Apple TV’s critically lauded space drama “For All Mankind” has already been renewed for a sixth – and final – season, but it won’t be taking its final steps without a key member of the team.
Let’s pause to issue a major spoiler warning for Season 5, Episode 3 (“Home”). If you haven’t watched yet, turn back now. If you have — or don’t care about massive spoilers — keep reading.
At the end of the second episode, Ed (Joel Kinnaman) loses consciousness after taking part in a dangerous mission on behalf of those living on Mars. While this would have been the perfect way for Ed to go out — in a blaze of glory one last time — that’s not how things play out. Instead, in “Home,” we watch as his adopted daughter Kelly (Cynthy Wu) learns of Ed’s cancer diagnosis, and we see Ed flit between the present and his time in the Korean War. (This has always been alluded to as a pivotal time in Ed’s life but never dramatized on the show.) He makes it back to the bar and connects with his grandson Alex (Sean Kaufman). Then he quietly drifts off to whatever happens next — he’s already conquered the cosmos; now it’s time for the great beyond.
“Actually, it’s funny with the show, it just gets to me. When we were shooting this, this final episode, I was so emotional, and I was trying to understand, like, what was going on inside of me. As actors, our life is that we create these short-term families. We all fall in love and then we say goodbye. It’s something that we do several times a year. When you do a show that goes on for a little longer, it becomes like a bigger thing,” Kinnaman said. “But the way that this hit me like a Mack truck … I was I was not expecting it.”
Kinnaman added that he was trying to unpack what was going on with him. For most of the last week he was working, he was crying. “Every day on set, I was crying. I was getting so moved by it,” Kinnaman said. “There’s a lot of different things going on at the same time.”
For one thing, Edward “Ed” Baldwin is the character he’s played the longest — both in terms of the production of the show and the character’s lifespan. He started out as a hotshot NASA recruit for the early moon landing program in the 1960s, modeled loosely on real-life astronaut Thomas Stafford, commander of the Apollo 10 mission (the second crewed mission to orbit the moon). But in the years since, Ed has moved away from his drawn-from-real-life origins and jumped forward in time, with each season taking place roughly a decade after the previous one.
Ed has loved and lost, becoming a key figure in the exploration of Mars, first as a traveler and then as a citizen. His status has taken on nearly mythic significance, even as he continues to deal with the messy realities of life — strained familial relationships, friction with governmental and private interests, and his own oversized ego within a confined community on Mars.
While filming his final episode, Kinnaman was also moving from one house, where he had lived for nine years, to another.
“It was so clearly one chapter ending and a new chapter beginning. But then that’s the nature of the show. And seeing myself in all of these different stages of life, having gone through a life in that way, in my own mind, contemplating over and over what it would be like to be 50, 60, 70 and now 80,” Kinnaman said. “It just feels like there was a life ending in a way. It was my own mortality and the nature of life and the nature of death, all at the front of my mind.”
In the final episode, the actor plays an 82-year-old man, the same age as Kinnaman’s father. He says goodbye to his daughter and his grandson. “It brought up so many feelings,” Kinnaman said.
Also part of the mélange of emotions he was feeling at the end was his love for the show. “I love what it stands for, the ethos behind it and the appealing to our better nature in some way and the optimism that it carries. I feel like it stands out – it’s really rare for something that feels so real and that is portrayed as complex can still be calm. It’s not glossy or shallow. I feel so grateful,” Kinnaman said.
He also really loved getting to play the flashbacks, which saw cast members Shantel VanSanten (who played Ed’s wife, Karen) and Michael Dorman (as Ed’s old friend Gordo Stevens, who was based on Apollo 10 lunar module pilot Gene Cernan).
“We were best friends on the show but then me and Michael because really dear friends,” Kinnaman said. When Gordo died in Season 2, Kinnaman remembers slipping him a deck of cards that symbolized their friendship — both on and off the show. They both started crying for real. “It’s something that can happen when you tell these stories, it seeps into you and reality and story intermingles in this strange way. It’s a deep experience that I’m still maybe it’ll take me a while to figure it out.”
“For All Mankind” co-creator Matt Wolpert said that the episode’s director, Meera Menon, told them, “It’s such a rare treat to be able to direct an episode of somebody dying that wasn’t violent.” “It’s interesting how rare that story gets told in television, especially these days, and I think that was kind of our intention,” Wolpert said.
