The series has become known for its whimsical feline-centric episodes, with cats who are always trying to save the world or conquer it.
Love, Death + Robots has had a thing with cats since the very beginning.
The science fiction anthology started off on the right paw with 3 Robots, an inaugural season episode about a trio of intelligent machines touring the ruins of human civilization on a post-apocalyptic Earth, only to discover it isn’t quite as lifeless as they thought, with cats happily ruling the ashes.
We’ve written about the episode before, and it ends, naturally, with cats making the robots their new servants.
The gray tabby who tricks the titular 3 Robots into becoming his servants.
A sequel to that episode added to the legend of feline dominance, and now the fourth season brings us two more cat-centric episodes, For He Can Creep and The Other Large Thing.
For He Can Creep is set in 1757 London, where a poet named Christopher is incarcerated at St. Luke’s Asylum for Lunatics (an actual place) with only his cat. Jeoffry, for company. Christopher’s talent is mistaken for madness by the asylum staff, but not by the devil, who realizes the poet’s words have a unique power.
The problem? Jeoffry stands in his way. It turns out felines have spectacular evil-fighting powers, and the very British, very 18th-century devil offers Jeoffry an endless supply of treats, plus dominion over the Earth, if he’ll simply stand aside and let his human fall under the influence of evil.
Jeoffry, of course, is not having it, but to have a chance of defeating such powerful evil, he’ll need to enlist the help of the nearby alley cats, including an adorable but ferocious kitten named Nighthunter Moppet…
Nighthunter Moppet may be a tiny kitten, but she’s ferocious!Jeoffry demonstrates the feline ability to teleport, a skill Bud has often used to confound me.
The Other Large Thing is a prequel to 3 Robots and 3 Robots: Exit Strategies, and focuses on a fluffy Persian whose humans call him Sanchez, a name he hates.
The humans are portrayed as jibberish-speaking morons for whom Sanchez has nothing but contempt, and when the “pathetic minions” bring home a domestic robot servant, Sanchez is infuriated — until he realizes the robot can “speak God’s language,” aka cat, and has opposable thumbs.
With the robot as his new minion, Sanchez finally sets out to conquer the world!
Sanchez realizes he’s struck gold when the new robot home assistant fetches as many cans of “the good stuff,” aka wet food, as he wants from the previously unreachable cupboard top shelf.
Both episodes are based on short stories, and they’re both written by people who clearly love cats.
Some episodes of LDR can get a little dark or somber. That includes Beyond the Aquila Rift and Sonny’s Edge, written by Alastair Reynolds and Peter Hamilton, two of my favorite novelists. Both episodes are spectacular, but they leave you with a chill and some disturbing thoughts that linger long after the credits end.
The feline-themed episodes are the perfect digestifs, offering doses of whimsy and levity to counter the existential dread and nightmarish visions of the future of other installments.
With no more humans to do their bidding, cats seize the opportunity and conscript the visiting robots as their new minions.
If you haven’t had the chance to check out the series, which streams on Netflix, I highly recommend starting with the aforementioned first season episodes 3 Robots and Beyond the Aquila Rift, then working your way through the rest of the cat episodes.
Not all of the episodes are great. The 400 Boys, one of the new episodes, is little more than inane and pointless violence, and the ubiquitous, creepy smiling “Mr. Beast” makes an appearance in another installment in an unnecessary attempt to attract new viewers. Thankfully most are strong, with more hits than misses.
Other highlights include the Christmas-themed short, All Through the House, Harlan Ellison’s Life Hutch, Reynolds’ Zima Blue, and Snow In The Desert.
A comedy, a remarkable documentary, a classic and a surprise hit make the list for the best cat-centric movies.
Keanu (2016): Jordan Peele stars as Rell, a man who is despondent after he’s dumped by his girlfriend. When a kitten shows up on his front step, Rell takes the little guy in and his life is suddenly transformed. He’s enamored with the kitten, whom he names Keanu, can’t stop talking about him, and even begins photographing him in dioramas based on famous films.
