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Reviews
For All Mankind: Stranger in a Strange Land (2022)
All the people complaining about the show's 'woke' storylines
... are missing the point.
There were quite a few people who downvoted the first season. It was rated in the 6s when I first checked out the show on imdb, and I couldn't work out why, until I looked closer and found the many complaints about the show's portrayal of women in the space program.
And it seems that the same types of people are complaining about the show's occasional focus on two or three LGBTQ characters as part of the series-wide tapestry of stories. (Personally, I find the Danny Stevens storylines to be much more egregious, but not because of any so-called political agenda - they're just badly conceived and executed.)
Those people who don't like Ellen's coming out story are missing the point. The premise of the show is not "straight, white men exploring the new frontier in a display of rugged American prowess". It's how the space program acts as a catalyst for societal change: technological, geopolitical and cultural.
For All Mankind posits a world where space travel is much more ubiquitous than in the real world, and how as a direct result of that, the women's movement evolved at a faster pace (to the point that the US elected a female President by the mid 90s). And how as a direct result of that, the LGBTQ movement evolved at a faster pace than in the real world.
It also shows how the space program accentuates but then ameliorates East/West tensions, with Americans and Soviets going from being at the brink of nuclear war to actively cooperating, when thrown together by circumstance on Mars.
And it shows how everyday technology such as PDAs and video calls evolved faster than in the real world as a result of the investments in the space program, not to mention the private space industry.
I've always considered For All Mankind as an unofficial prequel to Star Trek (just look at the long list of Trek alumni working on the show). There's drama galore, but underpinning it all is a basic optimism that space travel effects positive change, moving the world to the sort of future where a United Federation of Planets can plausibly, eventually, come to exist.
And it starts with change on Earth, from about the time period that Star Trek first aired - the 1960s. Cultural evolution. Geopolitical evolution. Technological evolution. It's all part and parcel of the fundamental premise of the show.