19th February, 2023: All In.
It’s Sunday … !
You’d noticed that, already.
And frankly? I’m doing what thousands of others are doing: and cooking dinner … before I watch some TV.
Yes: it’s Sunday …
So I’ll be watching ‘All In,’ the next episode of For All Mankind’s third season.
I’ll have my written, and video, up, tomorrow night!
20th February, 2023.
Episode 3 — ‘All In’ — opens with a night time view of Tower Bridge: then tells us we’re at the 27th Annual IAC Conference, in 1984.
And shows us NASA head, Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt), in a lift with senior Soviet official, Sergei Nikulov (Piotr Adamczyk) … and follows the pair meeting over the course of the next few years.
Until 1991: when — just as things are getting interesting — someone else gets in the lift … !
Post titles?
Post titles, we see Margo back at the office: telling NASA’s Mars team that they’re working to a drastically shortened deadline.
Helios, and the Soviet Union, have announced they’re launching a Mars mission in 1994.
Two years ahead of the USA.
Margo … ?
Wants NASA to beat them too it.
Confident in her expectations Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) will be able to accelerate astronaut training, and Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña) has the solution for getting building supplies to Mars, before those astronauts who need them, arrive.
After all: there’s no point astronauts building a base on Mars … when they have no building supplies.
~≈🚀≈~
US chances in a race to Mars … ?
Are much discussed in the ongoing Presidential Election: in this version of history, Governor Bill Clinton is up against Senator Ellen Wilson (Jodi Balfour).
Senator Wilson … ? Is please that the international circumstances are how they are.
Former NASA astronaut that she is? She’s shining in reflected glory, and looking to make a lot of gain
Meanwhile? Ed and Karen (Joel Kinnaman and Shantel VanSanten) are on board — and being shown around — the newly rechristened Phoenix: by no less a person than Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi), himself.
It’s only when Helios’ boss tells Ed about the automated systems — and his plans to put poets on board the Phoenix — that Ed … forces a confrontation.
He wants to makes sure humans — humans who can improvise in an emergency — are in charge. However good the poets might be, they’re not necessarily going to be good with a crash-landing space ship.
~≈🚀≈~
Back on Earth?
Margo isn’t the only person with problems.
NASA is facing the formidable Helios recruitment team of Ed and Karen: offering serious money to all and sundry.
Money Aleida turns down: but something the troubled — and relapsing — Danny Stevens (Casey W. Johnson), accepts: at just the wrong moment.
What no-one knows?
Is that Margo has a very Russian problem … with a garrote.
~≈🚀≈~
Now … what did I make of this episode?
What was ‘All In*’: good, bad or indifferent? Is it about wrestling … ? Or Poker?
I’ve got a feeling it’s poker.
As, by the end of the episode, Margo has taken a mightily big gamble: a gamble that almost saw Sergei killed in front of her.
The simple fact that the last few minutes of the episode, set two years after the main story … ?
The simple fact the Soviet Mars mission launches, two years after Margo has betrayed her country, giving the Russians vital plans?
Given we know Danny Stevens, a possibly obsessed, relapsing, Danny Stevens is on the same Helios Mission as Ed Baldwin?
Means this series is looking interesting.
It means I’m going to be glued to the TV, next Sunday: watching the fourth episode of the season, ‘Happy Valley.’
I’ll see you then!
‘All In.’★★★★
* As I recall? All in was a style of British wrestling, way back when. So long as whatever happened was in the ring, was all in, it was legal. The poker term, all in? Refers to betting your entire stake on a given hand: your money’s going all in.
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