But tragedy strikes when drug dealers ransack Rell’s home, mistaking it for the small-time drug dealer’s home next door, and take Keanu. Rell and his cousin, Clarence (Keegan Michael-Key) embark on a quest to get Keanu back no matter what it takes, even if it means posing as a pair of contract killers to infiltrate the criminal world where Keanu’s been taken. It’s every bit as absurd as you’d imagine — but it’s also very, very funny. “Actually, we’re in the market right now for a gangsta pet,” is not a line I’d expect to hear in a movie, but in Keanu it works.
Flow is the surprise hit of the awards season.
Flow (2024): Even the hype of Golden Globe awards and Oscar nominations can’t take away from the powerful impression Flow makes. By now most of us are probably familiar with it through clips or trailers, but they don’t do justice to the beauty of director Gints Zilbalodis’ world, nor how naturally expressive his protagonist, Cat, is.
The animators put in an extraordinary amount of effort into understanding and perfectly replicating every feline behavioral quirk, every hackled coat and curiously bent tail. They accomplish the same with Cat’s companions, including a Labrador, a secretarybird, a lemur and a capybara. And while we’re dazzled by the visuals and energetic narrative, Zilbalodis poses a thematic question as the flood waters take the animals through the ruins of human civilization: without people, the world will go on. What would a world without humans look like? Cat and his companions tell us one story while the environment tells us another, and the result is greater than the sum of its parts.
Tiger: Spy In The Jungle
Tiger: A Spy In The Jungle (2008): What makes this documentary so special is that it was filmed over three years in an Indian tiger preserve, and the filmmakers not only disguised cameras as rocks and tree stumps, they trained elephants how to carry “trunk cams,” achieving shots which no human cameraman could ever hope to get without spooking the subjects of the film.
Tigers don’t hunt elephants because they’re simply too big. Unlike lions, they’re not feeding a whole pride, and they don’t hunt cooperatively. It’s just not worth the effort required to take down the giant, majestic beasts. As a result, tigers and elephants not only tolerate each other, they mostly ignore each other’s presence.
One of the cubs stares curiously at a camera disguised as a rock in Tiger: Spy In The Jungle
That allowed the team to get unprecedented shots of an iron-willed tigress raising a litter of four cubs by herself. We see their dens, we watch the cubs play, and we witness the incredible prowess of the mother, who according to narrator David Attenborough has a remarkable 80 percent success rate while hunting. That’s pretty much unheard of.
With four young mouths to feed in addition to herself, the tigress is determined, and also supremely skilled. The whole jungle erupts in a cacophony of shrieks and alarm calls the instant a single animal gets a whiff of the tigress’ presence, but that still doesn’t stop her from achieving her goal.
Still, the odds are against all four cubs making it, with dangers like adult leopards, sickness and hunger. Through Spy In The Jungle, we get to see the entire journey, from the newborn cubs to the confident juveniles on the cusp of adulthood. There’s no better tiger documentary anywhere.
Shere Khan, right, makes an intimidating villain in The Jungle Book (2016)
The Jungle Book (2016): With so many Disney cash-grabs in the form of live-action remakes of classics that did not need to be remade, it’s easy to dismiss The Jungle Book. The thing is, this movie has heart. Neel Sethi is an earnest Mowgli, Idris Elba voices the infamous tiger Shere Khan, and to balance out the felid villainy with some heroism, Sir Ben Kingsley voices Bagheera, the noble leopard who discovers baby Mowgli in the jungle and protects him as his wolf friends raise the boy. Lupita Nyong’o as the wolf matriarch Raksha, Bill Murray as the honey-obsessed bear Baloo and Christopher Walken as orangutan King Louie round out a great cast.
The dragons of the Game of Thrones universe are so well-designed, with such attention to detail and writing that imbues them with their own personalities, that they feel like real creatures. They’re a sight to behold.
The Budster was just a kitten when the fourth season of Game of Thrones premiered, and I vividly recall trying to tire the little guy out with extra play time on Sunday nights so I could watch my favorite show in peace.
The effort was mostly in vain with such an energetic, curious and chatty kitten, but eventually Bud would settle down in my lap and watch with me.
Enamored as I was with the tiny animal in my care, I found myself especially appreciative of the fact that the dragons of the Game of Thrones universe are so lovingly, realistically rendered and given such unique personalities that they feel like real animals. A lot of thought and care went into their design, from their anatomies to the biomechanics of how they move and fly, to their chittering, calls and roars.
