For All Mankind S04E03: 'The Bear Hug'

© Apple TV

For All Mankind shakes everything up in a jam-packed episode.
by Jeremy Fogelman

The latest episode of For All Mankind is called “The Bear Hug” which seems to be a sort of reference to the USSR and the Communist regime, which echo throughout the episode. On Earth we have two main storylines, one in the more capitalist arena, as we follow the dream team of Aleida and Kelly trying unsuccessfully to pitch their search for life on Mars robotics program.

The impact of the failed asteroid mission continues to echo here as everyone is overly cautious about the financial bottom line -- the actual arc here is Dev, who is attacked by Kelly about being all about the profits when he used to care about the science. Dev attacks back about it being Kelly’s own mother Karen that “stabbed him in the back” -- but of course, he was pretty unstable when she did that.

But it dawns on him that he’s been following the same self-defeating path of his father without realizing it, and gets invigorated by the challenge of taking over the company again with a hostile vote among the majority shareholders and cleans house in a fun scene. Thus we also get a chance to see old Bill again, now in a wheelchair surrounded by nerdy memorabilia and it gives us real insight into Aleida’s trauma, as she is forced to confront her own inability to handle life threatening situations anymore.

Over on Earth in the USSR, we follow Margo and her adventure through terror as she’s harshly interrogated by both pro and anti-hardliner groups -- it’s a series of unsettling scenes that are honestly sometimes difficult to watch, and it doesn’t exactly end on a hopeful note either. At the end, Margo is alive and seemingly safe, but now being tasked by Irina, the mysterious KGB agent, to help run the space program under the new leadership of hardliner anti-West Korzhenko -- bit of a contradiction that they’re leveraging the former director of NASA, but I suppose hypocrisy will always matter in some way.

© Apple TV

The more up and down scenes take place on Mars, as we get another Karen-based vulnerability parallel as Ed admits to cosmonaut Svetlana (who is worried about her people back home of course) that he smokes marijuana (I would hope very carefully in the limited air environment) to help with his aches and pains and reveals his shaky hand. She was suffering from some injury after the asteroid too, and holds his hand in what might be a romantic tone -- one of a few in this episode.

The other romantic tone is Miles with fellow lower decker Sam, who is quick to mention her divorce -- even though Miles still has a wife and kids back home (even though he won’t see them again for a long time, but he worries about their financial situation). So we get a fun montage of Miles helping Russian bartender Ilya to assist in his contraband business, and an actual heist type scene where he scams his way into the North Korean bunk to steal their fridge’s thermostat.

Of course it’s never so simple, as our old friend Lee catches Miles in the act but leverages help -- at first I thought it was for asylum or protection, but the actual reveal is even more significant -- he wants help smuggling his wife to Mars. Now that’s a real challenge, and I loved the escalation.

It’s an episode that really ramps everything up and shakes up the established order of things, giving us a far better insight into Miles and a lot of intriguing thoughts about the vulnerabilities and traumas between all of these people. It certainly seems to be setting up the season to be quite a dramatic one, and I’ve really enjoyed it so far.