For All Mankind Season 5 Finally Brings Back The Best (And Scariest) Part Of The Show

This article contains heavy spoilers for "For All Mankind" Season 5, Episode 6 "The Sirens of Titan."

It finally happened. After teasing audiences with it since the start of Season 5, "For All Mankind" has reached the moons of Jupiter, taking humanity further into the cosmos than ever before. It's a monumental moment, one that sets the stage for the show's endgame — "For All Mankind" is set to end with its sixth and final season. Unsurprisingly, getting to Titan is anything but smooth.

Indeed, things are looking pretty dire in "For All Mankind." There's the whole revolution on Mars thing, which has already claimed the deaths of some Happy Valley citizens. You also have the ongoing threat of automating the mining operations on Mars, which threatens to replace every human settler on the red planet — and is the reason for the revolution.

Then there's the simple fact that space exploration is very, very dangerous in both our world and the world of "For All Mankind." We see this in this week's episode when the two competing crewed missions to Titan approach the moon of Jupiter. Kosmos-1, the spaceship by the Soviet company Kuragin, messes up some calculations.

Unfortunately, that leads to a horrendous accident wherein Kosmos-1 misses Titan entirely and is instead pulled into Jupiter's gravity well, where the crew dies a quick but awful death due to radiation before they even get to Jupiter's atmosphere.

It's a harrowing sequence, one that casts a large shadow over the rest of the episode and on the Sojourner-T vessel carrying citizens of Happy Valley on board. Most importantly, however, this episode finally feels like a return to the best parts of "For All Mankind" — the idea that space is scary as hell.

"For All Mankind" is a phenomenal series that shows an alternate timeline where the space race never ended and science and technology became a priority worldwide. This led to wonderful things like climate change never becoming an issue, or streaming never taking off in the "For All Mankind" universe.

But as advanced or brighter as this alternate timeline is, the Apple TV show still abides by one rule from reality — space is scary. This is the final frontier, and it is full of dangers. The first couple of seasons of the show had this idea front and center, with both the U.S. and Russia pushing the boundaries of space exploration at high costs. Indeed, every season had at least one sequence straight out of a disaster movie, usually involving something small like a screw or a wire rope on a spaceship becoming loose and killing a lot of people. These sequences were thrilling, and made the idea of space both terrifying and alluring.

The space hotel disaster of Season 3 remains a highlight of the entire show. However, once things stabilize in space — first on the Moon and now on Mars — settlements are built and there are (hopefully) no more deadly disasters. Of course, it makes sense for these disasters to become less and less frequent as humanity becomes more experienced in space travel. The early days of the Happy Valley settlement were full of accidents and disasters, but after a few months, things stabilized and the town is now home to thousands of people.

Still, some of the most exciting and nerve-wracking parts of "For All Mankind" all involved some space thing going horribly wrong. That makes this latest episode a welcome throwback.