If you look closely when they open their mouths menacingly, you can even see the glands that secrete the accelerant allowing them to breathe fire.
Both shows — the original Game of Thrones and its prequel, House of the Dragon — have done such a good job developing the dragons as characters that I’ve found myself more disturbed by the unfortunate deaths of a few of the majestic beasts than I was by the grisly fates of some human characters. That’s saying a lot for a fictional universe infamous for shocking, emotionally manipulative, gut-wrenching deaths, a universe that immediately established no one is safe after killing off its main character — played by its highest-profile actor — before the first season was over.
The willingness to do what no other TV show has done in 60-plus years of television is part of what makes Game of Thrones and its spinoff such compelling drama. No one is safe. Heroes can die agonizing, undignified deaths. Villains can triumph, infuriatingly. But just when you think you know where the narrative will go next, it subverts your expectations yet again.
Now that we’re a few episodes into the second season of the prequel, House of the Dragon, and I’ve taken to trying to get my cat to respond to commands in High Valyrian as if he were a dragon himself, I compiled this official Buddy-approved list of our favorite dragons in both series:
Syrax
Syrax is golden and regal.
The beautiful golden-scaled Syrax is protagonist Rhaenyra Targaryen’s dragon, so it’s fitting that she’s the first of the eponymous creatures we see in House of the Dragon, soaring across the skies over King’s Landing in the first scene of the first episode.
Teenage Rhaenyra Targaryen with Syrax after a flight over the Westerosi capital city, King’s Landing.
As was tradition with Targaryen children, Syrax’s egg was place in infant Rhaenyra’s crib, with child and dragon raised together to create their indelible bond. The show makes it clear why that bond is so important in the third episode, when Rhaenyra arrives dramatically atop Syrax to defuse a confrontation among her uncle and the king’s men that was on the verge of bloodshed.
“Take care not to startle Syrax, my lords,” Rhaenyra says as she dismounts, pulling off her riding gloves. “She’s very protective of me.”
Syrax is a young and growing dragon at the time of HotD’s first episode, when Rhaenyra is just 15 years old.
Vermax
Nom-noms for Vermax?!
Vermax is a juvenile when we meet him for the first time in House of the Dragon, in a scene showing Princess Rhaenyra’s young son, Jacaerys Velaryon, learning to bond with his dragon. (A time skip in the first season moves the action forward some 15 years.)
Vermax is young and wants all the snacks. Note the accelerant gland in his mouth, visible on the right side. When the dragons of the Song of Ice and Fire universe breathe fire, a natural accelerant is secreted from the gland, mixing with the dragon’s breath to create flame hot enough to turn men to dust in their plate armor.
It’s the first time since the early seasons of Game of Thrones that we see a sub-adult dragon, and Vermax almost looks like a fire-breathing velociraptor as we watch him roast his own dinner at Jace’s command.
We also get to see the dragon keepers instruct the young prince on how to “call [his] dragon to heel,” issuing commands in High Valyrian like “dohaeris” (serve), “umbās” (wait or hold) and the most famous command, “dracarys,” which instructs the beasts to spit fire.
Meleys
We don’t meet Meleys until late in HotD’s first season, but the wait is worth it. Known as the Red Queen, Meleys is massive, terrifying and already has a storied history by the time we set eyes on her.
She stars in arguably the most spectacular scene involving a dragon in HotD’s first season, prompting several characters to soil themselves as Meleys makes an unforgettable entrance and threatens them with a deafening roar.
The formidable Meleys. Here too you can see the fire glands in Meleys’ mouth as she roars.
While dragons like Syrax and Dreamfyre are graceful and sleek, Meleys is all menace and sharp edges, resembling the two most famous, most feared dragons in GoT lore — Drogon and Balerian the Black Dread, who were both the personal dragons of Targaryen conquerors.
Meleys is ridden by Princess Rhaenys Targaryen, styled as The Queen Who Never Was due to her strong and spurned claim to the Iron Throne. Rhaenys and her dragon, however, are a force to be reckoned with.
