The penultimate episode of For All Mankind's season was a thrilling rollercoaster of chess pieces moving into place across both Mars and Earth. Teams were preparing for the asteroid capture mission, while secret teams on both planets were working on their own unsanctioned missions. It was a real mishmash of Ayesa's Seven and The Magnetic Ms. Madison!
"Crossing The Line" concluded with Dev and Ed teaming up to steal Goldilocks, which, in accordance with the show's long tradition of inventive space disasters, was destined to go wrong somehow. But before things could go awry, many things had to go right, making "Legacy" the most enjoyable episode of the season so far, especially if you're a fan of heist dramas.
It turns out that Dev's engineering genius and Ed's first-rate project management skills made their devious plan come together quite smoothly. We got to enjoy many of the best bits of any heist plan, as laid out in the second-greatest Heist Text of our era, the 2001 feature film Ocean's Eleven: explaining the plan as clearly as possible to the full team of recruits; identifying and executing tasks with increasing complexity and ever-higher stakes; cleverly exploiting flaws and/or arrogance in security systems; and of course, The Kid. (For those who may feel their curiosity piqued by my ranking of Ocean's Eleven, the actual greatest Heist Text of our era is, of course, Ocean's 8.)
The expository scene where we learned both the intended asteroid capture plan and Dev's alternate scheme was really well done, cutting and weaving together elements of three meetings on Mars and Earth. This could have been very dull and confusing, but instead it was lively and just a tiny bit confusing because it is quite literally rocket science, and I am a humanities girl who last took a physics class about 25 years ago.
The asteroid interception team aboard Ranger would be receiving and responding to instructions from Happy Valley's operational communications center, or OppsComm, regarding when to fire up and power down their nuclear engines, using carefully timed bursts of burn time to temporarily bring Goldilocks into Mars orbit and then nudge it to a trajectory towards Earth. Ayesa's Seven would need to get Ranger to accept their slightly different instructions to extend the burn time just enough to make sure Goldilocks stayed in orbit around Mars instead. Once Happy Valley figured out what had happened, it would be too late to re-adjust the asteroid's trajectory, and they would have to either abandon mining it altogether or accept the longer timeline originally under discussion in "Leningrad."
Putting the team together was pretty straightforward - once Ed recruited Massey, all of the other die-hard strikers trusted her enough to agree to participate too. The most challenging person to get on board was Miles, who, once in charge of Ilya's former black market business, had grown to appreciate his former mentor's cautious, risk-minimizing approach. He just wanted to have a nice nest egg for his family to enjoy when his tour was over. Fair enough, but these concerns were no match for Dev's persuasive pep talk of "c'mon, man, this is a dare-to-be-great situation!" Miles was in. Not a moment too soon, because Miles was the key to acquiring all of the equipment Ayesa's Seven would need to build their own OppsComm. All of NASA's built-in equipment redundancy inventory was up on Phoenix, and although Miles had smuggling imports down to Happy Valley down to a science, sneaking it past the newly deputized security officers was a whole different ball game.Fortunately, Miles is cunning enough (and, more importantly, cool under pressure) to devise a feasible strategy that partially relies on letting the security officers think they've won. The episode depicts how intensely the Happy Valley and NASA leadership have become focused on operational security. Eli no longer expresses even a slight hint of skepticism about excessive force; Dani emphasizes the secure communications network that Happy Valley will use to communicate with Ranger during the asteroid capture mission; Palmer shuts down Ilya's former bar; Massey notes that security officers are constantly checking people's bags and IDs; and on top of everything else, access to sub-levels 4 and 5 is cut off—allegedly "for crew safety," but the practical effect is to reduce the number of spaces workers can use to organize. All these actions by leadership resort to draconian control measures because they're no longer confident in their ability to lead by example and persuasion.
I have to admit, I felt a little schadenfreude when I saw the team get past security with their cables, monitors, and nearly everything else. The reason they have to bother with Miles's guy on Phoenix packing all this equipment in innocuous goods like cereal and toilet paper is that the entire operation depends on bypassing Happy Valley's OppsComm. The most crucial element of ensuring that Ranger accepts and executes orders from their OppsComm is an item called a data discriminator, which will check that the orders it receives are from Happy Valley. Without a discriminator, there's no plan to execute, and due to a packing error, the discriminator winds up in the secure equipment lockup at Happy Valley.
