For All Mankind season 5 premiered on Apple TV+ on March 27.
The series is one of the strongest science fiction stories on Apple TV. The platform is not the biggest, so many people have not yet discovered it. The co-creators, Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert, push the show further into hard sci-fi by focusing on the massive expansion of the Happy Valley colony on Mars.
If you want to watch, pay close attention to the production design. The Mars mission control set is especially impressive. Every button has a clear purpose, and the details are carefully planned. The team behind the show works with great precision, even if most viewers do not notice the effort.
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For All Mankind: Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert speak about the Mars mission
The creators of the show spoke to Gizmodo regarding the 360-degree Mars mission control set in For All Mankind. They said,
“We are pretty sure we can actually launch a spaceship from this room. There’s not a button here that wasn’t thought through. Everything on these sets is thought through in terms of why it’s there, what purpose it serves, and that goes to almost every set on the show.”
The show will finish with its sixth season. By the time it ends, it will look very different from how it began. Each season moves forward about ten years, which changes the style of the series as well as the technology it represents. The story has moved quickly, and the design has shifted with each step. According to Ben, the series made it more challenging to keep the production design grounded. He said,
“It’s getting harder as the show becomes more science fiction. But this year is especially exciting because it’s the buildup of identity. People living on Mars, it’s a home. The fact that we’re able to tell that story and get to the end is incredible.”
Ben also said,
“For the history of the show, season one, mission control, the basis of everything was in Houston. And this is the first time our mission control, the center of operations, is on Mars. So building this set really represents where the show is, how the show has grown, how it’s evolved over the season. So we really felt like this is the place for you guys to see how the show has changed and evolved.”
For All Mankind: Mars as launch pad
Going beyond Mars would make it very hard to keep mission control linked to real technology. Since season 5 of For All Mankind takes place in the 2010s, the sixth season will move into the 2020s. This gives the creator many real examples to use if they want to update the mission control set.
For All Mankind has already been praised by a NASA astronaut for its accuracy, and the team will not want to lose that trust by making it too far removed from real science. For now, the creators are proud of how far the story has gone. Nedivi shared that Mars will act as a launch pad for exploring more about the solar system, including Jupiter and Saturn.
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Edited by Nimisha