The actress is credited in the last season 3 ep as a guest star, I noticed.
She did? I missed that detail I think … this is the scene with Alieda in her ex-office?
The last scene shows Margo opening the curtains to look out at what appears to be Star City in the USSR where the Soviet space program is/was based.
I understood that Margo agreed to defect to the Soviet Union in exchange for Sergei and his family being allowed to leave. But was the bombing part of the plan to allow her to fake her death or just a convenient coincidence?
I don’t think Margo faked her death intentionally. She had no way of knowing there was a bomb. I think it was just fortuitous that she left to go with the Russians before the building was blown up.
Of course, once the explosion happened it might have opened an opportunity to fake her death so thr Americans don’t know the Russians have a critical asset.
I’m pretty sure they were going to cut into the NASA feed at some critical moment and issue some statement about how faked it is and how corrupt NASA is, then blow themselves up along with everyone else.
If they were just distracting Jimmy, an easier thing to do would be to just tell him to go find someone, or go get something from home, or whatever. No need to risk him getting caught just to keep him out of the way. The transmitter was definitely part of the plan.
I don’t think it was just ‘punishment’. Danny had shown himself to be unstable and able to do things that put everyone at risk. And once the crew knew what he had done, having him live in close quarters with them for 18 months might have just been completely untenable.
He killed a lot of people - people who were good friends of everyone left. Putting him in the North Korean ship was a mercy, if anything. For everyone.
Next season should be interesting. It looks to me like they are setting up Dev to keep control of Helios since Karen is dead, and the end scene about Helium 3 gives us a clue - Dev is going to bring a fusion reactor and enough Helium 3 for decades to Mars, and they are going to make that base a permanent colony. And now that Karen is dead, there’s no reason for Ed to go home. He’ll probably become the governor of the first Mars colony.
I suspect the bombing is going to revitalize support for NASA, and for the President, an ex-astronaut. She’s going to survive attempts to get rid of her and push the U.S. into a normalization of gay rights. But if thennext season starts in 2003, she’ll be long out of office and we’ll just get backstory.
Loved the title of the show. It would be great if Kelly mamed her baby Valentine Michael Smith Baldwin. First human conceived on Mars, just like the original Stranger in a Strange Land.
Looking forward to next season.
Wait, what? Was there a post-credits scene or something?
Yeah, right at the end. It’s ostensibly a short explaining the science of the show.
Yes, but I still don’t remember anything about her faking her death as such, or indeed anyone thinking she was dead - she could have travelled there openly as far as we know, it is some years later after all. Unless I missed something!
It looked to me like Sergei was in a witness-protection kind of situation , ie his neighbours didn’t know who he actually was. Or did I miss something there too?
There was never any explicit death faking plan seen, but the way it is setup is that we don’t know exactly what happened. Was there more to her conversation with the Soviet space lady after she told Margo you don’t want to go to jail for 40 years that we never got to see? Did they make a deal whereby she would defect and in exchange the Soviets would release Sergei? Or did Margo, already knowing that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs plan to exfiltrate Sergei was successful, just use the explosion as a cover to defect because she didn’t want to do the time? Or was it something else?
It think thematically and for her character arc it makes sense that she defected in order to save Sergei, but the timing seems way too quick for something like that to happen. Sergei was at Ramstein Air Base very shortly (like hours) after her talk with the Soviet space lady. I don’t think the CIA/Air Force/State Department/whoever would be letting such a high quality defector FaceTime with anyone so soon.
Either way, she knew she was leaving because that’s what the whole “it’s been an honor and a privilege working with all of you” speech in the control room was for, followed by her walking alone down the hallway and out the control room to her freedom (which was paralleled later by Molly walking alone down the hallway and back into the control room to her sacrifice, so maybe that’s a commentary the show was trying to make about Margo’s motivations).
She also evoked Gene Kranz saying “The future is ours to fight for and win,” so maybe she has a plan for all this. Of course, this being a Ronald D. Moore show, don’t get your hopes up when it comes to plans.
I don’t think that the Soviets would cause a mass casualty event just to get an agent out. That would be, literally, an act of war. They simply took advantage of the confusion.
An aside. It may well be that Oklahoma City bombing never took place in the FAM timeline. No Bill Clinton presidency, maybe no Waco, which was, arguably, the inspiration for McVeigh.
Probably not. Thanks to Helium 3 fusion, the US probably isn’t much of a participant in Middle East / Oil conflicts.
This was my thought, that she walked out of the building shortly after she sat down at the piano and was “missing, presumed dead” after the bombing which was just a (for Margo) lucky coincidence.
Or having her be a microbiologist could turn out to be just the excuse to get her on the mission so that she could be dramatically pregnant and actually come to nothing whatsoever…
But then they search the building for bodies, as they always do, and find every missing person except her … ?!? As the bomb was outside the building it can’t have vapourised her.
I’m still not sure what Margo’s intention was before the bombing; defection or face the music?
Over 1100 victims of 9/11 are still unidentified. In the Timothy McVeigh bombing, of which this seems to be an alt-universe echo, they found a leg which didn’t seem to match any of the bodies, so they aren’t sure if 168 or 169 people were killed.
In this bombing, a lot of people were right next to the bomb when it detonated. If Margo had been leaving the building and walking by, she’d be vapor. So they would never know if she was killed in the bombing or not. If the Russians snuck her put of the country and no one saw her again, I think everyone would assume she was killed in the blast.
So nine or ten people are going to hang out on Mars for a year or two until a later mission can retrieve them. I can’t remember if they addressed what they’re going to do for food and water during all that time.
Use the North Korean’s supplies. If they can squeeze enough food for one person for over a year into a Soyuz, might as well say that they can squeeze in enough for a dozen people for a dozen years. The show stopped giving any fucks at all about realism or plausibility this season.
They definitely called out that it will be tight but they do have the plant-growing operation. Also, while they had supplies for a shorter mission, they also had a bunch of people die, and dead people don’t need to eat.
Quite the opposite, in fact …
One of the comments on, I think, the AV Club recap pointed out that it didn’t make sense for the North Koreans to have sent canned food, given the need to minimize weight. (And what did he eat on the months-long journey to Mars? He would have been in zero-g, so the contents of those cans would have not been contained, once the cans were opened.)