For All Mankind Season 5 Is Plunging Into Interplanetary Warfare
The Season 5 trailer teases the ultimate Mars showdown.
Every season of Apple TV’s alternate history spaceflight series, For All Mankind, has pushed the series into unexpected territory. But now, with Season 5, one threat that has been looming since Season 3 seems to finally be happening: After nearly two decades of a Mars colony existing, it looks like Earth and Mars are finally going head-to-head. Will For All Mankind Season 5 depict a kind of warfare between worlds? The epic new trailer certainly makes it look like that.
Minor spoilers for Seasons 1-4 ahead.
Starting with Season 3, For All Mankind took its story beyond the Moon, and depicted a new space race in 1995, in which the USSR, the US, and aerospace company Helios all competed to put the first human boots on the soil of Mars. (Yes, this obviously didn’t happen in our 1995, but For All Mankind has been operating on an alternate timeline since its pilot episode depicted a USSR moon landing in 1969.) By Season 4, and the alternate 2003, we had a full Mars base called Happy Valley, one that fought for its financial independence, resulting in a heist of a very valuable asteroid in that season finale. Now, with Season 5 catching up to 2012, the result of that insurrection is clearly going to get way bigger, and possibly, deadlier.
The biggest development of the newest For All Mankind Season 5 trailer is that we’re clearly seeing massive unrest on Mars, with an elderly Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) clearly in support of sticking it to Earth. The trailer also puts Ed’s grandson and Kelly’s (Cynthy Wu) son, Alex Baldwin ( Sean Kaufman), at the center of the action. In a pivotal moment in the new trailer, Alex is seen leading a group of people on Mars and declares proudly, “Mars is ours!”
This revolutionary vibe will be at the center of For All Mankind Season 5, but it won’t be the only plot point. The trailer also teases that Helios founder and tech maverick Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi) is pushing for something big on Mars, while Kelly Baldwin and Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña) are pushing to explore even further out in the solar system. As Aleida says in the trailer: “Our mission is to find life in the far reaches of the solar system.”
This last detail — in which For All Mankind is boldly going where no one has gone before — is something that has been seeded since Season 1 of the entire show. Back then, Ed talked about the idea of exploring the rest of the solar system, a fact which showrunners Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi have acknowledged was put in the bones of the show for a reason. As they told Inverse in 2024: “In our vision of the show, Mars is not the end.”
Mars will be at the center of For All Mankind Season 5.
So, For All Mankind Season 5, seemingly, has a lot on the line: A massive Mars-Earth conflict, a new generation of folks taking center stage (namely Alex Baldwin!), and, all the while, a larger plan for new planets and new frontiers to dominate the future of the show. Mars is the present of For All Mankind, but Season 5 is very much about the future, too.
