(Warning: Spoilers for the Season 4 finale of For All Mankind ahead.)
On For All Mankind, it is customary to end the season with at least one death of a beloved character. It’s been nearly three years since Tracy (Sarah Jones) and Gordo’s (Michael Dorman) sacrifice aired, and I still can’t look at duct tape. Season 4, the finale of which just dropped on Apple TV+, breaks this pattern, but that doesn’t mean tears are not shed.
In the alt-history series, the course of space exploration irrevocably changed when the Soviets landed on the moon first in the pilot episode. Humans working on Mars is not a theoretical prospect in the For All Mankind timeline, which leaps forward years at a time between seasons. Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) used to lead the NASA control room and once again, the typically stoic engineer has an impossible decision to make. Sure, it isn’t quite as twisty as the reveal at the end of the drama’s third season, showing Margo in 2003, alive and well eight years after faking her death and defecting to the USSR. Nevertheless, the Season 4 finale’s climax is equally bittersweet. “It’s time and time again where there is no good choice, just two bad choices,” Schmidt tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed.
If Margo’s protégée Aleida (Coral Peña) had reported Margo in the Season 3 finale for passing classified material to the Soviets, Margo would have faced jail time for espionage. Before Aleida could do anything, Margo opted to instead escape to Russia and make everyone believe she was dead (thanks to the unrelated bomb that went off giving the perfect cover story). Now, in the same room where she became the first woman to hold the title of space director at NASA, Margo embraces her fate by taking the fall for Aleida, ending the finale in handcuffs.
A lot has changed for Margo in the decades since we met her in 1969. Back then, she was an idealistic workaholic trying to make her way up the NASA ladder, shunning her mentor Wernher von Braun (Colm Feore), after finding out the extent of his knowledge about the Nazi concentration camps. “Progress is never free. There is always a cost,” von Braun attempted to reason.
Wrenn Schmidt in For All Mankind
Apple TV+
Margo repeats this sentiment and another von Braun lesson in the finale (“This is not a place for feelings, just the facts”), and the callbacks reflect why Margo ultimately confesses to sabotaging the mission to bring the “Goldilocks” asteroid worth $20 trillion back to Earth. She was a co-conspirator with Aleida in the plan, but Margo alone takes the blame in the control room. “A line is crossed for her morally and ethically,” says Schmidt. Unlike Braun, Margo doesn’t put herself first.
One constant for Margo is her dedication to the space program. Before the finale, Margo is called the “worst traitor in U.S. history” by Senate Majority Leader Feinstein (an Eagle News report drops this alt-history nugget in Episode 8). Despite the frosty reception when she returns to Houston, Margo relishes being back at the table. “Margo could rationalize this relationship [with the Soviets] because it meant she was doing the work again,” Schmidt says. Of course, events in the finale change Margo’s ability to compartmentalize.
By the end of the episode, Margo’s fate in court is left unanswered, but her testimony—told through voiceover—emphasizes how much she has grown across four seasons. “In Season 1, she thinks there’s right and wrong, and there’s no middle ground,” says Schmidt. But being forced to share classified information with the Russians after watching Sergei Nikulov (Piotr Adamczyk)—the man she has feelings for—almost get strangled to death last season shakes the last vestiges of an impossible-to-maintain worldview. It isn’t until Sergei and Margo are reunited in the present that Margo discovers his KGB handler, and the architect of their shared misery, happens to be her current boss at the Roscomos program, Irina Morozova (Svetlana Efremova). While there are no major deaths in the finale, that’s a gut-punch end to the penultimate outing of Season 4.
“’I’m curious how people will see that relationship or see those moments,” Schmidt says about this complicated relationship and the abrupt end. I, for one, am adding this Episode 9 sequence to the list of tissues and therapy expenses that the For All Mankind writers owe me after a KGB assassin shoots Sergei just as he’s about to take a bite out of a Big Mac.
Schmidt is no stranger to espionage and outer space, as her previous acting credits include Nope and The Americans. Before the last few episodes aired, she talked us through the challenges of this season, Margo’s choices, losing the potential love of her life, and why she took the blame for hijacking the asteroid.
Margo’s Russian exile and return to the U.S.
In Season 4, Irina spearheads the plan to bring “Goldilocks” back to Earth, making the Mars program obsolete despite other boundary-pushing discoveries. An elaborate and dangerous plan concocted by a rebel faction to keep the asteroid in Mars orbit so it can be mined there has been thwarted at every turn. However, Margo and Aleida aid the rebels from 140 million miles away, with Aleida entering a command code to keep the asteroid in space and, in doing so, committing an act of treason..
So why does Margo help hijack the asteroid and then take all the blame?
