important kind of point about the philosophy of the show. Right, so, so what would that be? That would be creating a post human life form. Right. This is a science fiction thing. This is, this is done. That would be consistent with the ethos of another show that we watched recently at Alien Earth that would be a very, that hybrid, liminal creature that's transformed and becomes something post human. That would also be consistent with a line of thought from people who are interested in science fiction and how it relates to contemporary developments, including things like AI and how AI relates to the human and how it makes us post human and kind of cyborg theory and all that kind of thing. That, that's one line of ideological thought as, as it interfaces with science fiction. The other, the other track, I think is the one that for all mankind has been on, which is the, the humanistic line and what you could almost call a kind of humanistic nostalgia. Right. A nostalgia for a time in the past where we, we were maybe less corrupted and less divided and more able to come together and, and you know, be more classically enlightened beings. And that's always been the track the show's on, which is why I think ideologically it would be strange for it to shift tracks to post humanism at this point in its lifespan.
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B
Yeah, I think you're probably right about that. And it's given further support. Your point is given further support when we consider the evolution of Dev's storyline. And what is he doing in the end? Right, so this is the technological dreamer, Right. He's very clearly the kind of Elon Musk, tech overlord figure, right. Over these last several seasons. And what is he last shown doing after his redemption? He's. He's in the dirt, literally. Right. Planting stuff on Mars. Right. If you want to consider the. A throwback to a simpler, more nostalgic time in human history. It would be hard, you'd be hard pressed to find more obvious or more stark than the transition from a character who believes in high tech. Right. Social engineering to someone who is now like, you know, beating sustenance out of the crowd with his hands.
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C
Yeah, the, the frontiersman determining the land or actually working with. Working with the land.
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B
He's now the farmer.
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Right.
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So it's, it's a transition from the frontiersman to the farmer. Yeah, the yeoman farmer. Right. Which is as, which is nostalgic and old timey as it gets in surf again and at least in an American storytelling.
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C
Yeah. I thought Dev's arc here was interesting and it was one of the things that going into the finale, I thought was on a knife edge. Like, is he, you. Has he gone to the dark side or is there some redemption? And Dev's always being on that knife edge. I think it's one of the things the show's actually done quite well is it's always kept him as this potentially kind of corporate tech bro who could go to the dark side, but also this idealistic dreamer who at every stage, when push comes to shove, ends up on the, you know, in a place of redemption or a place of communion or connection to the better angels of the show. And when I said at the start, I think one of the things that was going on this episode was there was a theme of kind of maps and blueprints. And the map isn't the territory and where you think you might be going, the blueprint you think you're building towards is not always the thing that you end up with once you interact with real people and real history. Dev sort of exemplifies that. Right. What was Maru? It was a blueprint utopia that Dev sought to impose on people by dint of his power and in secrecy. And it proved damaging, you know, to try and impose it. And when faced with the, the choice that all blueprint utopians have of do you continue on to building your utopia, your blueprint utopia, even given the bloodshed that it's going to entail, do you essentially change the people to fit your pre existing idea of utopia? Dev eventually seems to have resiled from that and he narrates the difference between a blueprint utopia that require. Requires sort of totalitarian means to impose and a looser kind of process based utopia that emerges from reaching greater stages of, you know, systematic, not systematic, sequential enlightenment, where the path emerges as you walk it, as you just try and be better. When he says to Alex, you Know, I thought that. I thought that I had to bring the right people to Mars. And what I actually discover now is the right people are the people who are already here. By definition, these are the right people, and I have to work with them and within this community. And the other sort of big, big element in this episode where you had a map, territory kind of dichotomy was the way the Marines were constantly struggling to understand where they were in Happy Valley, because they understood Happy Valley as a. As a map. And what it had become by being lived in and changed was, Was a territory, was an organic thing. It had changed. And so if you're an outsider to what it's become, you're lost, your maps are wrong, you can't find your way around.
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B
Yeah, yeah, but I think, yeah, I think there's a little of. There was a little of organic confusion. But then, I mean, we're also told quite clearly that the confusion is orchestrated. Right. And that it's part of a tactic on the part of a kind of guerrilla force. Right. An undermanned, underarmed guerrilla force that is trying to fight off a kind of classic colonial power that has better weapons, that has better intelligence, that has better training. And the way they do it is through kind of the classic techniques of subterfuge and confusion. And so there's a little of both going on. Right. That part of what I think you're right, the part of what makes a thing human is that it has a kind of messiness or lived in character about it that develops over time. But it's also orchestrated.
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Right.
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The confusion for the Marines here is orchestrated. They are intentionally placed in certain positions, like in the command center where they, you know, all those people get incinerated or like on Main street where the firefight kind of breaks out before the ceasefire. Those Marines are well trained, aren't they? They respond to orders, don't they? I mean, as soon as, like the barest crackle of ceasefire comes across, they immediately all stop.
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Right, right. Yeah. I suspect they were not that into the mission by that point, though. I mean, all the commanders had been kind of fried alive and, you know, they didn't know what was going on, which commonly happens to a Colonial force when things start. Start falling apart. We just got sort of a minute and a half here left, Jeff, So I thought we might talk about the, the jump ahead scene at the end. I had to do something, do some research into what was going on. At first I thought that there'd been such a. A parallel between what had gone on in this season and bits from both 2001 A Space Odyssey and the less known sequel, 2010. The year, the year we make contact that, you know, finding life on a moon of an outlying planet that, that I did look at the spaceship that came on screen at the end and thought that looks like discovery from 2001. And then the, the computer fires up and I'm like, this is going to be an AI kind of HAL 9000 story. Turns out that's not true. That was the. On screen was the Mars 94 ship, one of the three ships that had gone out on the. On the journey to Mars in like season three and had gotten damaged. And it seems now to be to have just continued on its way and to have detected something or it's be its systems are being revivified in some way and it's going to be 2020 when the next season starts. What are you, what are your sort of brief thoughts as to what we might find there?
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Yeah, I don't know. I mean I had the sense that it was the. That somehow they've figured out a way to reboot it from Earth. Right. Was my sense. It seemed a little sinister to me,
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but might be like a passing probe or another ship from Earth on the way out, like a salvage operation or.
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B
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know.
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C
I guess we'll see. I guess we'll look forward to the next season. That's pretty much all we have time for. If you have theories on next season or different views of this season, please do let us know in the comment. We value every comment and try to respond to all of them. But for now, on that bombshell,