 For All Mankind is a new series on Apple Plus that's an alternate history of the space race that sees women among some of the early lunar landing crews. Obviously, I had to watch it. And here are my thoughts. Okay, so at the time of this recording, I've watched the first five episodes, and I think, oh, hi, Pete. It makes the most sense to actually break it down sort of by theme. So today, we're gonna be looking at the first two by Pete, the first two episodes because these get into themes of alternate history versus revisionist history, which, as an historian, is a really big sticking point for me. Now fair warning, this will include spoilers. So if you haven't seen the show yet and definitely want to wait until you've had a chance to actually watch the show before you watch this video, now is your time to bookmark it so that you can come back later. I'll give you a second here. Let's move on. So when I watch shows like this, I actually do take notes, which is what this is. There's always things that jump out that I know I'm gonna forget about when I try to recall the episode and I do the video. So I wanted to just make sure I had everything top of mind. And yeah, my notes on this one are a little long, so let's get started. We're gonna discuss the first two episodes, episode by episode, this time. So if in case you haven't seen it or you need a refresher, episode one, the sort of brief description is, NASA is in crisis as the Soviets land the first man on the moon in 1969, Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, which begins the alternate history. Apollo 11 near crash lands on the moon, but all the astronauts return safely. So first up you guys know that I am all about Apollo. There are 15 Apollo astronaut autographs on this wall behind me and like another seven non-apollo astronautographs. My cat, whom you briefly saw, is named Pete Conrad after the Apollo 12 commander. And what's really fun about the idea of an alternate history of Apollo is that this allows you to actually explore some of the things that NASA or people within NASA had been thinking about in the late 1960s for Apollo or Apollo applications. And those are missions like the manned missions to Venus, Mars or Venus and Mars, which was a very cool proposal that surfaced in about 1967 to add an environmental module onto the Apollo stack so that you could go to Venus and Mars, not landing, just to fly by mission. Living in the command module would be the sort of nucleus, the workhorse again, the service module would power it, and then you'd have this massive lab. Effectively think like taking Skylab to Venus and to Mars. There's also a plan to land on the far side of the moon, which would have been really interesting because of course on the far side you don't have any communications with Earth. The idea being it could have been a really interesting way to prove that the technology and the training was up for landing places where you didn't have real-time or near real-time relays with the ground, places like going to Mars where you don't have real-time communications with Houston. So there's all kinds of really interesting nuggets in the Apollo era that can be kind of spun out and really teased out for these alternate histories, which is why I was super excited about this show. So the premise of the show is that June 20th, 1969, the Soviets land on the moon, and this creates the alternate timeline. This is where, if we have history that we know, this is the point at which it branches off and goes elsewhere. So, which sidebar? I really like that they gave it to Lanna because I'm a big Lanna fan. The initial premise, the initial date of this is what caused a big problem for me, and like I'm well aware that I'm being massively finicky and pedantic right now, but isn't that why you guys come to me for reviews like this? So, if we are to assume that our linear timeline is exactly the same up until the date of June 20th, 1969, and that that moment creates this fork in the timeline that creates the alternate history that we follow for the rest of the show, that doesn't work. Because there's no way in hell the Soviets could have landed on the moon in June of 1969. The history under me is like cringing, and my teeth are hurting a little bit, because the alternate history is based on like a weird revisionist history that ignores the fact that the Soviets did not have the technology to do what the show is purporting it could have done. So, I would argue, and I've said this before, that the space, the space race was won, in air quotes, in 1966 when Sergei Korolev died. Now Korolev is sort of the easiest way to kind of think about him, sort of. He was a Soviet chief designer, kind of the Soviet equivalent to Werner von Braun. He was the one who started, who did a lot of the early missile development and rocket development in the Soviet Union, and who fought to have the missile program be won with the space program. So basically, you take your R7 missile that's a good functioning thing, and you add a capsule on it, you just modify it to add a capsule, which incidentally is what America did by modifying the Titan II to launch a Gemini. So, he was one of the big drivers behind getting the Soviet space program off the ground. He knew the value of propaganda victories, and he was really good at pushing for these propaganda victories. So, the Soviet