“I think there is, in some ways, a purity to the discovery of the limits of mankind and of science and the pursuit of discovery for its own sake,” says Schmidt. “It’s become so sullied by human greed and the geopolitics of who’s getting what, how and why.” Margo believes in the ongoing Mars program and its potential to “change the trajectory of human life.” Instead of letting Aleida take the blame for this act of treason, Margo says that she took the action alone—even though she is nowhere near the monitor in question
As with all things For All Mankind, there is more than one answer. Notably, Margo confronts Irina in a very public place, alluding to Sergei’s murder—stopping short of calling Irina a killer. The asteroid hijacking immediately follows this, and Margo, taking the blame, is informed by this act of violence: “So often, Margo has to be so measured, and she’s not in that moment at all. It’s very rare that you see her just operating purely on adrenaline and emotion and not thinking through something, but I think at that point, too, she’s like, ‘What else do I have to lose?”
Coral Peña in For All Mankind
Apple TV+
After living in a cage of sorts for the last eight years, Margo no longer fears prison. She is once again presented with two terrible choices, but saving Aleida from time behind bars is a simple equation. “There’s all these emotions around that and then all this history that she has. But also like, ‘Well, if this is how it ends for me, this is how it ends,” she says. “I don’t know what’s next, but I’m at peace with making sure that this doesn’t end up in the hands of people who are going to manipulate and invert what could have been a beautiful, profound thing for humanity.”
Margo is led away in cuffs by the FBI, but not before Aleida has a chance to embrace her tearily. Margo doesn’t get a fairy tale ending, but she did save the Mars program. Maybe it isn’t two terrible choices after all.
Challenges and payoffs
In the compelling season, Margo’s secret Soviet exile, her return from the dead, and her reunions with Aleida and not-quite-lover Sergei ensure Schmidt is the show’s MVP—on Earth or in space.
“When we finished Season 4, it was this wild and incredible release because it was such a hard, challenging season for Margo and me,” says Schmidt. For starters, Schmidt had a new language to learn. Margo had been living in Russia for eight years, but Schmidt’s semester of taking Russian in college during her senior year was not going to help with all the space jargon: “I remembered almost none of it. The thing I remembered was how to say, ‘My name is… I live in this city…”
There is also the aging factor, as thanks to time jumps between seasons (on average around 10 years), the 40-year-old Schmidt is now playing a woman in her sixties. Each morning, Schmidt spent two and a half hours in the makeup chair having prosthetics applied. Is there something that helped snap Schmidt into the older Margo mindset? “The mentality of Margo to me almost feels like it’s bonded in ways with my own. That feels like second nature,” she says. Instead, the physical elements like the prosthetics and wig help with the aging, as well as “dropping into that slump. The pain of ‘I always have to try and keep my weight on my right foot.’ That and the weight of wearing 17 layers of clothing to go outside, everything aching all the time.”
Both the language and the aging presented an acting challenge and physical transformation that played into some of the season’s most emotional scenes, which Schmidt knocked out of the solar system.
Margo has never been a social butterfly, but she shares a deep bond with Aleida that was shattered by the espionage betrayal. Of course, Aleida doesn’t have the full picture regarding why Margo shared top secret design secrets with their rivals until now. “I kind of love that it’s not Margo, who explains what happened to Aleida, but Sergei,” says Schmidt. After all, Margo only committed treason to save his life—making his death even more heartbreaking.
Wrenn Schmidt in For All Mankind
Apple TV+
In the sixth episode, Aleida’s relief that Margo is alive is quickly replaced by anger, with Schmidt and Peña capturing the complexities of the reunion in a hotel room in Russia. Again, the series moved me to tears. “One of the beautiful payoffs in that scene where they see each other again is that Margo stops trying to explain it or defend it and just lets Aleida feel what she feels,” says Schmidt.
Margo isn’t one for making excuses or getting emotional, but when it comes to Sergei, she lets her heart crack open a little with a dash of fury in the mix. “I look at what happens in Season 3 as ‘I understand why you did what you did, but how could you? You have destroyed everything that my life is about and I’ve worked for,” she says. “Now all of it hangs in the balance, and I’m trying to see how you did what you did, but also, it’s so incredibly painful.” Since Margo “died,” Sergei has made a life for himself in the U.S., but he throws that all away when he sees her on TV.
Schmidt describes Margo’s conflicting emotions as an undercurrent of these crackling scenes, as Sergei’s presence puts her in jeopardy again: “I have clawed my way back from obscurity, from nothingness, to actually doing what I love again. Even though it’s in this convoluted, dangerous way because I’m working with Roscosmos, and you are threatening that again.”
If Margo didn’t have feelings for him, it would be easy to tell him to “buzz off,” but this combination of underlying love, frustration, and “that she’s been so isolated” gives these scenes additional weight. Sergei suggests fleeing to Brazil together but takes a bullet before they have the chance. Aleida breaks the bad news to Margo during the asteroid power play.
Under the layers of makeup, Schmidt conveys how much this shakes Margo to her core and it is an understatement to call this timing not great. But it also gives Margo the chance to prove how wrong the “facts not feelings” mandate is and help pull off the heist of the century. Now, does prison have a space program in this universe?
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