Comment For All Mankind, one of Apple TV’s many compelling sci-fi shows, got through four seasons by asking a big question: What would our world be like if the space race never ended? In its fifth season, which premiered Friday, the show is starting to hint at its answer: It’s the same as our actual world, only with some of humanity’s biggest problems on Earth relocated to outer space. The season starts the way every Mankind season starts, with a world-building montage of news clips that would seem like lazy exposition if it weren’t such pure fun, and frankly necessary, given the show’s labyrinthine universe. Season 4, which aired its finale just over two years ago, took place in 2003, when a rebel band of Martian heroes (in this case, actual humans living and working on Mars) “stole” a valuable asteroid by directing it into Mars’ orbit, thus forcing the United States and the still-existing Soviet Union to continue investing in the Red Planet so they could mine the asteroid. Now, with the fifth season, the show picks up in 2012, and all is not well. The asteroid is barely returning any valuable materials to Earth, where there’s a global populist backlash against the money-grubbing, elitist humans who are draining government coffers on Mars. (Sound familiar?) President Al Gore lost the 2004 election to a Mars-bashing Republican. Meanwhile, the Martian law enforcement appointed by the big world powers is acting awfully ICE-like toward the citizens living at Happy Valley base. For All Mankind spent four seasons getting humans to Mars and showing how they might build a thriving colony there. This fifth season will still have strains of exploration in it, we learn, as the hunt for life heats up. But now the show’s characters are the dog that caught the planet, and they’re grappling with all that entails. What happens when Mars stops being aspirational and becomes a place where people have to live? And, heavens forbid, where they have obligations not just to each other, but to their species back on Earth? Most terrifying of all, what if people on Mars are just people who happen to live on Mars, with the same deficiencies as their former neighbors on Earth? These are salient questions, considering their real-world parallels. Take a tech billionaire like Elon Musk, whose now-deprioritized SpaceX plan once promised to send a million people to Mars and establish a self-sustaining settlement sometime over the next few decades. Musk put forward the planet as a potential refuge for humans as we destroy our own, placing us at the center of Mars colonization pipe dreams. For All Mankind has never questioned that exploration of the heavens is extremely cool, but in this season, the show is clear-eyed about how ugly it might look in practice. The risk is especially acute if the wrong people take charge up there. Advertisement