Review: For All Mankind – Don’t Be Cruel s02e07

As predicted, For All Mankind has started to move into a much darker place, with the cold war really beginning to have a serious impact on all of NASA’s plans.  Episode 7, ‘Don’t Be Cruel’, also sees significant changes in the personal and professional lives of all involved, some of which will have a ripple effect on everyone around them.  *Warning! Some Spoilers Ahead!*

For All Mankind has a knack for weaving real life incidents into its alternative timeline narrative and one such case is the trigger for much of this week’s events.  Tom Paine (Dan Donohue) and Ellen Wilson (Jodi Balfour) are about to travel to Korea for a negotiation, when Ellen’s father (Bruce Weitz – Hill Street Blues) has a heart attack.  This means that she has to rush off to Connecticut to see her Father, at Tom’s insistence, while he flies on alone.  By a twist of fate, the Korean Airlines plane makes a navigational error and flies over protected Russian airspace and gets shot down, killing all on board.

This receives widespread condemnation around the world and the accusations start to fly, both politically and within NASA, with Margo (Wrenn Schmidt) suspicious that the Pentagon were using the plane for spying.  The White House meanwhile promotes Ellen to Acting NASA Administrator, and her life immediately becomes more complicated.  For her this couldn’t happen at a worse time, as she was now comfortable in revealing her true sexuality to Tom and start a new chapter.

Essentially, all the events that follow in ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ mean that Ellen is going to maintain the status quo in her personal life, although she may not realise it yet.  We can clearly see on Pam’s (Meghan Leathers) face that she realises things have changed, the second she arrives at Ellen and Larry’s (Nate Corddry) house.  For All Mankind has always managed to handle Ellen’s quandary relatively well in the past, albeit only shallowly in some regards, and it looks likely that they’ll look at it again.  There are opportunities here though to truly explore this and get more detail, especially from Pam’s perspective.  Obviously, the show is NASA focused, but Pam’s emotional story is equally as valid.

So far, Ellen’s reaction to her promotion has been to go full into work mode and totally focus on that, which results in her already making compromises.  This is most noticeable during her phone call to President Reagan, although you tell she’s slipping before that.  It’s also very clear things have changed for her, after she takes advice from Larry, and remembers Tom’s comment that he had to be a different person with different people.

This leads to Ellen taking a strong stance and suggesting an aggressive posture to the President.   That is with a view to him trusting her in the long run, so she can still aim for Mars.  It’s a bold strategy, which could backfire, but one that could also be the making of her.  Only Professionally of course, as it will probably ruin her personal life.

One of Ellen’s new priorities in ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ is making contact with Dani (Krys Marshall) and her crew, who have had all communication cut off following the incident.  No one s quite sure what is happening, least of all Dani, who spends 48 hours in a cramped dorm room, without any news.  Through some back-channel discussions between Margo and Sergei Nikulov (Piotr Adamczyk) they are able to get them out of Russia, but not before she is visited by a mysterious figure who seems to value what they are trying to do to change the world.

The biggest upshot of Margo contacting Sergei is that she reveals some information to him that is technically classified, so it will be interesting to see if that comes back to haunt her later.  She will feel she had a moral obligation to tell him, but knows it is a dangerous thing to do, as she does it in a very surreptitious way.  It’s an intriguing grey area, as she is helping him fix an issue in a design that the Russians stole from NASA in the first place, so should she help them with something they shouldn’t have anyway?  General Bradford (John Marshall Jones) certainly feels they can find out the problem for themselves, so this issue may well return at a later date.

Less secretive for Margo is helping Aleida (Coral Peña) with her interpersonal issues at NASA, and there are some significant strides taken between them to heal the wounds.  This process really started last week with designing the docking mechanism for Apollo-Soyuz, but it continues in its own small way here.  This season has seen Margo loosen up a little bit and reveal more of herself to various people, so the writers are definitely looking to keep her developing.

If there’s one thing that should remain secret and that we’ve seen developing over the past few episodes is the romantic collision between Karen (Shantel VanSanten) and Danny (Casey W. Johnson).  This has been telegraphed for quite some time, starting with the introduction of Danny’s recollection of Karen dancing to ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ in ‘The Weight’, although we all hoped it wouldn’t happen.

Initially that moment between them was about shared trauma and Shane’s death, but it was obvious it was going to be taken in a different direction.  It’s unclear where the kiss is supposed to lead though, but here we see Karen immediately feel guilt or regret.  She then returns home, instigates sex with Ed (Joel Kinnaman) and it’s not obvious whether this is an attempt to cover up in her mind what she’s just done, or whether kissing Danny made her realise where her true passion lies.  The most likely answer is the former.

It’s not the only emotional disturbance in the Baldwin house either, as Kelly (Cynthy Wu) receives the details of her adoption, including who her parents are.  While her Mother is dead, it turns out her real father now lives in Arlington, and she is clearly apprehensive about what to do next.  Hopefully this whole storyline will be given some significant time, as there is a lot to cover here.  If it only gets brief screen time, they will never be able to do it justice.

By far the largest point of tension in ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ though is a result of all the politics that have been building, and Ellen’s advice to go aggressive.  This has resulted in the mission to take back the drilling site from the Russians far earlier than planned.  This means that the intended LSAM pilot isn’t up to the task and Tracy (Sarah Jones) accepts the mission.  Here she proves how capable she is and earns the respect of everyone around her.  It’s a major development in the narrative on the Moon, and the first use of their modified M16s in an actual operation, so they definitely have crossed the line now. 

Where this all leads to is anyone’s guess at this point, but it feels like there will be a major escalation before it plateaus to a sort of truce.  At some juncture they will have to come to an arrangement with the Russians or there will be all out war on the Moon, which would probably result in disaster for both sides.  Hopefully that means we’ll see either the return of Nikulov, or maybe even Mikhail Mikhailovic (Mark Ivanir), who Ed captured many years before.  What we do know is that whatever they choose to do next, it will be compelling.