Full spoilers follow for For All Mankind Season 5, Episode 3 – “Home.”
And that is a wrap on Ed Baldwin, For All Mankind’s biggest astronaut within the history of biggest For All Mankind astronauts. It is also a wrap on Joel Kinnaman, the star of the Apple TV alt-history show, who has been leading the forged since Season 1 debuted in 2019.
That is right: Admiral Edward Baldwin has died after a historic run as a war hero, an astronaut, a Mars residents rights activist, a husband, father, and grandfather… and a primo pot grower. The person indeed was a legend.
I spoke to Kinnaman and showrunners Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi in regards to the decision to finally say goodbye to Ed Baldwin, and the way they went about doing it. You’ll imagine a spaceman can cry!
Goodbye, Ed Baldwin
Since For All Mankind jumps forward by a few decade each season, Ed has aged considerably over the course of those fives seasons. And while the show is steeped in a world where space travel is much more advanced than where it’s for us (no offense, Artemis II crew — you guys rock), the characters still age like anyone else would. As Matt Wolpert says, it just type of “felt right” that now was the time for the 80-year-old Ed’s story to finish.
“Ed is a man who’s been in so many fraught, dangerous situations, and all the time is able to strap on a spacesuit and put himself at risk,” says the showrunner. “He even talks about wanting to die along with his boots on. … His actual fear shouldn’t be dying like that, but dying in a more helpless way. That is what got us dramatically excited.”
Kinnaman explains that he “knew it was coming,” having been given by the showrunners the entire plan for the unique five-season version of the show back in 2018. (For All Mankind is now planned to finish after Season 6, albeit an Ed-less Season 6.) The actor points out that it has been greater than seven years of playing Ed for him — the longest he’s ever been with a personality.
“It is also been this profound experience of playing all these different ages and jumping 10 years after which seeing myself within the mirror for months in these different ages,” he says. “It just really put my very own mortality on the front of my mind and made me take a look at life in a bit bit different way.”
The Korean War Flashbacks
In an unexpected twist to Ed’s final story, Wolpert and Nedivi decided to also return to what’s form of his “first story” — his time as a young pilot within the Korean War. The concept of doing a flashback episode to Ed’s time in Korea had been floating around for years, with Kinnaman and the writers discussing it, but it surely all the time got bumped from the agenda. The episode was going to occur in Season 3, after which Season 4, but it surely was, because the actor puts it, “considered one of those darlings that they kept killing.” Until now.
“This was the best way that it was speculated to be,” he says. “And I like that I got to play the oldest and the youngest version of Ed at the identical time.”
Adds Nedivi: “The character of the show is we jump in time, and also you experience numerous Ed’s past within the show, but there’s one period we have never really experienced that he talks about, he refers to throughout all five seasons. … It felt like if we ever were going to do it, that is the moment since it is a thing where, as you get near death, those memories from the past come back to you, and particularly from the best way, well past. A lot of Ed’s identity and character’s defined by his experience in Korea, and we have hinted at that, and we have talked about that, and he’s talked about that, that it felt like we will not really allow him to pass without attending to that. [It was] the right method to really encapsulate the ending of his arc, to bring him back all of the method to the start of his arc.”
Within the flashbacks, we see how Ed barely makes it out of enemy territory after his plane is shot down, even while his comrade is not so lucky. As such, these scenes give the impression that Ed’s experience within the war helped make him the “great man” that he becomes as an astronaut — seeing his friend lost while he makes it out alive. What does one do after something like that?
“He’s almost living on borrowed time from that time forward,” explains Wolpert. “Nevertheless it also was a way of seeing how much he was fighting to remain alive and fighting to get home. It felt like an incredible framing of it, and in addition, truthfully, simply to see Ed as a young man juxtaposed against him at the top of his life felt prefer it captured a part of the special sauce of the show within the arc of this character over time.”
The Return of Karen and Gordo…
“Home” also gives us a glance into Ed’s last thoughts where he’s drifting somewhere between the ultimate moments of his life and, well, whatever is coming next. There he’s reunited along with his first wife, Karen (Shantel VanSanten), their young son Shane, who died as a toddler (and who, it seems, was named after Ed’s fellow pilot who died back in Korea), and his best friend and fellow astronaut, Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman). It’s pretty effective stuff to see these actors return as their characters — characters who’ve been dead on the show for years.
“We were like, ‘Okay, this is rarely going to occur,'” laughs Nedivi. The actors had moved on to other projects and the complexities of production often make bringing an actor or actors back for temporary cameos like this beautiful difficult to drag off. But all of them managed to make it work.
Continues Nedivi: “I actually have to say the indisputable fact that each of them, in the midst of other jobs, in the midst of doing quite a bit, not even being in LA, that they got here and did that and got into character again in spite of everything this time is a testament to the 2 of them and their commitment to giving Ed the right ending. But additionally, they told us that these characters are still a lot an element of who they’re, and it defined them. So I believe they liked that, diving back on this world. I remember Dorman even told me, ‘I miss this guy.'”
The showrunners add that additionally they felt that, in a way, Karen and Gordo never got the right send-off they deserved.
“And it form of seems like it was a method to bring the three of those characters from Season 1 together one last time,” says Nedivi.
Kinnaman was surprised by how emotional shooting the episode wound up being for him.
“I used to be attempting to unpack, ‘Why is it landing like this for me?'” he says. “Since the last week of shooting, I mean, I used to be an absolute mess. I used to be just crying the entire time. … I believe it was [in part] that I actually loved this show and I actually loved telling this story and being a part of this story. So it was also like saying goodbye to that. I do not know. It was quite confusing. After which they wrecked me with having Shantel and Michael Dorman there! Michael was standing there smiling and I began crying. I used to be like, ‘Motherfucker.’ Because we were also playing best friends after which we became really close friends. And I like him. I actually love him. He’s a phenomenal man and such a superb spirit. And yeah, we were just standing there laughing.”
The episode then brings all of it home with a version of Elvis’ “Love Me Tender” playing — Karen’s favorite song, which she and Ed danced to at their wedding — as a shot of Ed’s spacecraft slowly flies on.
“He was the Sinatra guy, and in the long run, it is the love of his life,” says Nedivi. “It’s her music that’s in his head and in our head. It felt like the right end of that love story too.”
For All Mankind Season 5 is streaming on Apple TV now.
Seek advice from Scott Collura @scottcollura.bsky.social, or hearken to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do each!