For All Mankind season 5 trailer promises Mars independence (video).
There are plenty of science fiction series that talk a good game about the future, then quietly retreat into laser pew-pew and people in sensible beige corridors. For All Mankind has always had grander ambitions. Apple’s alt-history space saga has spent four seasons asking what might have happened if the Soviets had beaten the Americans to the Moon and the space race had never slammed on the brakes, and the answer, broadly speaking, has been: more rockets, more politics, more funerals, more human folly, and the occasional glorious bit of engineering madness. Season 5 arrives on 27th March 2026, with weekly episodes running through 29th May, and the new trailer suggests that Mars is no longer content to be Earth’s rugged little frontier outpost. It fancies becoming a problem in its own right.
Apple’s official synopsis says the new season picks up in the years after the Goldilocks asteroid heist, with Happy Valley now a thriving colony of thousands and a launch point for missions going even farther into the solar system. Naturally, Earth responds to this growth in the calm, mature manner one expects from large powers with a history of proxy conflict and bruised egos: by demanding “law and order” on Mars. The trailer, accordingly, looks less like a friendly workplace drama with some spaceships attached and more like the opening murmurs of a proper colonial bust-up. Mars wants a say. Earth wants control. Somewhere in the middle, somebody will make an emotional speech while machinery worth several billion dollars catches fire.
That is very much the show’s sweet spot. For All Mankind has always been at its best when it remembers that the real fuel of history is not hydrogen or plutonium, but bruised pride, ideology, ambition and people making catastrophic decisions in rooms full of buttons. Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi built the series on a gloriously simple but rich notion: keep the Cold War space race burning, and watch the twentieth and twenty-first centuries warp under the strain. The result has been one of the more intelligent bits of modern television science fiction, a show where technological progress is never free, heroism is often grubby, and every victory comes with enough emotional collateral to fill a launch hangar.
Season 5 also has the advantage of stepping into the 2010s of this alternate timeline, which is deliciously odd territory. In the real world, the 2010s gave us apps, doomscrolling and arguments on social media. In For All Mankind, they appear to have given us a heavily populated Mars colony, interplanetary political friction and the sort of future NASA posters from the 1970s used to promise before reality wandered off to invent subscription television and electric scooters. There is something wonderfully bold about a series that can jump decades between seasons and still keep its emotional through-line intact, even as the hairstyles, geopolitics and spacecraft keep changing around it.
Joel Kinnaman is back as Ed Baldwin, which means viewers can once again enjoy one of television’s great ongoing miracles: the survival of a man so stubborn he could probably outlive a fusion reactor through sheer refusal to cooperate with mortality. Wrenn Schmidt returns as Margo Madison, still carrying enough history and guilt to bend nearby gravity, while Edi Gathegi, Cynthy Wu and Coral Peña are also back in the ever-expanding ensemble. Season 5 adds Mireille Enos and Costa Ronin as new series regulars, which should help stir the already volatile stew of politics, space labour, family baggage and old Cold War ghosts refusing to stay politely buried.
What the trailer seems to understand, thankfully, is that For All Mankind is not just about shiny hardware. Plenty of science fiction can give you an elegant ship gliding past a planet. This show wants to know who paid for the ship, who gets exploited building it, which nation claims the planet, and which exhausted middle-aged veteran is about to make a terrible call because they have not processed something that happened three decades and two dead friends ago. It is science fiction with calluses. The future here is not a pristine showroom. It is a worksite, a battlefield, a political theatre, and occasionally a pub with questionable homemade alcohol.
There is also the little matter of Star City, the announced spin-off about the Soviet side of this alternate space race, which rather suggests Apple knows it has a proper universe on its hands now. That was announced when season 5 was renewed in April 2024, and it makes sense. One of the cleverest things For All Mankind ever did was realise the point of alternate history is not simply to swap dates around like fridge magnets. It is to create pressure. Different winners, different institutions, different compromises, and suddenly the entire world tilts a few degrees off the familiar. The show has dined out on that premise very handsomely indeed.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we have a soft spot for science fiction that remembers progress is rarely tidy and the future is usually built by difficult people with impossible dreams and very poor work-life balance. For All Mankind has managed, over four seasons, to become one of the best ongoing examples of that. Season 5 looks ready to keep the engines hot, the politics combustible and the emotional damage nicely orbital.
So yes, the trailer makes it look as though Mars may be about to stop asking permission. Which, given humanity’s general talent for exporting all its worst habits into new frontiers, should be marvellously entertaining and deeply alarming in equal measure.