space program is not organized the way NASA is. There aren't centers that are doing specific things. It has design bureaus, and Korolev was the head of one of these design bureaus. And he didn't necessarily get along with the other people who are heads of other design bureaus, which is how you end up with things like the N1 rocket, which I've talked about in other videos. The N1 rocket had 30 engines on it, not because that was the most efficient, but because Korolev couldn't get more powerful engines from another design bureau to put on his rocket. The 30 engines introduced a bunch of failure points, and the N1 exploded spectacularly on the launch pad multiple times. Now, in this show, they talk about how the N1 rocket had another successful launch. So, if we're taking June 20th, 1969, as the point where our timeline deviates to the alternate history, it's already based on revisionist history, because the N1 rocket never had a successful launch. So, that really bothers me. Okay, so it bothers me for two reasons. It bothers me as the nerdy historian who loves fact and who doesn't think you really need to embellish on things as insane as the history of space exploration, because it's already bonkers and awesome in itself. But with a show like this, you're going to get people who don't know the history, and they're going to come to this, and they're going to assume that whatever you're saying pre-that deviation in your timeline, pre-that moment where you're saying the alternate history starts, that's true. So, in this weird way, as someone who's passionate about education and stuff, it bothers me that it's putting false information that people are going to assume is true. Yeah. So, that was like kind of my main sticking point behind all this. All that said, I actually really like that this is where it is. I like that it starts with this like massive American failure, because we're so easy seeing pictures of Apollo 11, and it looks like this. It's the big celebration, it's waving the flags, it's the ticker tape parades, and all of those images have been replaced in the show with these shots of just really sad, really serious somber faces, ghosts like illuminated by glowing television screens in the dark. I mean, it's really, it's quite a powerful image. The problem for me in that was that I didn't feel it, because it starts so quickly with, here's the failure. So, I didn't feel the tension going in, and I really wanted to. That's what I kind of thought was missing off the bat. Like, there could have very easily been a space race montage, and it could have included some of the revisionist history and just like acknowledged it somehow. I don't know how, but you know, show me, show me that the U.S. didn't pull ahead in 1966. Show me that Corellept didn't die. Show me the successful N1 launchers. Show me a U.S. failure so that I feel the tension and I feel the stakes, because it's kind of assuming, for me, it felt like it was assuming people would have the emotional reaction you're seeing on screen. So instead of building the tension, I felt that first episode kind of gave you the reaction without the build-up, and it was hard. Like, I found it hard to kind of feel the pain that everyone was feeling. Specifically, the astronauts. It just looked like all these guys were just like mad, but I couldn't feel why. And sidebar, I think the weirdest was when Deke Slayton's character tells all the astronauts, like, yeah, we were bested. Now, go do whatever you have to do. Go be mad. Go kick a dog and come back and work in the morning. Now, apparently the phrase kick the dog or kick the cat is like an old-timey, but not that old-timey phrase, meaning go abuse your power on the totem pole, so like yell at your employee, yell at your kids, which is, A, still, I mean, granted, it's dated and kind of makes sense for 1969. But it's also like, I was really mad. I was just like, don't kick dogs. Like, why are we talking about kicking dogs? And then I hugged Pete, because like, don't kick animals, guys. Don't kick animals. So yeah, that's kind of my feelings on the first episode. Like, I love that you're taking this iconic moment of American history and flipping it upside down. That's really fun, but the whole episode was just kind of anger, and I wanted to feel more of where that anger came from a little bit, because I feel like it's obviously what's driving the entire series. And instead of just showing people being mad and talking about kicking dogs the whole time, like, show me the build up. Like, let me feel the pain. Let me feel the excitement of the astronauts. Let me feel, you're talking about Apollo 10. Show me Apollo 10. Show me how like, yeah, next time we got this, we totally got this, guys, and then just how they got the shrugged swept out from under them. Like, that's what I wanted to see, and that was kind of missing. So going into episode two, we're still kind of going on this theme of alternate versus revisionist history, because now we have Warner Fun Brown coming in. He was in the first episode, but this episode is all about him. It is aptly titled He Built the Saturn V. So again, if you need a refresher, the episode is described as Director Warner Fun Brown opposes President Nixon's directive to make the moon base into a U.S. military base, starting the race for the base. Nixon's men use Fun Brown's past involvement