Tom is in the zone lately, on good, easy terms with Margo, mentoring Ellen, and best of all, relishing his precious 14 airborne hours of being able to focus on a complicated budget matter rather than the hundred little interruptions that usually mark his day at JSC. Part of what makes a good cliffhanger so effective is our viscerally sickening dread of the inevitable while the characters onscreen go about their soon-to-be-unimaginably-disrupted lives. I love the opening credits of For All Mankind, but the second Korean Airlines Flight 007 exploded after being hit by a Soviet missile mid-air, I hit that skip button so fast I thought I’d tear a ligament. You know what takes chutzpah? Starting an episode with a cliffhanger, especially one where a great character dies. It’s not that they’re easy to pull off, it’s just that good cliffhangers work well at the end of a chapter of serial storytelling, and it’s a narrative device that audiences are trained to anticipate and enjoy as an inflection point in a show’s plot development. Just about any TV show can end an episode on a cliffhanger. Season three debuts on June 10, and what better way to whet viewers’ appetites than by recapping the season that skyrocketed For All Mankind to greatness? Welcome to the retrospective recaps of For All Mankind season two.
