What would happen if man landed on Mars?

In the first season of

, the man reaches the Moon.

But instead of Neil Armstrong, the first to set foot on lunar soil is a Soviet cosmonaut.

That small change for man will mean a big change for humanity, and makes the Apple TV + series take place in an alternative world very similar to ours, but that, the more years that pass in fiction, the more it distances itself from reality. .

This drama plays with the roots of the uchronies to show how these changes affect their characters over the decades.

If the first season follows the adventures of a group of astronauts in the sixties and seventies, the next installment jumps to the eighties to continue their stories as the tensions of the Cold War are transferred to space.

Now,

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This ambitious story created by Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi was one of the series that launched Apple into the world of in-house fiction production in 2019. Its blend of character drama, sci-fi and epic, with high doses of emotion and tension, in addition to spectacular space sequences, have made it a critical favorite.

Krys Marshall and Joel Kinnaman, in the first episode of the third season of 'For All Mankind'.

For its creators, in the third season - which Apple TV + premiered this Friday with the broadcast of a new episode every week - is where the series really begins to show its full potential thanks to the push that those temporary jumps give it, the maturity of its characters and the evolution of technology in fiction.

All of this, in turn, poses a growing challenge for screenwriters.

The changes of time force them to pay increasing attention to the differences between their imagined world and the real one.

"It's a fun challenge," said Ben Nedivi, co-creator of the series, in a video call interview last Tuesday.

“Before we started, we had a plan for a lot of the characters.

And every season we revisit that plan.

That's the fun of this series and what makes it different, that we can tell the lives of these people.

Now,

in the third season, we have already seen 30 years of its history.

Many movies or series talk about the past life of the characters and make reference to it, but you don't see it.

In our series you have seen it, you have been on that journey with them, you know the traumas they have gone through and how that includes in the decisions they make now.

Coral Peña, in the first chapter of the third season of the series.

All part of a small change: the USSR reaches the Moon before the United States.

And, due to the butterfly effect, that slight difference gives rise to an increasingly different world, but these changes manifest little by little: “In alternative history films or novels, it is normal for there to be a change and to jump to the future and the world is totally different.

You know, the Nazis won the war and that's how the world is now.

What we try to do is show the change as it happens, you see how that alternative history is taking shape”, says Nedivi.

"What in the first season were very subtle small changes, now they are bigger and bigger," adds the screenwriter.

For example, in the third season, one of the astronauts from the first installment has become a politician and is running against Bill Clinton for the presidency of the United States.

Another big difference: this batch of episodes kicks off with a wedding in space where things aren't going to go as planned.

as one of the references for that chapter.

for that fight for survival in an extreme situation.

Matt Wolpert, another of the co-creators of the series, from another window of the video call adds his inspiration in adventure movies and about pioneers, in the style of westerns, “people surviving only with their determination and their guts.

If the second season was about the risk of the Cold War, the third is at heart an adventure story.

Jodi Balfour, in 'For All Mankind'.

The approach of

it also proposes challenges to its screenwriters when it comes to dealing with the technological aspects of a space race that follows a different course than reality.

To do this, they have the help and supervision of experts such as astronaut Garrett Reisman, who acts as a consultant and reviews the scripts so that everything is, at least, feasible.

“We always reach a dramatic point, but we work hard to make the series as realistic as possible.

This time, as we wanted to tell the story of the race to Mars, we wondered what it would be like if we really landed on Mars, how would it survive, the challenges that this would entail”, continues Nedivi.

Wolpert completes the answer: “In the previous seasons, we were inspired a lot by real ships, even Pathfinder of the second season was a slight evolution of a space shuttle.

Wolpert and Nedivi, who have previously worked in the writers' rooms on shows like

and

, also serve as producers on

and talk about the complications of dealing with a production of this size.

“The scope of the show this season is tremendously bigger than what we've done before,” says Wolpert.

"We've had to build four different ships, several bases, two command centers... There were times when we would look at the plan and say, 'what were we thinking?'

Wrenn Schmidt and Joel Kinnaman, in the second episode of the third season of 'For All Mankind'.

Future seasons of the series, if produced, would pose even greater challenges for its writers as the story moves closer to, and even beyond, our real time.

“We have ideas for the future, yes.

What we find funny is, speaking of the adventure of reaching Mars, to see how you could survive there.

What would happen if we continue to live on Mars and more people go there?

What would that situation really be like?

I think that could be a challenge that we could count if the series goes ahead, "concludes Nedivi.

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