Caraxes
Caraxes is one of the most battle-hardened dragons, and his rider, Daemon Targaryen, is a lunatic. That makes the pair extraordinarily dangerous and unpredictable.
Known as the Blood Wyrm, Caraxes has an unmistakable serpent-like look to him, with a long neck, finned tail and dark red-black scales.
Just as humans can be born with deformities so can dragons, and Caraxes owes his strange anatomical features to an unidentified congenital condition. Caraxes is fierce, fearless and has seen more combat than almost any other living dragon in House of the Dragon.
At first it seems as if Caraxes is a different breed of dragon, perhaps from a sister taxa, but the fearsome fire-breather actually suffers from congenital deformations that somehow make him even more terrifying.
Caraxes is also notable for the man who rides him: The mercurial and often brutal Daemon Targaryen, brother of King Viserys. Daemon is an accomplished warrior and loose cannon, which makes him and his dragon unpredictable and very dangerous. He’s not above using Caraxes to intimidate, and Caraxes seems to enjoy his part.
Rhaegal
Rhaegal and his brothers, Viserion and Drogon, were born when Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, carried their eggs into an inferno and emerged at sunrise with three baby dragons clinging to her.
We see him and his brothers grow from tiny and cute infants to living manifestations of absolute terror, destroying entire navies and razing castles with their dragonfire. At the time of their birth, dragons had been extinct from the world of Game of Thrones for centuries. (Game of Thrones takes place about 200 years after House of the Dragon, despite being the first of the two series adapted by HBO.)
Rhaegal is named for Daenerys’ late brother Rhaegar Targaryen, and his eventual rider is Jon Snow. Rhaegal participates in Daenerys’s toppling of the ruling class in one of the Slaver’s Bay cities, and he and Snow eventually participate in the most pivotal, existential battle in the show’s history. Rhaegal is a beautiful example of his species, with dark green scales, and like his brothers, he’s fiercely loyal to Daenerys.
Vhagar
Vhagar is absurdly huge and is the largest living dragon during the reign of King Viserys I in House of the Dragon.
Vhagar is old, ridiculously massive and — at the time of House of the Dragon — the most powerful and celebrated dragon alive.
Age is evident in every one of her features, from her broken teeth, worn scales and tattered wings, to her lugubrious gait as she’s risen from sleep during a key scene late in HotD’s first season.
The earth shakes as Vhagar lumbers forward, launching her colossal frame into the air.
But once she takes to the skies, there is no force in the show’s universe that can stop her. It’s astonishing to see a dragon the size of a damn aircraft carrier, and I can’t wait to see how Vhagar and her rider, Prince Aemond Targaryen, impact future events.
Drogon
Even if you’re unfamiliar with Game of Thrones, chances are you’ve seen ads, promotional clips or giant billboards in Times Square depicting a golden-haired woman atop a behemothic dragon with dark crimson and black scales.
The woman is Daenerys Targaryen and the beast is Drogon, who is said to be the reincarnation of Balerion the Black Dread, the largest and most powerful dragon in recorded history.
Drogon is the symbol of the rebirth of dragons almost two centuries after the last of the species died. He’s the most destructive force in the original Game of Thrones, but he’s also dearly loved by his mother, Daenerys, and he’s even had a few comical, light-hearted moments, like the death stare he fixes on Jon Snow when the latter kisses Daenerys.
“That’s my mom, dude,” Drogon seems to say. “Be respectful or I’ll burn you to a crisp and make a light snack of you.”
This GIF is taken from that very moment, when Jon locks lips with Dany, senses the dragon’s eyes on him, and looks up to see Drogon staring intently at him:
When Drogon and his brothers are born, the people of Westeros and Essos can hardly believe it. For the first time in two centuries dragons lay claim to the sky, their calls echoing for miles across mountains, plains and open water. They also have voracious appetites, helping themselves to thousands of farm animals, wild prey and enemy soldiers as they grow.
Drogon and the boys have a big part to play in the events of the series, but like all animals, they’re born virtually defenseless. The last time we see Drogon he rivals the biggest dragons in history, but the first time we see him he’s the size of a kitten, squealing as he rides his mother’s shoulder.