Wolpert said that Ed’s vision of how he’d like to go — “with his boots on in a fiery spaceship crash” — was not how they wanted to play it out.
“The way he winds up dying is kind of his nightmare on some level, at least in his vision of it, and the fact that over this episode, we were able to tell the story of him coming to terms with that, that death that he did not want, but that he accepted, and that it was a quiet and beautiful death. I think it came together beautifully,” Wolpert said. “Everybody involved really brought their A-game, but especially Joel, who, honestly, the more we both have worked with him, the more we’ve just been floored by his talent and his range. He’s so funny. He’s a great comedic actor. He’s a great emotional actor, and he just in the way he physicalized age. It was just a brilliant performance.”
“What I loved is it was the best of both worlds. He got his big, heroic send off in episode two. That was an important thing to us, that he doesn’t die that way. You still give him that time to die with his condition, quietly, the way he probably didn’t want to. And then by the end, realizing this is the way to do it, with Alex there,” co-creator Ben Nedivi added.
Nedivi said that, more than anybody, “For All Mankind” didn’t happen without Kinnaman singing on. His absence was equally monumental.
“It’s honestly strange to move on without him. It was the strangest thing to move on to episode four he’s not around. And I kept looking, Where’s Joe? Is Joe? He was, for us, such a grounding element of this process from the beginning. And it was really hard, I have to say, to move on without him,” Nedivi said.
It was Kinnaman, Nedivi said, who fully grasped what the show was and what Nedivi, Wolpert and co-creator Ron D. Moore were trying to accomplish.
“He understood the concept we were going for. He understood that it’s this unique, weird show that you wouldn’t really understand until season three. He understood he would be going through five hours of makeup in the morning at two in the morning, just to show up on set and then do a full day. And he not only never complained, he embraced it. He was a true leader. He made the set a fun environment. He made he made us better writers and better showrunners, I have to say, through this experience, so I don’t think we’re ever going to forget this collaboration with him, ever,” Nedivi said.
Nedivi said VanSanten and Dorman were not even in Los Angeles when they were called about appearing in Kinnaman’s final episode, but they agreed anyway.
“They wanted to be there for this moment for him,” Nedivi said. “The last day of his, that moment for him, was this beautiful, emotional moment for everyone.”
The “For All Mankind” creators and Kinnaman were also eager to show a slice of Ed’s life during the Korean War.
“The thing when we were thinking about it, in terms of going back to Korea, it felt like the one part of his life we hadn’t really explored yet in depth, is the one that he references the Korean war all the time, almost every season. And we always felt, even from Season 1, like, Oh, it’d be great to show a little bit of that. But, you know, you never could get around to it,” Nedivi said. “And then I remember when it occurred to us in the writers room, like, Well, this is the if ever there’s a time to dive back into the past, this is it. And it frequently happens as you’re closer to death, that suddenly these memories from your past do flood in. It felt true and we wanted to capture that. I think Meera did an amazing job capturing that as well, like the idea of how these memories come in, but are also overlapping with the present, and he’s a little confused about where he is, and spoke to the experiences I’ve seen with my relatives going through this. And I think the way Joel handled it was, was unbelievable.”
Kinnaman said that he has lobbied for a Korea flashback over the past few years. Both Season 3 and Season 4 originally had flashbacks to Ed in Korea, only to be jettisoned, like so much space junk, at the last minute. “And then it just took too much focus away from the main story,” Kinnaman added. “It felt like a darling that they had to kill every time.”
The actor was overjoyed that they finally found a place for it — not least because he got to shed his cumbersome old-age makeup.
“A big chunk of the crew has been with us from the first season, but 90% of the crew, if not more, haven’t seen me without makeup since 2019. They haven’t seen me without prosthetics on my face for years,” Kinnaman said. His last day was during the shoot of one of the flashbacks. “My last day was without makeup, which was great,” he said.
We teased that the rest of the season is, somehow, even more shocking and emotional than his episode, which he could hardly believe. But he’ll just have to find out for himself.
“Of all the shows that I’ve been on that have continued without me, I’ve never seen an episode of anything … but I’m going to watch this,” Kinnaman said.
One small step, in other words.
New episodes of “For All Mankind” stream on Apple TV on Fridays.
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