Finally, The Kid comes into play. The Kid is literally child Alex Poletov, who is available to earn his stripes on this ragtag crew because Kelly has gone to Korolev Crater for a few days to set up the Seeker robots with her team. The strike and heist planning plotlines have been so infuriating/engrossing that I needed a reminder that her team's quest to discover life on Mars is the reason for her and Dev's presence there, and for Aleida's participation in the Goldilocks capture project. I'm not the only one—Ed agreed to babysit Alex while Kelly's away, and he forgot about it too, which is embarrassing, but it turns out to be a blessing in disguise. You know who's small enough to crawl through the air vents, John McLane-in-Die Hard-style, to the secure lockup to retrieve the discriminator? Despite his fear of Ed—"you look like a bear," he tells his grizzled and gruff granddad—Alex is eager to take on this absolutely hare-brained task, and he pulls it off, earning the highest praise Ed can bestow on his reserved grandson, that he's "such a brave boy."
Having acquired all the necessary technology, they can proceed to the next phase of the plan by starting to build their own OppsComm on one of the now theoretically inaccessible sub-levels, because they're unlikely search targets. Turns out, inaccessibility is not a meaningful concept to first-rate electrician Sparks, who builds a secret workaround into one of the elevators. Meanwhile, Dev pivots to working as a mole and saboteur on the official asteroid capture mission, successfully encouraging Dani and Ranger commander Ravi to assign Massey to the mission based on her experience and his aversion to "massive lawsuits and a PR nightmare." Dani's inclination to trust that Massey is acting in good faith, as she always has, is now tempered by extra caution, leading her to assign Palmer to the mission to keep a watchful eye on everyone's behavior.
Back on Earth, Sergei, last seen at the end of season three picking up a newspaper in his new neighborhood in the U.S., has been living a comfortable life since Margo had him extracted from the USSR. He's settled in a small Iowa town, married to a woman blissfully unaware of the key details of his past life, and teaches physics at a local high school. Like Aleida, he thought Margo died in the bombing at the former JSC, and like Aleida, he's shocked to learn that Margo has been alive and reasonably well in Moscow all this time. Unlike Aleida, however, he has no one to help him process this information.
Sergei knows he should stay put and continue on as if Margo were dead, but at a literal crossroads on the way to work, he decides to turn in the opposite direction and risk it all in Houston. It's not just that Sergei can't resist being pulled back into Margo's orbit; he feels a moral obligation to try to rescue her, as she rescued him. Aleida is skeptical and continues to struggle with her mixed feelings about Margo, but the new knowledge that Margo surrendered her entire life and career to save him has some effect. Her assistance with a bit of mathematical sleight-of-hand leads to a late-night meeting with Margo, where he breaks the news that before she recruited Margo to work at Roscosmos, Irina Morozova was his KGB handler. She's been the architect of their grief from the beginning, and for her own safety, Margo must not go back to Moscow after completing her work on the Goldilocks mission.
Sergei's impulse to protect Margo is admirable and consistent with the faith they've always had in each other, but the entire plan is sloppy and ill-advised in every way. He's seemingly abandoned his wife and job, and his plan to reach out to Margo includes showing up at Aleida's house in broad daylight to ask for her help. The circumstances demand quick and decisive action and the ability to improvise, but a little more tradecraft on Sergei's part would go a long way toward making any plan executable. He should probably take lessons from Margo, who manages — heaven knows how — to get past her security detail double act to meet him. I hope there was a brief scene showing how she did so, and that it just didn't make the final edit, because popping out of the hotel and meeting Sergei in a restaurant parking lot at 10pm doesn't seem like an achievable goal for her right now.
Not that Ayesha's Seven have it any easier. Sure, they've set up their own alternate OppsComm and gotten Massey assigned to the Ranger crew. And sure, things are going fine so far – Dani lets them know they're 100% on track to intercept Goldilocks, and Massey appears cool as a cucumber as she does her job. A final zoom in on the original discriminator reminds us that the entire rest of the season is going to hinge on a piece of equipment that looks like an old removable car stereo.
