Good news For All Mankind fans! We’re going to be heading back to the alt-history sci-fi series for a fifth season PLUS we’re getting a spin-off series, named Star City.
The new spinoff series will explore the world of the Soviet space program, and has been created by For All Mankind creators Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert and Ronald D. Moore
“Our fascination with the Soviet space program has grown with every season of ‘For All Mankind,’” said executive producers Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi. “The more we learned about this secret city in the forests outside Moscow where the Soviet cosmonauts and engineers worked and lived, the more we wanted to tell this story of the other side of the space race.
“We could not be more excited to continue building out the alternate history universe of ‘For All Mankind’ with our partners at Apple and Sony.”
Star City is a propulsive paranoid thriller that takes us back to the key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race – when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers, and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward.
We saw a peak behind the Iron Curtain in Season Four of For All Mankind, which Wolpert was looking for audiences to seeing: “I’m most excited to have audiences see the world of the Soviet Union,” he told us back in November last year. “We’re pulling the Iron Curtain back and showing Margo’s journey in that world.
“It’s been something that the show has referenced a lot in the previous seasons and we’ve seen little glimpses and met characters, but it’s always been ‘the enemy over there’, ‘the competition’, and we’ve never really seen what’s going on, on a human, ground level.”
The latest season for For All Mankind rocketed the series into the new millennium in the eight years since season three, Happy Valley has rapidly expanded its footprint on Mars by turning former foes into partners. Now 2003, the focus of the space program has turned to the capture and mining of extremely valuable, mineral-rich asteroids that could change the future of both Earth and Mars. But simmering tensions between the residents of the now-sprawling international base threaten to undo everything they are working towards.
We’re not sure what Season Five will bring us but the last few moments of Season Four (spoilers ahead) saw the timeline propel to 2012 where a large mining operation has been set up on the asteroid in Mars’ orbit. Also, when we spoke to the show’s creators last year, they revealed that there are no limits to where the show could take us…
“We’re always looking for that next step in the journey,” Wolpert said. “There’s a moment in episode one of season one where Gene Kranz is talking about not letting up in the space race, and just because we lost doesn’t mean we should give up because the extension of what they’re doing in trying to get to the moon is that they can go to Mars, to Jupiter, to the moons of Saturn and beyond, into the galaxy.
“So from the beginning of the show, literally the first episode, we’ve intended to show the full extent of what is possible, but it’s also important to us to make sure that it feels real within the world of our show. We don’t want to push so far forward that it doesn’t feel grounded enough, like yes, those people in that world could really have gone to the [moon of Jupiter] or Europa or any of those other tantalising destinations in the solar system.”
“All those things are on the table,” adds Moore. “We definitely want to continue to explore and expand space exploration out into the solar system, and one day beyond. I think you’ll see the show eventually start to do those things…”
All four seasons of For All Mankind are now streaming globally on Apple TV+.