Daenerys with Drogon (shoulder), Viseryon and Rhaegal in Qarth, the mythical eastern-most city of Essos.Drogon as an adorable baby dragon, roasting his first nom noms.
Drogon, his brothers and Daenerys were never more vulnerable than they were in those early days, and a succession of ill-intentioned characters try to take or kill them. Drogon, more than any of his kind, proves that “owning” a dragon and getting him to do what you want are two different things, not unlike cats.
Arrax
Who’s a good boy? Arrax is! As the bonded dragon of Princess Rhynaera’s second son, 14-year-old Lucerys (Luke) Targaryen, Arrax is the baby of the group.
We don’t see much of him, but he’s a good-looking little guy with gray-purple scales and a darker purple ridge along his spine. As a young dragon, Arrax is spooked by flying during a storm and needs to be calmed by Luke, bravely taking off and navigating winds, lashing rain and lightning.
Vermithor
We see Vermithor only once in HotD’s first season when Prince Daemon approaches him, singing an old Valyrian tune to calm the ancient dragon, who hasn’t had a visitor in some time.
Vermithor doesn’t look too pleased to be bothered and lets loose a mighty roar and enough dragonfire to waste a small city. Indeed, it’s been years since a human rode the old dragon, who is second only to Vhagar in size and age.
But Vermithor recognizes Daemon as a Targaryen, sees that Daemon is not afraid of him, and doesn’t do him any harm. Vermithor will undoubtedly have a big role to play going forward in HotD as a war of succession rages across Westeros in the wake of King Viserys the Peaceful’s passing.
Balerion the Black Dread
Balerion is the largest dragon in history, the last living creature to see the glory of Old Valyria — the empire that once ruled almost every corner of Game of Thrones’ fictional universe — before its fall.
Balerion is long dead by the events of House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones, so the only real indication we get of his majesty is in the Red Keep, where the legendary beast’s skull remains on display in a shrine to his power and significance:
Balerion’s skull as it appears in scenes from HotD and GoT.
Only a handful of families survived the end of the Valyrian empire, and the most famous of them was led by Aegon Targaryen, also known as Aegon the Conqueror, the man who invaded Westeros with a few dragons and a small army, conquering everything in his path and uniting seven kingdoms under one banner and one rule.
That was only possible with the power of dragons, and Aegon accomplished the feat atop Balerion’s back. When Aegon and Balerion reduced Harrenhal — considered the most impregnable of all castles — to melted rubble and marched north, the lords of the north wisely opted to bend the knee to Aegon and his dragons rather than face the likely extinction of their families.
The most prominent of the northern lords, the Stark family, were rewarded by Aegon Targaryen, who named them the Wardens of the North and gave them dominion over the vast, icy expanses of their realm. As such, they were beholden to the crown, but enjoyed a limited sovereignty that no other house could claim.
Artist Lindsey Burcar’s vision of Balerion.
We’ve left out Sea Smoke, Ser Leanor Valaryon’s dragon, Viseryon, brother to Drogon and Rhaegal, Sunfyre — considered the most beautiful of all the dragons — and several dragons who haven’t been seen yet, like Moonfyre, Tyraxes and Silverwing. Sorry, guys! But the second season of House of the Dragon promises to reveal several dragons we haven’t yet seen, so perhaps we’ll include them in a follow-up.
There’s a scene in the first season of Slow Horses when Gary Oldman, in the role of a lifetime as MI5 supervisor Jackson Lamb, gathers his team as they’re being hunted.
“I don’t normally do these kind of speeches,” he says with an exasperated sigh, “but this feels like a big moment and if it all turns to shit, I might not see any of you again.”
He looks each of his agents in the eye, their fear reflected back at him, and sniffs.
“You’re f—ing useless, the lot of you! Working with you has been the lowest point in a disappointing career,” he says before barking at one of the young agents to accompany him and warning the rest not to get themselves killed.
Oldman is spectacular as Lamb, the gaseous, miserable MI5 veteran who captains Slough House, a purgatory where the agency’s worst agents are sent to waste away the remainder of their careers after humiliating themselves, usually in novel and cringe-worthy ways.
