Displaying items by tag: Bradley Thompson

I’ve said many times now here on The Digital Bits how much I appreciate Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert, and Ronald D. Moore’s For All Mankind.

As the series completes its fifth and penultimate season, the Apple TV Original has quietly become one of my all-time TV favorites, equaling Moore’s own rebooted Battlestar Galactica and even Star Trek, a franchise I love dearly but that—over the decades—has proven wildly uneven, and more recently has lost its way.

When I say this out loud, I’m typically greeted with two reactions. The first is surprise, as many viewers still either haven’t heard of the show, or haven’t yet given it serious consideration. But they should.

The second reaction—which I’m pleased to say is much more common today than in 2019, when the show first aired—is a kind of quiet understanding. Because if you know about the series… you know.

For All Mankind is, of course, an alt-history, science fiction ensemble drama that asks a simple question: What if the Soviet Union had beaten America to the Moon in 1969?

More broadly, it’s a series that attempts to realistically depict humanity’s slow, difficult, but hopefully inevitable climb out of Earth’s gravity well to become a spacefaring civilization.

Now… when I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, that outcome seemed like a foregone conclusion.

The first human spaceflight, Yuri Gagarin’s Vostok 1, happened six years before my birth. NASA’s Apollo 11 astronauts walked on the Moon two years after it, which means I’m just old enough to remember watching the Apollo 17 astronauts leaving the Moon for the last time on TV in 1972—one of my earliest memories.

Soon after this, I discovered the original Star Trek, a series that fed my young imagination exactly what it craved at exactly the right time. And I watched each new NASA mission that followed with eager intensity: Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, and the early Space Shuttle flights. [Read on here...]