For All Mankind Season 5’s Shocking Ending Explained
Is a certain Baldwin still alive? What was on Titan? And which spaceship was that?
As with previous seasons, For All Mankind Season 5 ends with a time jump. Before the final credits roll, we’re in the year 2020, which means Season 6 will take us, more or less, up to an alternate version of the present. But the final moments of Season 5, “This Land Is Our Land,” also create several questions not just for the impending final season of the show, but also will make you question some of the events of this season, too.
Inverse talked to showrunners Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi to get some definitive answers on what we saw in the final moments of the Season 5 finale. Here’s what the masterminds behind For All Mankind revealed about this surprising ending.
Warning! Spoilers for For All Mankind Season 5, “This Land Is Our Land,” below.
Is Kelly Baldwin Alive?
Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) in her final moments in For All Mankind. Is this really the end for Kelly?
While Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) is stranded on Titan, she records a final message to her son Alex (Sean Kaufman), and eventually places the Apollo 11 plaque on Titan, which was given to her by her father, Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman). But, before the curtain falls on Kelly’s story, bioluminescent organisms appear in a pool near her, making her final moments wrapped in wonder and discovery.
We’d know that the Titan mission discovered cellular life on Titan, but this discovery was a little bonus for Kelly.
“It was a very sad moment, but I think we felt it was really interesting and elegant to give her this moment of joy at the end, in this discovery in spite of it being her last moment,” Nedivi tells Inverse. “It was a cool way to end her arc — the idea that what they thought was just a little sample of life ends up being a lake full of it.”
That said, if fans are wondering if this lake of pretty alien life was somehow going to bring Kelly back to life after getting stranded on Titan, the short answer is no. Just as her mother perished in Season 3, and her father passed away earlier this season, these are the final moments for Kelly Baldwin. “That moment is her last moment on the show,” Nedivi said.
Which spaceship is that in 2020?
A spaceship from the past reawakens.
As with all previous seasons of For All Mankind, the last moments of the Season 5 finale jump ahead in time, this time, moving things into the year 2020. But what do we see here? A new planet? A new frontier? Actually, it’s a spacecraft, which appears to be a derelict, and this specific ship is a callback to Season 3.
The abandoned ship in this final scene is none other than Mars-94, the Roscosmos ship, which, along with Phoenix and Sojourner 1, was part of the race to Mars in 1994. But what is this ship doing floating around in space in 2020? And what is on that screen?
The final message on Mars-94 in For All Mankind Season 5.
Here’s what the text on the screen says in Russian:
Д:/ Обнаружение ГВ 3.06.0451 // Никулов
Загрузка .
And in English that translates to:
Detection of GV 3.06.0451// Nikulov
Loading.
“With every flash-forward we do, there's definitely a mystery to it and a riddle,” Nedivi says. “I will say, this is resolved in Season 6. This one was particularly fun for us because it calls back to the past of the show and the future of the show at the same time.”
But what does this confusing message actually mean? Well, the name “Nikulov” can only refer to Sergei Nikulov, the Soviet aerospace engineer who has been part of the series since Season 2. Played by Piotr Adamczyk, Sergei was murdered in Season 4, after living secretly in the United States. In Star City — which debuts as For All Mankind Season 5 is ending — Josef Davies is playing a younger Sergei Nikulov in 1969 and 1970.
So, is this an Easter egg from Star City as well as the past of For All Mankind? What does Sergei’s work have to do with a derelict spaceship in 2020? We’ll hate to wait until Season 6, the final season of For All Mankind, to find out.
