The series' women steal the show in For All Mankind Season 2 Episode 5, "The Weight," an hour that deftly illustrates the complex, difficult, and often painfully performative ways that they must navigate the world they've chosen to live in. Molly's boys' club-style decision to let Ed and Gordo off the hook for wrecking an expensive plane and risking their lives sorry to anyone who really thought that cliffhanger last week was ever going to be a real thing - because they're just pilots who need risk and danger or whatever feels like a choice made by someone still desperate to prove she's one of the boys herself, and just like they are. At the Baldwin house, Karen is determined to prove that she's emotionally tough enough to survive another, likely several-years-long stretch, of not knowing whether Ed will come home after any given mission. Last week, she's basically the person who pushed him to give himself the command of Pathfinder, but here she seems to be struggling with second thoughts. Ellen reconnects with the former Outpost bartender - and her former girlfriend Pam Horton, who's back in town on a book tour in support of her new poetry anthology. (Which, honestly, is a future I kind of love for her.) The pair hook up again because, of course, they do but their encounter really serves to highlight how empty Ellen's life has become outside of her space duties. She's still living a lie, while Pam has moved on entirely changing careers, getting published, living as an out lesbian in a way that Ellen clearly has never imagined for herself. Whether her tryst with her ex will push Ellen toward claiming more space in her own life for herself than she's been allowed thus far is unclear, but we can always hope, right? Truly I find this character so compelling, but her constant willingness to make herself small for others is simultaneously frustrating and deeply understandable. The bulk of this episode, however, is centered around Tracy Stevens who finally, finally achieves her lifelong dream of making it to the moon. Only to find out that it's not the panacea to her problems she'd always assumed it would be.
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