For All Mankind Season 5 Offers A Prestige TV Reunion No One Saw Coming

Spoilers ahead for "For All Mankind" season 5, episode 2, "The Hard Six."

Five seasons in, and "For All Mankind" remains one of the best sci-fi shows on Apple TV. It's an epic series that imagines a timeline where the space race never ended and instead ushered in an era where science and technology are prioritized. This leads to an alternate Earth where fusion power is commonplace, electric cards are the norm by the late 20th century, and climate change isn't a major issue.

More than that, streaming never became a thing in the "For All Mankind" universe. Instead, there's a Blockbuster store on Earth's moon and humanity has a thriving settlement on Mars. Granted, there's still plenty of conflict on the show. The sci-fi series has never shied away from depicting the horrific human cost of progress, with every season featuring at least one massive disaster that claims dozens of lives. There's also Cold War political scheming and, beginning in season 4, corporate greed, which follows humanity to the red planet, resulting in a workers' revolt.

Season 5 adds something else, too: a murder investigation. In season 5, episode 1, "First Light," a dead body inexplicably turns up on the Martian surface, leading to the arrest of Lee Jung-Gil (C.S. Lee). Lee, of course, is a close friend of Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), who has served as the face of "For All Mankind" since the start.

While the case seems open and shut, there's at least one person who cares about getting to the real truth of the matter in season 5, episode 2, "The Hard Six." That would be Celia Boyd, a member of the Peacekeeper Security Force on Mars who's played by Mireille Enos. Yes, I mean Kinnaman's co-star on the prestige TV drama "The Killing." 

"The Killing," for those who are not familiar, is an AMC detective show based on the Danish TV series "Forbrydelsen." It was part of a wave of English-language adaptations of Nordic noir shows that came along in the early 2010s, along with series like "The Bridge." The show itself centers around various murder investigations in the Seattle, Washington area, with detectives Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) and Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman) leading the way.

During its first season, "The Killing" got a lot of attention thanks to its similarities to "Twin Peaks," including its moody Washington setting, its collection of colorful side characters, and a dead girl being the focus of the story. It also helped that season 1's marketing tagline ("Who killed Rosie Larson?") evoked the "Who killed Laura Palmer?" promotional campaign for "Twin Peaks." Granted, nothing supernatural ever happens on the series (unlike "Twin Peaks"), but the mystery of Rosie's death that encompassed the first two seasons of "The Killing" was compelling and full of delightful twists and turns.

After running for three seasons on AMC (and being canceled twice by the network), "The Killing was picked up for a fourth season that streamed on Netflix in 2014. Now, more than a decade later, "For All Mankind" season 5 is diving into a murder investigation that, with its air of conspiracy, would have brought "The Killing" to mind even without Enos and Kinnaman's involvement. Now, all we need is for Celia Boyd to interact with Ed Baldwin directly, and this unexpected reunion will be truly complete.

"For All Mankind" is currently streaming on Apple TV.