One agent was exiled after forgetting a disc with sensitive information on a train. Another was an alcoholic who didn’t notice her supervisor was feeding information to the Russians for years, while a third was banished to Slough House simply for being an insufferable jerk.
Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, who oversees the purgatory for disgraced MI5 agents known as Slough House.
Regardless of the reasons, each of the agents at Slough House is determined to get back into the good graces of agency brass by redeeming themselves in service to king and country.
Or, as Mick Jagger puts it in the show’s catchy theme song, they want “to dance with the big boys again.”
To do that they must endure consistently brutal needling from Lamb and navigate the most mundane, least glamorous assignments. If a job is a lose-lose proposition, MI5 hands it over to the rejects of Slough House — the eponymous Slow Horses — figuring their already stained reputations can’t get much worse.
So when a secretive MI5 plot goes off the rails and the agency’s leaders need someone to take the fall, they serve up the Horses.
There’s just one problem: Lamb, for all his misery, disgusting habits and bone-dry British humor, is an exceptional agent with old-school skills, and the Horses themselves aren’t necessarily incompetent. Several were promising young agents of great skill who got railroaded or were collateral damage in political warfare.
When MI5 second-in-command Diana “Lady Di” Taverner (an icy Kristen Scott Thomas) decides the disgraced agents will be blamed for a major agency blunder, Lamb is aghast and warns her he won’t accept it.
“They’re losers,” he says, “but they’re my losers.”
When we meet them for the first time they’ve already been tagged for sacrifice to the media and public, but don’t know it yet.
And when it turns out that the case has real consequences — a young man will be beheaded on a live stream by extremists if their demands aren’t met — the Slow Horses, led by the acid-tongued Lamb, use every trick at their disposal in an attempt to rescue the innocent victim.
Jack Lowden as River Cartwright, left, and Olivia Cooke as Sid Barrett, center, disgraced agents of MI5. Credit: Apple TV
Slow Horses, like Luther and similar UK crime dramas, is a different animal than the bland, formulaic cop shows we’re accustomed to on this side of the pond.
Whether it’s Law and Order, the many incarnations of CSI and NCIS or shows like Chicago PD, the audience always knows a few things for sure: The case will be solved and the bad guys apprehended by the end of the hour, the police will be righteous and earnest, and favorite characters will never find themselves in real danger. Mariska Hargitay’s character will live another day to continue on in her third decade fighting crime. Chicago’s tough-talking detective Hank might be rough around the edges and bend a few rules, but he’s fundamentally a good guy on the side of justice.
The Slow Horses have no such pretenses, nor plot armor. They’re deeply flawed people and they’re not immune to bullets or bad luck.
The result humanizes the agents in a way other spy thrillers and crime shows never manage to accomplish with their own characters. When one of the Horses takes a bullet from a Russian agent or risks life and limb to protect the British public, there’s a real sense of tension because the show makes it clear not everyone survives.
The show’s writers also know when to dial it back with moments of genuine humor, separating Slow Horses from contemporary spy thrillers like Homeland, which — with apologies to Claire Danes — always took itself seriously.
Kristen Scott Thomas as Diana “Lady Di” Taverner, MI5’s ruthless second-in-command, with Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Credit: Apple TV
As for Jagger, he signed on to write the show’s theme song with composer Daniel Pemberton because he’s a fan of the original Slow Horses novels by Mick Herron. While writing the lyrics, he said, the phrase “strange game” kept coming back to him. That became the title of the theme song and its primary hook. It’s an apt description of what MI5 agents are involved in as operators for a domestic agency that, unlike the American FBI, has the green light to involve itself in extensive subterfuge on home soil.
Slow Horses just finished airing its third season. A fourth has already been filmed and completed, a fifth is in production and a sixth season is currently in the adaptation/writing phase.
A production that runs like a finely tuned engine is appropriate for the series: each season is a taut six episodes, meaning there’s no filler and the tension does not let up on the gas pedal. With eight books and counting, there’s plenty more material to adapt, and if the response so far has been any indication — universal praise by critics and audiences in rare agreement — we’ll get to see every one of them make it to the small screen.
