For All Mankind S04E02: 'Have a Nice Sol'

© Apple TV

For All Mankind gives us an episode heavy on the juxtaposition between those with and those without.
by Jeremy Fogelman

The latest episode of For All Mankind is called “Have a Nice Sol” after the classic phrase modified to be about “Sol”, the name for the Sun -- here sarcastically said by the HR dude Palmer when Miles complains about his new position. Much of the episode is dedicated to showing how Danielle as the new commander juxtaposed with Miles as the under-respected lower class of the station -- to the point where we have a pretty effective side-by-side montage set to the Gorillaz classic song “Clint Eastwood”, which indeed came out in 2001.

Miles faces a much worse situation than he expected, all driven from the tragic failure of the asteroid mining operation -- he’s never on the surface, he does HVAC and makes barely enough to scrape by, and the bandwidth is so bad for his floor (literally below the other floors) that he cannot watch a complete “vidmail” from his family back home.

When he tries to complain to Ed, the old curmudgeon simply dismisses the problem since they’re all on another planet and should be about “personal responsibility” -- easy for him to say, of course, with the best food and drink on the base, and the fact that he keeps putting off going home to Kelly and his grandchild.

Naturally Danielle is the only one who can remotely argue against him, and she quickly realizes about tensions that Ed has ignored -- the triumph of fixing a broken satellite is offset with Miles being unable to formulate an honest reply to his now watchable family vidmail messages. An interesting contrast to Danielle saying that there’s no penalty for speaking the truth, which I believe she believes -- whether or not she’ll be able to hold to that is a different story.

Miles’ story this episode ends getting drunk off contraband vodka -- a pretty clear juxtaposition against the violence Margo is seeing in Moscow. We hear very alarming concerns about “Where is Gorbachev” which certainly seems to imply some sort of coup, with the heavy-handed (if logical) sight of Margo’s broken glasses on the ground our way of leaving that fraught storyline.

© Apple TV

Ironically Margo’s situation is directly related to Aleida’s, as her PTSD over finding the blown up office of Margo has kept her from returning to NASA, and even the mention of Margo triggers her despite getting a firm offer from the director to return. This is a sad situation, but it’s changed quickly enough when she runs into a similarly sad Kelly at the local bar (which we know quite well).

It’s a duo that makes perfect sense and I’m delighted to see how it goes -- the two are both young mothers and clever scientists, and both dealing with trauma and the system pushing against them. Their entire drunken discussion was very well handled, and it led to a pretty interesting development -- pursuing independent funding for Kelly’s search for life on Mars, and you can see Aleida’s husband in the background very happy she’s actually doing something for once.

The episode really played a lot with these contrasts and duos, both in similarities and differences, and presented some very interesting insight into how the Mars base functions -- which is sadly exactly how you’d expect a company like Helios to run it. A very entertaining and sometimes emotional episode, with no serious tragedy of the people we know, but actual hints of promise surrounded by the potential destruction of everything.