For All Mankind is coming to an end with Season 6

Bye, Bob

Image: Apple

I have some good / bad news for you:

Good news: Apple has renewed its outstanding science fiction series For All Mankind for a sixth season.

Bad news: Season Six will be the last one.

Good news: Season 6 will fill out the plan that the showrunners set out to do: bring the story up to the modern day.

Good news: A spinoff, Star City, is coming on May 29th.

I've raved about this show since the beginning: an alternate history in which the Soviet Union reached the Moon first, prolonging the space race and over the course of the following seasons, took us out to not only the Moon, but to Mars and beyond.

It's a really smart show, one that really digs into the reasons for why the space race took place and plays out as a fun thought experiment for what might have been, looking at the role that the Cold War and conflict played in our endeavors beyond our planet. Season five begins streaming tomorrow (March 27th), and it's teasing out a story of the Martian colonists who're getting frustrated with Earth's oversight, frustrations that threaten to bubble up into revolution.

The show begins in the 1970s, and with each successive season, it's jumped forward a decade, which should mean that Season 6 brings us up to the 2020s. Speaking to Variety, series co-creator Matt Wolpert said that “I think from the beginning, the thing that we were focused on, and we didn’t know quite how many seasons it would take to get there, was that we wanted to reach the present day.”

“We wanted to tell the arc of the story from the initial divergence of 1969, and then reach the present moment, and see just how different the world we’re in now could have been had we kept pushing for progress and kept pushing forward as a species.”

I've seen over the years that the Wolpert and his co-creators (Ronald D. Moore and Ben Nedivi) had plotted out a seven-season run for the show, telling Collider in 2023 that "early on, we planned this out over six or seven seasons, so we're still on the road map, and I'm proud to say that we've stuck to, I think, the big goalposts we've had so far." Crucially, plans change as time goes on, and it seems as though this is bringing everything to a good closing point.

And this isn't the last that we've seen of the world: after Season 5 finishes out its run in May, Apple will debut a spinoff series: Star City, which goes back into the heights of the Cold War from the perspective of the Soviet Union:

But this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humankind forward.

Earlier this week, Apple released a first teaser for the show, and it looks pretty excellent: