Our hearts were broken but our hopes were restored in the fifth season finale of For All Mankind.

On the Red Planet, the horror of the battle between the freedom-seeking Marsies and the M-6 alliance troops reached a peak when thanks to subterfuge by Governor Polivanov (Costa Ronin), the rebels learned the location of the invaders’ HQ and Miles (Toby Kebbell) pushed a button that burned them alive. Irina (Svetlana Efremova) and Aleida (Coral Peña) made a gutsy move to restore comms so the latter could send crucial lift-off information to the spacecraft on Saturn’s moon, Titan. They got a shock: Incoming news revealed that a ceasefire had been called. They, along with Dev (Edi Gathegi) and Alex (Sean Kaufman), bravely made sure that news reached the troops, saving many lives. On Titan, the expedition in search of life finally found what they had been looking for but with the team facing a shortage of their oxygen supply, Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) volunteered to sacrifice her own life so her colleagues could make it back from a research area to the main ship and share the news with the world.

TV Insider spoke with creators/executive producers Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi about that noble death, the Mars 94 ghost ship from Season 3 that appeared in the final shot, and what’s next when the alt-history sci-fi drama wraps with a sixth and final installment.

Was it always the plan to have Kelly Baldwin’s life end this way?

Matt Wolpert: It wasn’t really. We knew that this season would be her father’s [Ed Baldwin, played by Joel Kinnaman] last, and the way he went out leaving a legacy for her and [her son] Alex was a driver of this whole season. Breaking that last episode, even as we were working on the script, we were still figuring out if we wanted to go there. You know you’re onto something where you’re like, are we really going to do this? It was the same with Gordo [Michael Dorman] and Tracy [Sarah Jones] [who died in the third season] where it was like, is this the right move? But it felt right. The steps Kelly took later in the season to push the envelope and bring that ship down unbeknownst to everyone else, and some of the other more Baldwin-esque moves she made, compelled her to make that sacrifice. Walt [Christopher Denham] didn’t know any of that, but the audience does. When she’s talking about his children and how it should be her, we know she’s also carrying the weight of, I’m the one who brought us here.

Ben Nedivi: Those actors did a great job where Walt is like, “It should be me.” And she’s like, “Because you’re a man?” There’s a cultural thing of, oh, the man should be the one to do the sacrifice. Giving her that moment of, “I’m going to do it,” really captured the spirit of For All Mankind.

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How did Cynthy Wu react when you broke the news?

Nedivi: On this show, everyone’s waiting for that conversation. It was very emotional. I don’t remember her exact reaction, but Cynthy feels like family to us. She’s been with us and on the show since Season 2. We’ve seen her grow as an actress. We’ve seen this character grow from playing a teenager, to searching for life early on, to finally finding life. She did the things she’s been building towards for almost her entire life, but that sacrifice also being such a beautiful one also made sense to her the same way it made sense to us. One of the hardest parts of working on this show is that from first season to this season, we’ve had to do this a number of times and it’s never easy.

What did you use for the footage of the Titan life form Kelly saw under the microscope?

Wolpert: Our visual effects team created that. Yeah, that’s sort of a unique … [Laughs] We actually got it from Titan. That’s the crazy thing. We found it on Titan and brought it back and we filmed it and so it’s completely real.

The last shot was the wrecked Mars94 ship from the third season – and a screen on the ship was getting a message. Why did you decide to bring that back and why was that that final image?

Nedivi: It’s a good question. These flash forwards are always a way to tease where we’re going in the following season. The combination of that message and what you see happening with Kelly at the end definitely tips our hat towards where we’re going. We also really are excited for the amount of Google translating that’s going to happen at the very end of this season with people watching the show. You got to pause right on the moment. It reveals a little bit, not a lot. I think the fun for us of these flash forwards are also that it’s interesting because even in Season 2, when you saw the foot on Mars, you didn’t know whose boot that was. That’s the thing here, too. What does this mean? What is written? What is the meaning of going back to that ship? That will be answered in the next season. We’re working on it now, and it’s coming together in a nice way.

Wolpert: It is a great way to nod to both the future and the past of the show. Part of Season 6 is those things coming together in some way.

Why did Miles push that button and burn people alive despite Aleida telling him it was going too far?

Nedivi: For us, it felt appropriate that if you’re going to tell the story of revolution and independence, the reality of a lot of these movements that we’ve researched going into this season is that they get pretty dark, and you have to go to places that aren’t always happy or easy in order to accomplish your goals. We are into morally complex characters and morally complex decisions. We didn’t want this to feel easy. Aleida, she’s suffered probably more than any character, but she always has been in many ways the moral beacon of the show. To see her evolution from, “I’m just here to supervise this Titan mission. I’m not into Mars. This isn’t a part of my identity. I have a family back home.” By the end of this episode, as much as she is against what Miles is doing and how he does it, you can see how invested she is in Mars and independence. Her starting to be with them in this group in discussions was very intentional on our part to see that evolution.