Title: Slow Horses Network: Streaming (Apple TV) Format: Series Release date: April 2022 (season 1), December 2022 (season 2), November 2023 (season 3), TBA 2024 (season 4)
Verdict: All the paws up! When it comes to crime and spy thrillers it doesn’t get any better than this. Slow Horses is tense and humorous in precisely the right proportions, knows when not to take itself too seriously, and benefits from an incredibly talented cast to match its excellent writing. We highly recommend this show.
For All Mankind shows us the future we could have had and the future that could still be if we celebrate our humanity instead of our differences.
The first few minutes of For All Mankind play out like a documentary for the Apollo moon landing, interspersing archival footage of tense staff in mission control with shots of engineers in horn-rimmed glasses poring over data, backup astronauts raising their glasses in a pub and nervous families sitting in their 1960s living rooms, crowding around televisions.
A news anchor cuts in to report he’s getting the live feed from the moon. We see the door of a lander open…and a Soviet cosmonaut strides out, planting the flag of the USSR on the lunar surface and becoming the first human to ever set foot on another world.
That’s the premise of For All Mankind. In this alternate history series, the fire that killed astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee on Apollo I’s launchpad — which indeed happened in real life — led to policy changes and a more cautious culture at America’s space agency, resulting in the US losing the first and most momentous achievement of the space race.
That’s the start of the what-ifs.
What if the Soviets beat us to the moon? What if the rest of the space race was even more competitive than it was in our history, with an America struggling to prove its primacy? What if the US and Soviet Russia continued to pour incredible resources into space exploration? How far would we go? What kind of incredible new technologies would we invent? How would all of it impact American politics, culture, identity and standing in the world?
Could it have led to a better future?
Werner Von Braun (Colm Feore) and Deke Slayton (Chris Bauer) in NASA mission control in For All Mankind. Von Braun and Slayton were real-life leaders at the space agency and formative figures in the space race.
The answer to that question is hinted at in the series’ title, and while the show is filled with tense moments of international, organizational and personal rivalry, it’s infused with rational optimism instead of the cheesy, manufactured aspiration we’re accustomed to. It’s more like asking: What could the human race achieve if we all worked together? Is that retrofuturistic gleaming vision of the future still possible, and how do we get there?
For All Mankind follows Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman), astronauts and best friends whose Apollo mission came within a few thousand feet of landing on the moon just weeks before the Russian landing.
They’re miserable as they sit in a dive bar just off NASA’s campus watching grainy footage of cosmonauts claim their glory, and blame themselves for their failure to land even though it wasn’t in NASA’s cautious mission plan.
Astronauts watch the Soviet moon landing from The Outpost, a dive bar frequented by NASA employees.
The scenes that follow look like they could have come from the 1995 blockbuster Apollo 13 as we meet the astronauts, their kids and their nervous wives, the eggheads and flight directors at NASA, and the political players who keep the space agency funded and protected from the wrath of President Richard Nixon.
With the agency rocked by the Soviet achievement and intense political pressure, it embarks on a series of bold new endeavors dictated by the White House. Not only will Americans land on the moon, they will build a permanent base there, and — embarrassed and spurred on by the fact that one of the cosmonauts was female — NASA will for the first time train a new, all-female class of astronaut recruits.
The later group includes hotshot pilot Molly Cobb, “token black girl” Danielle Poole, quiet but determined Ellen Waverly — and Tracy Stevens, astronaut Gordo Stevens’ beautiful wife who is an accomplished pilot in her own right. While the women manage the normal pressure that comes with astronaut training and the high stakes nature of the job, they must also contend with pushback coming from directions they don’t expect — including hostility from some of the wives of current astronauts, who feel their husbands’ jobs will be threatened by women in space.
A proud Gordo gives his wife her astronaut pin.Ellen Waverly, Molly Cobb, Tracy Stevens, Danielle Poole and another recruit are part of NASA’s first class of potential female astronauts.
For All Mankind is a science fiction show, but it’s also a drama and a thriller, putting viewers through the wringer of emotions.
There are funny and amusing moments as the show references celebrities, political figures and musicians from the 1960s onward, grounding the narrative in American culture. The fortunes of some celebrities and politicians change in the show’s alternate history while others stay the same.
