This article contains heavy spoilers for “For All Mankind” Season 5, Episode 5, “Svoboda.”
It finally happened. After “For All Mankind” teased an anime-like storyline for Season 5, the show’s latest episode, “Svoboda,” finally starts the Martian revolution. The Apple TV sci-fi series, which takes place in an alternate reality where the space race never ended and humanity reached the stars and colonized Mars in the 2000s, has been teasing some big fight for independence on Mars since Season 4. It all began with blue collar workers on the red planet rioting to demand better working conditions and rights.
Mars has already changed everything for the sci-fi epic that is “For All Mankind.” At the start of Season 5, there’s a thriving settler community on the planet, with entire families who consider themselves Martian. This is now part of their identity, and they take it seriously, enough so that they’re willing to fight for it. There are citizens meeting to promote independentist ideas and even a local tech mogul has plans for a self-sustaining Martian city that can function as a permanent and fully independent settlement. Still, this has mostly been talk … until now.
Everything changed when Season 5, Episode 4, “Open Source,” revealed that tech giants Helios and Kuragin have been striking clandestine deals to make the entire Martian operation fully automated. Recognizing that this means every worker and settler on the red planet would eventually get kicked out, the people of the Martian colony known as Happy Valley rebelled.
Though there was already a revolt in Season 4, this one is different, as “Svoboda” ends with rebels about to take the governor of Happy Valley hostage. It’s an exciting development that means “For All Mankind” is also getting to a classic trope of Mars-set stories: Martian revolutions.
For All Mankind wouldn’t be a proper Mars story without a revolution
Apple TV
Again, as exciting as “For All Mankind” Season 5’s revolution storyline is, it’s far from surprising. Quite the opposite, ardent sci-fi fans know you can’t tell a proper Mars story without a revolution.
Whether it’s books like “Red Rising” and Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars” trilogy, acclaimed TV shows like “The Expanse” (itself based on a novel series) and “Babylon 5,” movies like “Total Recall” and “Mars Express,” or even video games like “Red Faction,” revolution is inherent to the red planet. Small groups fighting corruption. Blue collar workers rising up against the big corporations that rule Mars. Colonists fighting to gain independence.
There’s a good reason for this. The sheer amount of work required to colonize Mars makes it easier to think of the red planet as an industrial place first, a second home, well, second. That, in turn, makes the planet ripe for stories about fighting oppression and class warfare. Then there’s the fact that the vast distance between Earth and Mars would make it easy for Earth to hold Martian supplies hostage, leading to conflict.
That’s exactly what “For All Mankind” showrunner Ben Nedivi and his team looked at when developing Season 5. As he told Space.com, the time needed to ship things from England to its American colonies parallels the journey of going from Earth to Mars in the TV show. “That gap and the control Earth still wants to have over Mars forms a lot of tension that you feel this season,” he explained.
Space colonies are ripe for stories about revolution and independence, a way to echo our own history in a new setting. “For All Mankind” is now part of that great tradition.
“For All Mankind” is streaming on Apple TV.