Toby Kebbell and Coral Pena — 'For All Mankind' Season 5 Episode 8

Apple TV

Will Miles make a good governor? Or is he too morally compromised after what he did?

Wolpert: It’s a great question, and I think that’s exactly the question we want people to be wondering about because the story of Miles is a man who from the first time we meet him makes compromising decisions. He lies to get the job to go up to Mars. And then over the course of Season 4, he gets involved in a black market but for a good reason to support his family and then he takes over that business. Then as is referenced in this ending of Season 5, he betrays his friends to protect his family. There’s always this battle in his character of doing the wrong things for the right reason. The full extension of that is him pushing that button to bring about the end of other people’s lives to defend his home and his family. It’s an interesting question of what makes a good revolutionary does not necessarily make a good leader. Now his daughter [Lily, played by Ruby Cruz] has a bit more awareness of who her father really is. That’s something that will be an element going forward.

At one point, Irina (Svetlana Efremova) says to Aleida, “There was a time I was as idealistic as you, perhaps even more so.” When you wrote that line of dialogue, had you already imagined the Irina character in Star City?

Wolpert: Definitely. That was very much on our mind toward the end of Season 5. When you meet Irina in Season 4, she is this very cold, powerful, ominous woman. Over two seasons, she’s broken down and rebuilt in a slightly more friendly way. By the end of Season 5, she is helping these people, even though we know what she’s capable of. People change over time and their life experiences create who they are. One of the main concepts of Star City is seeing the origin story of someone going from a more idealistic, hopeful person and through experience becoming a little bit more powerful and capable of so much she didn’t even know she was capable of.

Who is Irina’s contact at Star City who’s been sending her all this information?

Wolpert: In Season 4, there’s that conference room of people that she works with and some of them are terrified and some are her allies. There’s one point where you see the man’s face in Episode 10 and he is one of those guys that’s sitting at that conference table and has been a source of background information for her as she shifted away. As the head of Star City for a while, she still has her people implanted and waiting for the time that she can make her big move.

Will we see that person in Star City?

Nedivi: You might see a younger version of him, potentially.

Why did you choose to show the moral injury of war with Avery Jarrett (Ines Asserson) talking to Alex about how terrible she felt about killing someone?

Nedivi: When we approached this season, it was important that it didn’t just feel like Earth were the bad guys and Mars were the good guys. Watching the show, obviously, you’re going to be invested in the Marsies. Putting Avery on the other side gave us an emotional ballast against that and a way to invest in a character that we know from the beginning of the show, her family, her parents, her grandparents. We also know the shadow hanging over her. At the end of Episode 8, seeing Ruiz get killed, you see her going into Episode 9 driven by fury and anger the way anyone would be in that situation. Suddenly for her, these people on this planet are the enemy. When she goes down there ready to kill and realizes, wait, these are normal people, including the one she kills, that is a turning point for her character realizing, what I’ve been told on earth about the people here is not always true. Vice versa, the Marines and the people coming to invade them are also not all evil. The real heartbreak to us of war is that the decisions made by the leaders have to be acted upon by kids. Avery was central to that.

Sean Kaufman — 'For All Mankind' Season 5 Finale

Apple TV

How far do we jump ahead in time in the next season?

Nedivi: I don’t want to say that because it is a bit of a surprise. As always, we tend to jump into the next decade. We do jump into the 2020s. 

Is Alex Baldwin going to be our new hero?

Nedivi: From the beginning, it’s been a true ensemble. This season, it was important to elevate these younger characters and pass the baton from one generation to the next. Alex, Avery, and Lily, in certain ways, are going to be much more important characters moving forward. They’ll take on a bigger role, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to forget about the older generation.

In Season 6 will we answer what it really means to do something “for all mankind”? Is that too heady?

Nedivi: We like heady.

Wolpert: It’s such a complicated answer. What is “for all mankind” goes back to the root of the space race. That was both idealistic and pessimistic and is a through line of the show going forward. In Season 6, that comes to a head. It’s yet another race and it’s yet another kind of exploration that’s building on what’s come before. Season 6 is an extension of the ending of Season 5 in what was discovered and where that’s going to take us.

We’re going to be on Titan?

Wolpert: Maybe.

Fingers crossed this new life form is more peaceful than humans. Do we find out more about it?

Nedivi: Definitely. It’s the driving force of what brings us into that season. This was always the plan from the beginning, going along this path. So that discovery is one of the things we’re focusing on and have always been focusing on.

For All Mankind, Season 6, TBA, Apple TV

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