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.”