with the Nazi regime to remove him as Deputy Associate Administrator for Planning. Warner Fun Brown, as he appears in the show, is not Warner Fun Brown. He's very clearly an amalgam of all the Germans who were working for NASA at the time, because, okay, Warner Fun Brown is obviously a real dude. And he worked, his main thing was working on the Saturn V, which was based out of Huntsville, Alabama, and a lot of work out at Kennedy in Florida. So why is he always shown in Mission Control advising on what the lunar module engine can do, which he did not build, nor was he not involved in, and he did not spend nearly as much time in Mission Control as the show would lead you to believe? Like, it's showing a real person in an unrealistic point to where the average person is going to think it's true, and that bugs me. If he's not a real person, why not create an amalgam of German people and just make him Magnus von Ferenstein? That's not a real name, because you're mixing, you're revising who he was as a person, and that's what bugs me about these shows, because you're using the pre-alternate timeline to create the basis for what happens in the alternate timeline, and that's revisionist history that your alternate history is now based on. So the whole thing in this episode is that we need to know why America was beaten to the moon by the Soviets, and we need to put the blame on somebody. And conveniently for the narrative, here's the next Nazi. So it's blamed on Werner von Braun because for some reason he's the one who made the decision to have Apollo 10 be a dress rehearsal for the moon landing. That's not at all what happened, and the fact that it's using that before the alternate timeline is what bugs me because that's the motorcycle, because that's the revisionist timeline that we're trying to inform the alternate history, and it just doesn't work for me. Just make the whole thing an alternate timeline from 1961. Looking to put the blame on somebody, here is Werner von Braun who inexplicably made the call to not land on Apollo 10. And he goes to a congressional hearing, it looks like, and testifies that he needed more practice just to make sure everything was safe. And then his Nazi past is brought out as like the trump card. And it's kind of weird, because the government definitely already knew about this before he was working for NASA. I mean, this was not a surprise. If it almost felt like this weird thing of like wanting like it was it almost okay, it almost felt like the show wanted you to know that Nazis are bad, which by the way guys, Nazis are bad. But it just felt like awkwardly forced. It didn't feel like it was the natural progression of how this would have ever happened. But at the same time, I understand I talked to some friends about this, there was an interesting almost catharsis in having him be held accountable for his past actions in the Second World War at the height of the space race's popularity, which of course didn't happen. So yeah, it was I thought it was an interesting move that I just think for the sake of the show worked really well. But for the sake of history felt very, very awkward. Of course, if you would like a little bit more information about Fun Brown's getting to America and how he was treated in America, all of that is in my first book, Breaking the Chains of Gravity. So yeah, that's kind of my big takeaway from the first two episodes. I love the alternate history, I love taking it from Apollo 11 onward. You know, I like that Apollo 11 wasn't the perfect mission in the end, it nearly crashed on the moon. But I had a really hard time kind of suspending my disbelief and accepting that any of it could happen without making the alternate timeline earlier and suddenly I just hate this like we're going to revise history, but also claim that this is the marker of our new timeline because it can't work. Just, yeah, that really bugged me and I have a bit of a hard time suspending this belief. But this is why I also don't like shows like this necessarily. I don't really watch them for a leisure because I can't stop my brain from being like, that wouldn't happen. I'm like, stop it, brain's like, but that's not real. So yeah, so those are just my like deep history thoughts about the first two episodes of the show. But what did you guys think? Did you like it? Were you annoyed by it? Were you also like a little bit disturbed by the insistence on kicking dogs? Don't kick dogs, guys. Two things, the takeaways of these two episodes. Don't kick dogs, Nazis are bad. Let me know all of your thoughts in the comments below. We will continue to discuss the show in two episodes spurts, I think, as long as that works for kind of thematic discussions. And of course, if you have other things you want to talk about, let me know down in the comments as well. Just want to remind you guys that my brand new book Fighting for Space is now available for pre-order and you can also submit your receipt to my publisher to get a signed book plate and time for the holidays. All of that is at this link right here and also everything you need is in the description. And of course, be sure to follow me on Twitter so you never miss updates that what I'm up to when new videos are live. And of course, all the book stuff because that's pretty big right now. Alright, thank you guys so much for watching. See you next time.