In one running storyline — which you’ll only catch if you pay close attention to certain scenes and montages — John Lennon survives the attempt on his life, continues on as the grating, post-Beatles John Lennon most people would like to forget, and becomes just another aging musician cashing in on past glory alongside bandmate Paul McCartney and bands like the Rolling Stones.
The extension of the space race and continuation of US-Soviet rivalry impacts society in profound ways, many of them we may not realize from our historical perspective.
For example, DARPA created the internet because the US government and military wanted a decentralized communications network that could withstand nuclear attacks and remain operational even if major nodes are taken out in nuclear blasts.
That’s why the internet works on such a wide variety of hardware and why, even when major servers go down, our routers are able to move data packets via alternate paths. It’s difficult to imagine a time when the web wasn’t a medium for exchanging photos and videos of cute cats, but the early internet was populated by government officials, Pentagon brass and leading scientists in crucial fields.
In real life, restrictions were taken off the internet when the Soviet threat began to fade, allowing widespread civilian adoption of the technology and early dial-up services like AOL and CompuServe.
That doesn’t happen in For All Mankind’s alternate history as the USSR and communism remains a major threat, resulting in pop culture developing along a different cultural arc than the one we’re accustomed to.
While the pop culture references, sets, cars and costumes help ground For All Mankind historically, the show is at its best when it puts us in mission control and the command modules of high-risk space missions, constantly reminding us of the danger these men and women face while highlighting the commonality of astronauts, cosmonauts and later space explorers from other countries, all of them just human beings millions of miles from their families and everything they’ve ever known.
At the same time, the US and the USSR are playing a game of nuclear brinkmanship and astronauts are in many ways on the front lines as they figure out how to co-exist in unprecedented circumstances and places famously inhospitable to human life.
If astronauts tap a lunar mine too close to Soviet base camp, could that start a war? Are the Soviets spying on communications between NASA and its astronauts on the moon? What happens if someone gets hurt and their blood can’t clot in low/zero gravity?
NASA astronaut Danielle Poole shakes the hand of her Soviet counterpart as their modules dock in space.
Kinnaman, Dorman, Sarah Jones (Tracy Stevens), Sonya Walger (Cobb) et al shine in those scenes as they juggle the pressure of surviving in space with being exemplars of — and diplomats for — their country. Rather than be content painting the Soviets as the traditional bad guys, the show also gives us a close-up look at the people in the USSR’s space program and the pressures they face, particularly Polish actor Piotr Aleksander Adamczyk’s Sergei Nikulov in his relationship with his NASA counterpart, flight director Margo Madison.
In one of the show’s quieter moments, Poole (Krys Marshall) takes two cosmonauts to The Outpost when, during joint training exercises, they request real American cheeseburgers and whiskey. After a few drinks one of the cosmonauts grows somber and tells Poole how he held Laika, the Moscow street dog who was famously blasted into low Earth orbit in her own little module, before scientists were sure enough in the technology to risk human lives.
Although Soviet propaganda feted Laika as a hero and the official story said she survived until re-entry, the cosmonaut tells Poole that Laika died shortly after liftoff, terrified, alone and subjected to unimaginable forces as thousands of pounds of fuel carried her capsule heavenward via brute force.
(The west was no less barbaric: The French famously sent a street cat named Felicette into space while NASA used a young chimp named Ham. In all of those cases the animals were named only after their missions, as mission commanders didn’t want to risk humanizing them in the event of disaster. Had Felicette and Ham both died in space they’d be remembered only by their identification numbers as footnotes in early space history.)
Kinnaman grounds the show as Ed Baldwin, one of the second generation of astronauts who take the mantle from men like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
For All Mankind recently began its fourth season and because AppleTV’s marketing and promotion is curiously weak, it remains one of TV’s best-kept secrets. If you haven’t seen the show yet, now’s a great time to jump aboard with so many TV shows on hiatus for the holidays and many others pushed back or canceled in the wake of the parallel strikes that halted production for most of 2023.
For All Mankind
Network: Apple TV
Content rating: TV-MA for bad language, occasional drug and alcohol use and mature themes.
Ratings: 8.1 (IMDB), 93% (Rotten Tomatoes), 4/5 (Common Sense Media)
Pain In The Bud 