Ronald Moore and Maril Davis on recapturing and altering history in For All Mankind
Ronald Moore and Maril Davis speak about recapturing the Apollo program and altering history in their upcoming series for Apple TV+, For All Mankind.
Apple TV+ launches in just a few days, and the streaming service has plenty of exciting content planned for its users. One such series is For All Mankind, which will be available on the streaming service when it releases on November 1. Created by Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica veteran Ronald Moore, along with Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert, the series reimagines history, asking what would have happened if Russia had beaten the United States to the moon.
And at New York Comic-Con this year, Ronald Moore and executive producer Maril Davis spoke a about recapturing the history of the Apollo program — and then altering it — diving into what went into creating this series and how it differed from the previous works of science-fiction they’ve been involved with before.
“I’ve worked on a lot of fun projects, but this has been really great,” Moore said. “It touches my childhood like a lot of my shows have. My interest in science-fiction comes from the Apollo program. I watched Neil Armstrong land on the moon when I was five years old and my parents got us in the living room. That sparked an interest in anything in space, and I found Lost In Space and then Star Trek, which changed my life, and then science-fiction in general. So, to go all the way back and start doing things with the Apollo program and astronauts and those events, it’s just been a kick.”
Davis also cited her own fascination with space as a factor when it came to her interest in this series, but she emphasized the notion that kids just aren’t as dazzled by science and space exploration anymore. For All Mankind strives to imagine a world where the sciences are still considered “cool” — and possibly push our own society toward that belief through its story.
“For me, I’ve always been kind of fascinated with space,” Davis said. “And Ron and I have talked a lot about how astronauts used to be rockstars and everyone looked up to them, and how that’s kind of not been the case in recent history. Kids do not grow up dreaming of being astronauts and going into space. They want to be actors and rock stars and all these other things.”
According to Davis, recapturing the excitement surrounding the first space landing — even if the Russians got there first in the For All Mankind narrative — was crucial to the message they wanted to convey.
“We wanted to recapture that moment and show that they were, like, the big people on the planet and how going to space was still something exciting and that we were exploring,” she explained. “And certainly that’s something Ron did with Battlestar and Star Trek, but we wanted to show it in a more realistic way and show what that would look like if we reached beyond the moon and the program kept going.”
And while the concept of the United States not having won the race to the moon seems to have negative connotations at first glance, Moore and Davis emphasized the fact that, in For All Mankind, it has a more positive effect on the politics that come after.
“Well, what we play is basically that the Russians beat us to the moon at the last minute,” Moore explained. “You thought that Apollo 11 was going to be it, and then a couple weeks ahead of time, the Russians did it. And it’s a shock. It’s like a Pearl Harbor shock to the country. And then there’s anger and outrage and pushback, and it changes the political situation.”
And there likely would have been a mesh of those very emotions had things played out this way. But Moore doesn’t believe all the negative emotions would have led to a more negative society. In fact, in the series, he posits that the United States would have tried much harder to build up our science programs — and perhaps gotten much further as a result of it.
Moore continued, “Now the Nixon administration says, ‘Wait a minute. Don’t worry, we’re not going to be second in this race. We’re going. We’re going to put a moon base up there.’ It sparks the race to keep going because the United States in this version never had that pinnacle moment of putting a man on the moon for the first time, which is what kind of effectively ended the moon race the first time.”
The repurcussions of this alternate history really are fascinating to consider, and it’s not just the sciences that are affected by the change in narrative. According to the cast and crew, losing the moon race also shifts the way social issues unfold — leading to progress much sooner than anticipated.
To see exactly how things change, viewers can tune into For All Mankind when it arrives. It seems like the political science-fiction story many of us didn’t even know we eneded — and the early reviews have been fairly positive thus far.
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