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Full spoilers follow for For All Mankind Season 5, Episode 3 – “Home.”
And that’s a wrap on Ed Baldwin, For All Mankind’s greatest astronaut in the history of greatest For All Mankind astronauts. It’s also a wrap on Joel Kinnaman, the star of the Apple TV alt-history show, who has been leading the cast since Season 1 debuted in 2019.
That’s right: Admiral Edward Baldwin has died after a historic run as a war hero, an astronaut, a Mars citizens rights activist, a husband, father, and grandfather… and a primo pot grower. The man indeed was a legend.
I spoke to Kinnaman and showrunners Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi about the decision to finally say goodbye to Ed Baldwin, and how they went about doing it. You will believe a spaceman can cry!
Goodbye, Ed Baldwin
Since For All Mankind jumps forward by about a decade each season, Ed has aged considerably over the course of these fives seasons. And while the show is steeped in a world where space travel is far more advanced than where it is for us (no offense, Artemis II crew — you guys rock), the characters still age like anyone else would. As Matt Wolpert says, it just kind of “felt right” that now was the time for the 80-year-old Ed’s story to end.
“Ed is a guy who’s been in so many fraught, dangerous situations, and always is ready to strap on a spacesuit and put himself in danger,” says the showrunner. “He even talks about wanting to die with his boots on. … His actual fear is not dying like that, but dying in a more helpless way. That’s what got us dramatically excited.”
Kinnaman explains that he “knew it was coming,” having been given by the showrunners the whole plan for the original five-season version of the show back in 2018. (For All Mankind is now planned to end after Season 6, albeit an Ed-less Season 6.) The actor points out that it’s been more than seven years of playing Ed for him — the longest he’s ever been with a character.
“It’s also been this profound experience of playing all these different ages and jumping 10 years and then seeing myself in the mirror for months in these different ages,” he says. “It just really put my own mortality at the front of my mind and made me look at life in a little bit different way.”
The Korean War Flashbacks
In an unexpected twist to Ed’s final story, Wolpert and Nedivi decided to also go back to what’s sort of his “first story” — his time as a young pilot in the Korean War. The idea of doing a flashback episode to Ed’s time in Korea had been floating around for years, with Kinnaman and the writers discussing it, but it always got bumped from the agenda. The episode was going to happen in Season 3, and then Season 4, but it was, as the actor puts it, “one of those darlings that they kept killing.” Until now.
“This was the way that it was supposed to be,” he says. “And I love that I got to play the oldest and the youngest version of Ed at the same time.”
Adds Nedivi: “The nature of the show is we jump in time, and you experience a lot of Ed’s past in the show, but there’s one period we’ve never really experienced that he talks about, he refers to throughout all five seasons. … It felt like if we ever were going to do it, this is the moment because it is a thing where, as you get close to death, those memories from the past come back to you, and especially from the way, way past. So much of Ed’s identity and character’s defined by his experience in Korea, and we’ve hinted at that, and we’ve talked about that, and he’s talked about that, that it felt like we can’t really allow him to pass without getting to that. [It was] the perfect way to really encapsulate the ending of his arc, to bring him back all the way to the beginning of his arc.”
In the flashbacks, we see how Ed barely makes it out of enemy territory after his plane is shot down, even while his comrade isn’t so lucky. As such, these scenes give the impression that Ed’s experience in the war helped make him the “great man” that he becomes as an astronaut — seeing his friend lost while he makes it out alive. What does one do after something like that?
“He’s almost living on borrowed time from that point forward,” explains Wolpert. “But it also was a way of seeing how much he was fighting to stay alive and fighting to get home. It felt like a great framing of it, and also, honestly, just to see Ed as a young man juxtaposed against him at the end of his life felt like it captured part of the special sauce of the show in the arc of this character over time.”
The Return of Karen and Gordo…
“Home” also gives us a look into Ed’s last thoughts where he’s drifting somewhere between the final moments of his life and, well, whatever is coming next. There he’s reunited with his first wife, Karen (Shantel VanSanten), their young son Shane, who died as a child (and who, it turns out, was named after Ed’s fellow pilot who died back in Korea), and his best friend and fellow astronaut, Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman). It’s pretty effective stuff to see these actors return as their characters — characters who have been dead on the show for years.
“We were like, ‘Okay, this is never going to happen,'” laughs Nedivi. The actors had moved on to other projects and the complexities of production often make bringing an actor or actors back for brief cameos like this pretty difficult to pull off. But they all managed to make it work.
Continues Nedivi: “I have to say the fact that both of them, in the middle of other jobs, in the middle of doing a lot, not even being in LA, that they came and did that and got into character again after all this time is a testament to the two of them and their commitment to giving Ed the proper ending. But also, they told us that these characters are still so much a part of who they are, and it defined them. So I think they liked that, diving back in this world. I remember Dorman even told me, ‘I miss this guy.'”
The showrunners add that they also felt that, in a way, Karen and Gordo never got the proper send-off they deserved.
“And it sort of feels like it was a way to bring the three of these characters from Season 1 together one last time,” says Nedivi.
Kinnaman was surprised by how emotional shooting the episode wound up being for him.
“I was trying to unpack, ‘Why is it landing like this for me?'” he says. “Because the last week of shooting, I mean, I was an absolute mess. I was just crying the whole time. … I think it was [in part] that I really loved this show and I really loved telling this story and being part of this story. So it was also like saying goodbye to that. I don’t know. It was quite confusing. And then they wrecked me with having Shantel and Michael Dorman there! Michael was standing there smiling and I started crying. I was like, ‘Motherfucker.’ Because we were also playing best friends and then we became really close friends. And I love him. I really love him. He’s a beautiful man and such a good spirit. And yeah, we were just standing there laughing.”
The episode then brings it all home with a version of Elvis’ “Love Me Tender” playing — Karen’s favorite song, which she and Ed danced to at their wedding — as a shot of Ed’s spacecraft slowly flies on.
“He was the Sinatra guy, and in the end, it’s the love of his life,” says Nedivi. “It’s her music that is in his head and in our head. It felt like the perfect end of that love story too.”
For All Mankind Season 5 is streaming on Apple TV now.
Talk to Scott Collura @scottcollura.bsky.social, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!
