'For All Mankind' Episode 9 'Bent Bird': Ed Baldwin may have just started a war on the Moon with potentially disastrous consequences
(Spoilers ahead for 'For All Mankind' Season 1 Episode 9 'Bent Bird')
Thanks to the Soviet Moon landing turning the Space Race into the government's number one priority, there's a lot more political and military influence on NASA in 'For All Mankind' and it's already caused plenty of trouble.
The Soviets landing on the Moon made space a more important frontier in the Cold War than even Vietnam and, make no mistake, this is war now.
The Soviets have been getting more and more aggressive, going so far as to plant a device within the American mining grounds. The administration's response was to cautiously avoid confrontation but that didn't sit well with Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and he eventually ended up destroying the device.
At the start of Episode 9, Ed has now been stuck at Jamestown base on the Moon for over a hundred and fifty days and, with the death of his son, his mental health has been steadily deteriorating. He's already refusing to talk to Houston and it's honestly a miracle that he hasn't already found a way to blow up the whole base.
When Ed's would-be rescuers, the Apollo 24 crew, are left stranded in Earth orbit by a malfunctioning computer, things get a lot more complicated. To make matters worse, Ed runs into a Soviet cosmonaut at the American mining site and they have a very tense confrontation.
At first, it seems as if Ed is willing to follow orders and avoid confrontation. Unfortunately, that's not what he has in mind and Ed decides to take matters into his own hands, luring the cosmonaut inside Jamestown base's airlock and suffocating him to death.
There's always the chance that Ed might be able to lie his way out of this situation but no matter what he might say to his bosses over at NASA, the fact remains that a man has died on the Moon. And with relations between the Soviet Union and the United States more strained than ever, this could be the beginning of a moon-shattering lunar war.
'For All Mankind' Season 1's tenth and final episode will land on Apple TV+ on December 20.