Futureworld

If America didn't land the first man on the moon, would that be an excuse for it fucking up everything else? That is the set-up for at least one comedy routine and Ronald D. Moore's For All Mankind which retcons the Apollo mission as a catch-up to the Russian space program. By putting the USSR there before the States Moore casts the Americans in the role of the can-do guys, a compelling premise for as long as you can forget they could-did.

This tethers the space walk, and not just for history buffs. Mankind's "what if" science fiction is in the tradition of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle but instead of topsy-turvy, Moore has merely fudged the dates. The drama relies almost entirely on in its fidelity to real life, or at least a 4K update of previous versions: First Man, which was a shakier take on Apollo 13, which was a more carefully explained version of The Right Stuff. NASA dramas count-down reliably. Men with flat hair! Women around the TV! Controllers smoking with impunity! The cigarette work in Mankind is at a Michael Bay level. The space scenes never rise above Kubrick's, although the snap-zoom on the command module is a VFX nod to Moore's Battlestar Galactica remake, the first two seasons of which were up there with The Prisoner.

But the series is not real. So, post-pesky Russians, where will Moore's Picard plot-wheel land? Red Dawn 2019? The Astronaut's Wife? Mankind's wives are too lively to hail from Stepford. Maybe that Wernher von Braun will turn out to be a Nazi. That'd really be fucked.