To Mars and Beyond: ‘For All Mankind’ Returns as Apple Goes ‘Liminal’
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The fifth season of Apple TV’s popular revisionist history space drama For All Mankind launches today. New episodes will follow every Friday through the end of May. Plus, Apple Original Films has announced a new sci-fi thriller.
For All Mankind Season Five
The fifth season begins with the same time jump we’ve seen at the beginning of each new season. This time around, nine years have passed since the “Goldilocks” asteroid heist (it is now the 2010s). While Happy Valley is now a thriving colony, with a population in the thousands, tension continues to grow back home, as the governments on Earth want to be more involved with the operation of the Mars base. An unsettling discovery fuels the debate about how law and order should be maintained on the red planet.
The series explores an alternate timeline where the Soviets beat out the United States to first land on the moon, and things have certainly advanced from its first season, which was set in the 1960s. I was nine years old when the US put a man on the moon in 1969, and sat with my face about six inches from our television’s screen during the entire Apollo 11 mission. When the Soviets beat us to the moon on that first episode of For All Mankind, I was somewhat surprised to find that I was upset and a bit angry that we had been beaten, even though I knew it was just fiction.
Joel Kinnaman returns to the cast as astronaut Ed Baldwin, buried under increasingly Benjamin Button-like layers of makeup and latex, as he’s now portraying a character in his 80s. Other popular characters, including Margo (Wrenn Schmidt), Miles (Toby Kebbell), and Ed’s daughter Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) will also return for their own storylines this season.
Season five is the penultimate season of the popular series, and the sixth and final season is already in production. However, there’s a spin-off, Star City — named for the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center — that’s set to premiere on May 29, 2026 and will focus on the Soviet Union’s side of the space race.
Apple TV Announces New Sci-Fi Thriller
Apple Original Films has also announced an upcoming science-fiction thriller called Liminal starring Vanessa Kirby (Pieces of a Woman) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Watchmen).
The new film is based on the award-winning graphic novel Telepaths, written by Eisner Award winner J. Michael Straczynski alongside Steve Epting and Brian Reber. Liminal will be directed by Louis Leterrier (Lupin).
While Apple hasn’t provided any details about the new project, it will likely follow the same plot lines as the graphic novel, which is available on Amazon:
An electromagnetic disturbance results in the sudden awakening of telepathic powers in a tenth of the Earth’s population. In the moments after the world comes to grip with this development, newly-telepathic Boston police find themselves sent against a wrongly convicted prisoner who becomes a hero and leader of other telepaths trying to escape a world in which their powers will make them targets. Both are heroes of their own story, and the future may depend on whether or not trust can be found between them.
J. Michael Straczynski, who is arguably best-known for creating the groundbreaking cult sci-fi series Babylon 5 and co-creating Netflix’s Sense8, also wrote such films as Changeling and Underworld: Awakening.
Apple’s announcement didn’t include any additional details on casting, or a release date.
