MOVIE NEWS – With an 8/10+ score on IMDb and four seasons already out, it’s one of the best science-fiction series right now and also one of the most believable. For All Mankind is returning for a fifth season on Apple TV+. What began as a counterfactual built on a strong foundation now looks forward.

Apple TV+ has carved out a reputation as a go-to destination for streaming sci-fi. In only a few years, the service has rolled out hits like Foundation, Severance, and the recent Pluribus from the creator of Breaking Bad, whose opening episodes clearly made waves. Yet there is one show that often slips past the broader audience, even though the people who do try it tend to rave about it. That show is For All Mankind, and its next season is nearly here.

Specifically, season five, which will make it the longest-running sci-fi series in the platform’s catalog so far. A spinoff is also on the way, meaning we are not only talking about a series that audiences rate highly – it sits at 8.1/10 on IMDb after more than 40,000 votes – but about an expanding franchise as well. Even so, it still reads like a niche title, at least in the sense that it never generated the kind of social-media noise Pluribus sparked last fall. It is the kind of overlooked show that deserves a second look, and with its return date now locked in, I want to do exactly that by focusing on its realism – from respect for orbital physics and the use of original NASA designs to input from real astronauts and flight directors.

At its core, For All Mankind is alternate history. In other words, it is a historical narrative that starts with a “what if…?” and follows an alternative timeline from there. Here, the hook is that the Soviet Union reaches the Moon before the United States, triggering a butterfly effect that reshapes politics, technology, and global culture in the second half of the 20th century. Put simply, the U.S. gets competitive and drives the space race to unimaginable but still plausible extremes, leaving the fictional present barely resembling our own. Actually, scratch that – in reality, the story still has not even reached its 2025-2026 window.

All of this premieres March 27 on Apple TV+, a date that also marks a major milestone for the project. With season five, the series gradually steps away from the alternate-history framing and leans fully into pure science fiction, where the only real limit is the writers’ imagination. Based on the new trailer and the teaser shown at the end of season four, the show is moving toward a future that feels closer to The Expanse, an Amazon series that even offered a small nod back to it. Over its first four seasons, For All Mankind has essentially chronicled human expansion across the solar system, from the sting of losing the lunar race in the 1960s to the emerging asteroid-mining economy of the early 2000s, as depicted in the fourth season discussed here.

A Commitment to Realism, With Astronauts in the Room

But is the series actually realistic? Alternate history can be a reconstruction built on hypothetical data that sometimes spirals into outlandish stories with no grounding in reality. That is not what happens here. Even though the catalyst is fictional, the engineering, orbital physics, and biological challenges of living in space are treated with striking scientific precision. That rigor was a personal priority for Ronald D. Moore, creator of the Battlestar Galactica reboot and showrunner of the new God of War series, who brought in Gerry Griffin, a flight director during the Apollo program from 1968 to 1977, and Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut.

“It’s difficult to get everything right. I didn’t appreciate how much it would cost to achieve that accuracy, especially with weightlessness. We have shots taken on Earth, others in microgravity, and also on the Moon, with one-sixth of Earth’s gravity. Getting the physics right, so that, for example, the tether cables didn’t fall under their own weight but floated, was a constant challenge. The whole team was dedicated to it. For me, it was like going back to training, even though I had already flown on the shuttle,” Reisman explained, adding that he also had to study for the job because his active career came after the Apollo capsules.

Scientific Rigor, And Sergei Korolev’s Butterfly Effect

But what about the premise? That is, the moment that changed everything in the timeline. Ronald D. Moore explained it this way a few years ago: “I was having lunch with Garrett and trying to figure out how and why the space race would have continued. What push would have been needed to keep it going after Apollo 17? He said to me, ‘You have no idea how close the Russians came to getting to the moon.’ I was fascinated by the concept. In researching to find the turning point, I latched onto one fact: the chief designer of the Soviet program, Sergei Korolev, died on an operating table in Moscow. After his death, the Soviet program was never the same, and the rocket they had designed never launched. Our premise is that he survived, fixed the design flaws, and accelerated the program. That’s where everything changed,” he recalled.

Part of that story is set to be explored in Star City, a spinoff that will revisit the early years of this alternate space race through the eyes of the cosmonauts, engineers, and intelligence agents working in “Star City.” But before that arrives, season five of For All Mankind hits on Friday, March 27, followed by a new episode every Friday through May 29. You have two months to catch up on the previous 40 episodes.

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