For All Mankind (Season 4) Episode 8: Recap & Ending Explained - How will Dev and his team capture the asteroid?

For All Mankind (Season 4) Episode 8: At this point, all four seasons in “For All Mankind” ending with a disaster is almost poetic. It’s an inevitable catastrophe being laid out by the last three episodes of the season, culminating in this finale. The pattern is repeated here, with the plan of Dev and Ed inadvertently going to fall apart. It’s acknowledging and almost relishing the inevitable, and yet also understanding the intricacies of the plan, and enjoying it, is what makes a show and long-form content tick. “For All Mankind” is no exception.

For All Mankind (Season 4) Episode 8 “Legacy” Recap:

As if to prove that “For All Mankind” always keeps us on our toes, the scene before the open credits shows us the life of Sergei, the man Margo had essentially sacrificed her life for and made all those hard choices for the previous season. Sergei, we see, is living the American suburban life, a physics professor at a high school to disinterested students, married to an American woman in Iowa. He is drawn into the life and the times of the show when he learns that Margo is alive from the news covering Margo’s arrival in Washington. Realizing that he still carries that torch after so many years, he breaks his routine and takes a right (quite literally) turn toward meeting Margo again.

At Happy Valley, amidst Dev and Ed’s team and the astronauts, as well as Margo advising the NASA scientists, including Aleida, the current problem to solve is the redirection of the asteroid. The actual plan is to redirect the asteroid using the asteroid interception team aboard the Ranger, with instructions to be fed from the Operational Communications Center (OpsComm) in Happy Valley. The plan is to capture the asteroid and then alternately speed up and slow down the burn of the nuclear engines at the appropriate time and point, such that the asteroid could be redirected towards the moon.

The alternate plan by Dev is similar to the capture, except he would slow down and push when the asteroid is near Mars orbit, so that it gets stuck in Mars orbit rather than continue on its trajectory towards the Moon. Once that is already done, it would be too late to make adjustments in the calculation, and thus NASA’s plans to work at a 30-year projected longer timeline on Mars would come to fruition.

As part of a heist, one of the key aspects is putting the team together. The central component of their plan is Massey, who had been skeptical about the plan but slowly started to warm up to it. Once Ed, Massey, and the other Helios workforce members who had stood their ground against Dev agree to that master plan, it becomes an easy task for them to find more followers for a good cause. One of those followers turns out to be Miles, who is currently the owner of Ilya’s bar but has issues with upper management because they have closed down the bar, citing a breach in security.

Miles has also become more cautious, a closer cry to Ilya than before, and is currently on a course to create a nice nest egg for himself back on Earth before he returns there. But of course, in front of Ayesa’s oratorial skills, where he delivers the speech also delivered by Achilles in Troy (somewhat similar), who is Miles to stand his ground? So he is in, and at exactly the right moment, because Miles becomes the key person in obtaining the equipment. What is helping this crew is NASA’s penchant for creating backups of every machine and every instrument, so they would be able to acquire almost every piece of equipment necessary to build their CommOps.

The way to acquire those is pretty tightly monitored, however, because, unlike previous episodes, authority figures now have no problem acknowledging that the strike needs to be shut down, and they are ready to use excessive force to shut down any form of activity, bending the rules. It is all to decrease space for the workers to organize and perhaps incite a new form of strike. Thus we get the traditional suspenseful scene of Miles and his comrades trying to bypass the security and managing to escape with the goods, only to realize that one of those key elements has been misplaced.

And as it turns out, perhaps because of storytelling contrivance, the data discriminator is the one that has been misplaced. That data discriminator is instrumental in bypassing control from Happy Valley and taking control of the asteroid capture device, and that data discriminator is also the reason why Massey becomes the central figure of the heist because she needs to swap the device at the asteroid capture ship.

For All Mankind Season 4 Episode 8 — Wrenn Schmidt in “For All Mankind,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

But here is where the kid comes to play. Ocean’s Eleven format comes into play, and a wild card enters the picture. Ed, in all these planning stages, had forgotten that he was supposed to be babysitting his grandson because Kelly was going on a three-day trip to calibrate and start working on her “seekers.” With all the hoopla around the heist, one might forget the real reason for Dev’s presence on Mars, as well as Aleida’s eventual meeting with Margo, which was Dev’s re-appraised approach towards Helios and his insistence to go to Mars along with Kelly.

So now, with Kelly going, Ed would have to look after his grandson, keeping in mind his medicinal routine. Taking stock of the situation, both he and Dev agree on having a babysitter for Alex, which they find in fellow cosmonaut Joanna. While that doesn’t completely solve the problem of a kid searching helter and skelter for his grandfather, his hyperactive nature does make him the secret addition of the heist group. The data discriminator is currently inside a digitally locked, highly guarded vault, and the only way to enter that vault is through a very small vent.

Thus Alex becomes John McClane, in Ed’s most irresponsible move ever, with Dev urging him on. Ed’s fear of something happening to Alex is pretty understandable. We would be too, but Alex does manage to get inside the vault and can locate and even bring the data discriminator through the vault back to Ed. It was cutting it way too close, though, because the box containing the discriminator was too high up for Alex to reach, and in the process of climbing up the shelves, he makes a lot of noise. It attracts the security guards outside, but Alex manages to escape through the vents.

Having acquired all the necessary components, “For All Mankind” essentially bypasses all the process-oriented montage sequences of building the secret OpsComm room. The one incident the show does choose to highlight is Dev manipulating Palmer and Dani to bring Massey into the crew. After the strike, Palmer logically wanted her to be out of the mission, and Massey feared as such. But knowing how essential an “inside man” is to succeed in the heist and swap out the discriminator, Dev successfully manages to manipulate them by appealing to Massey’s experience and his aversion to any sort of public relations fallout. Dani acquiesces but with the caveat of assigning Palmer to keep a watchful eye on her.

For All Mankind (Season 4) Episode 8 “Legacy” Ending Explained:

Back on Earth, we see Sergei having driven from Iowa to Washington and surprising Aleida. The surprise soon turns into skepticism and then realization for Aleida as Sergei fills in the necessary backstory, in part for Aleida to understand and empathize with Margo’s no-win situation at that time. Perhaps that is why she assisted in the plan of helping Margo meet with Sergei by passing his note containing a mathematical equation to her, hidden amidst the reports. Back at her hotel, where we had previously seen Margo enjoy an American burger after many years, we see her trying to solve the equation, which produces the latitude and longitude of the location where she is supposed to meet Sergei at 10 p.m.

Strangely, Margo managed to bypass her heavily guarded security to meet Sergei outside a diner at 10 p.m., but this moment of contrivance is taken for granted at the revelation by Sergei that the architect of both Sergei and Margo’s troubles of the last two seasons had been Irina Morzovna, the current head of Roscosmos and Sergei’s KGB handler. She had been the one egging him on to get close to Margo and learn about the details of NASA’s rocket engine. And now Sergei wants to return the favor of Margo, who sacrificed years of her life to save his own, by warning her that she shouldn’t go back to Moscow, as she is in great danger over there.

Back at Phoenix, the asteroid capture ship, we see all the astronauts preparing to capture Goldilocks and redirect them, and Massey, too, is excited and prepared and also being carefully watched. As she looks towards the data discriminator and looks at the astronauts in full view, with no hiding spot or no way to distract, she and we, as the viewers, realize that the entire plan of development hinges upon this act. No wonder she whispers “fuck.” I would have said it aloud.