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Spoilers follow for For All Mankind Season 5.
If Apple TV’s For All Mankind has been missing something from its early seasons, it’s Tracy and Gordo Stevens, that messed-up but oh-so-attractive couple of astronauts who gave their lives heroically at the end of Season 2. On the moon, no less!
Of course, with the show now in its fifth season (and a sixth and final season already in the works), there have been a lot of changes since those early years, particularly with the series always doing a 10-year time-jump between seasons. This has led to characters like Joel Kinnaman’s Ed Baldwin aging out and dying of natural causes, even while their children, and now their grandchildren, inherit the charge to explore space. Which brings us back to Tracy and Gordo.
For All Mankind Season 5 has somewhat sneakily returned to Tracy and Gordo through their grandaughter, Avery “A.J.” Jarrett (Ines Asserson), a young Marine who, it turns out, is the daughter of Danny Stevens, Tracy and Gordo’s troubled son (who was also an astronaut, of course, and who died on Mars years earlier). Bringing A.J. into the show continues For All Mankind’s themes of legacy, so I recently asked showrunners Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi when they decided to return to the Stevens family in this way.
“I don’t think it’s something we necessarily thought we were going to do, but the Stevens are as much [a part] of the folklore of this show as the Baldwins,” says Nedivi. “It was a bit odd to us that it didn’t feel like that story was over. And something Matt and I talked about a lot in terms of generations, in terms of families we know and histories, is that sometimes maybe the kids of certain heroes suffer the consequences of their parents’ glory, but then the grandkids are also impacted, but also can come back in different ways.”
As such, returning to the Stevens family — which has had a pretty tragic trajectory through Gordo, Tracy, Danny, and Danny’s brother Jimmy (who was involved in the bombing of the Johnson Space Center in Season 3… long story) — gave the showrunners the chance to maybe, just maybe, give some kind of a happy ending to the famed, and infamous, group.
“It felt like an opportunity that only a show like this could offer … where you’re able not only to show the impact of Gordo and Tracy on their kids and what they went through, but on their grandkids,” continues Nedivi. “So meeting her and introducing her was something that came up early in the [writers] room and was sort of one of these things we couldn’t get our mind off of.”
There was also the fact that basing A.J. on Earth offered the show a reason to actually go back to Earth a bit, as it has increasingly become a Mars-set series.
“The idea [was also] we’re going to introduce this new character that shows the perspective of Earth, because that’s really what it came from too,” says Nedivi. “We didn’t want this to just be the story of the Marsies [Mars colonists] and their perspective. We’re like, ‘Well, how do you show the perspective of people on Earth and the States without it feeling like just the other?’ And it felt like making them a Stevens, making them tie to the past of the show and these memorable characters was a great way to do that, and then build her up in a way that she’s as morally complex as her parents and as her grandparents.”
Indeed, A.J. is one of the better aspects of Season 5, as she struggles with the difficult legacy of her family history. Her fellow Marines don’t even know who she is at first, but now, as of this week’s episode, it looks like she’s about to head to Mars, where a colonist revolt is taking place — and where her family legacy is strong.
The showrunners note that casting the role was not easy.
“It’s an exciting challenge to bring new life and new blood into the show, but it is something you obviously have to think about — whether the actors will fit into the tone of the show,” says Wolpert. “But also in some cases, it’s thinking about who they are the descendants of, who do they need to resemble, or have we established a younger version of them in the show prior to that, or something like that? So there’s the appearance level, and then really the main thing is just thinking about how they best capture the character we’re looking for.”
“Casting that was one of the trickiest things we had to go through,” adds Nedivi. “But when we signed [Asserson]… first of all, just the way she looks, it’s insane. She looks like a melding of Gordo and Tracy that I’m like, it’s almost like she was born to play this role. But even more than that, just in her performance, just in that first scene where you meet her, she grabs you and doesn’t let go. And I think that is something that Gordo and Tracy [actors Michael] Dorman and Sarah [Jones] had in spades. So really, the more we saw what she was doing, the more we wanted to write for her.”
For All Mankind Season 5 is releasing new episodes on Apple TV weekly.
Talk to Scott Collura @scottcollura.bsky.social, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!
