Talk:For All Mankind (TV series)/Archive 1

Cast member?
Does an actor portray Alexei Leonov in the first episode? If so they should be added to the cast members under 'Historical figures'. Randy Kryn (talk) 00:41, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Alternate history timeline
Start a Section for Alternate history vs Real history like:
 * No Chappaquiddick incident, Edward Moore Kennedy does not go to Chappaquiddick because he has to go to Washington congressional hearings are called to investigate why the USSR was 1st on the moon!Brownshoes22 (talk) 01:30, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
 * probably not a good idea. I started a table of space missions and it was quickly erased as unsourced and trivial. 2001:983:2ED1:1:5073:3A34:758C:1D4F (talk) 12:20, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I support the idea of a in-universe timeline. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:6C55:7600:14C8:D9F3:6461:3E2C:2568 (talk) 12:51, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
 * My proposal at the time

Note : Italics denote historical astronauts and cosmonauts.

Hate to be a party pooper... but regarding the idea of Alternate history vs real history: this seems like WP:OR to me... unless you find citations for each of the comparisons that is. RobP (talk) 14:33, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Agree, this is unnecessary since it's all covered in the episode summaries. Pointless charts-for-charts'-sake business that infests much of Wikipedia.Duckwalk71 (talk) 00:11, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

Character Descriptions
Is it necessary for so many spoilers in the character descriptions? I get plot information in the episode summaries but it seems unneeded for the cast listing to describe how character end up or die. Duckwalk71 (talk) 22:13, 11 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I agree. I expect to find spoilers in plot summaries, but not in character descriptions. —Bruce1eetalk 22:28, 11 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I've gone ahead and trimmed out spoilers, there's still plenty of relevant information there. Duckwalk71 (talk) 00:08, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
 * So I made the edits in good faith but they were just reverted with the explanation that the cuts were "too deep" and cast changes between season 1 and two " did not make any sense". This seems over the top, casts can change between seasons on any show for any number of reasons (not least the time jump between seasons) so including character fates (particularly the Baldwin's son) or plot twists is unnecessary. Labelling that a character member is season 1, season 2, or both is surely sufficient. The character list just needs to identify the basic parameters of a character, so to trace the actor in the role; explanations for what happens to characters across the series should be left in the summaries. Duckwalk71 (talk) 08:11, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
 * After seeing your explanation (which was not originally mentioned at all in the article's Revision history) on the Talk Page, the cuts now make sense. I think further cuts needs to be done in #Recurring and especially #Historical figures in stock footage. Why does actors Tracy Mulholland and Teya Patt need to be mentioned? Neither actors currently have articles and both have a total of ~5 minutes of air time to speak a sentence or two in each episode that they appear in? The characters that they played do not advance the plot (nor does the 2 actors portraying news anchors). Except for the historical figures that had significant new dialog added by uncredited voice actors, such as Richard Nixon, Ted Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, why should we know that the show had included news clips showing Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart, Gus Grissom, John Lennon, Scott Carpenter, etc. were shown on a fictitious news report within the show? What is your opinion? -- 108.71.214.235 (talk) 05:15, 14 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't think such things need to be to specifically policed, as long as the list does not become too long and unwieldy. The main thing with cast that needs to be adhered to is that main cast reflects the listings in the TV show credits. Duckwalk71 (talk) 13:41, 14 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Some of what you have written does make sense, however the point of discussing topics that relates to the structure of the article is to develop recommendations, derived through WP:CONS, that can help future editors in the development of the article in question. The list of actors and especially historical personalities can easily become very large since each episode list episodes credits for nearly two dozen of mostly non-notable actors (ones without WP articles) at the end of every episode and I have spotted several dozens (nearly a hundred) of historical personalities that appear in the historical clip section that appear at the beginning of each season and also during the in-series television "news reports". (As example of lack of editorial guidelines, the article The Last Ship (TV series) and its companion article List of The Last Ship characters have become quite large as a result of not having any general editting guidelines.) -- 108.71.214.235 (talk) 05:16, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Historical characters vs fictional characters
Should there be a section discussing how many historical astronauts are replaced by fictional characters? The series replaces so many historical people with fictional characters that it's hard to take seriously. Whereas other alternate reality novels and movies and the like heavily incorporate the established historical characters into their fictional timeline, For All Mankind seems to blissfully ignore them. The Apollo 10 crew consisted of Stafford-Young-Cernan, not Baldwin-Talmadge-Stevens. The Baldwin character also states in a episode that he flew Gemini 7 with Stevens, and that's despite that Borman and Lovell's Gemini 7 crew portrait is shown in the series. They've even got a woman on Apollo 15! And the 'Mercury 13' astronauts depicted in the show are fictional characters.

Even the crew rotation system is all over the place. Michael Collins claims in Carrying The Fire that had he stuck with NASA after Apollo 11 he would have been assigned backup commander of Apollo 14 and thus rotated to fly Apollo 17. When he left NASA, Apollo 10's Eugene Cernan filled that empty slot. And John Young was rotated to backup commander of Apollo 13 which in turn rotated him to Apollo 16. The Apollo 10 crew were never in a position to be rotated to Apollo 15, nor were they backups to Apollo 12 as stated in the series. The Apollo 12 backup crew were Scott-Warden-Irwin. Dave Scott was CM Pilot on Apollo 9 and thus rotated backup commander of Apollo 12 and then became commander of Apollo 15. Sensing a pattern? Deke Slayton liked to give CM Pilots the opportunity to be Commander.

Jim Lovell Apollo 8 CM Pilot >>> Rotated to Backup Commander on Apollo 11 >>> Rotated to Commander of Apollo 13 (originally Apollo 14)

Dave Scott Apollo 9 CM Pilot >>> Rotated to Backup Commander on Apollo 12 >>> Rotated to Commander of Apollo 15

John Young Apollo 10 CM Pilot >>> Rotated to Backup Commander on Apollo 13 >>> Rotated to Commander of Apollo 16

Michael Collins Apollo 11 CM Pilot >>> Would have been rotated to Backup Commander on Apollo 14 (replaced by Cernan)

Richard Gordon Apollo 12 CM Pilot >>> Rotated to Backup Commander on Apollo 15 >>> Would have been rotated to Apollo 18

In For All Mankind, it somehow seems to go like this.

Baldwin-Talmadge-Stevens flew Apollo 10 >>> Rotated to Apollo 12 backup >>> Flew Apollo 15 with Talmadge and Stevens replaced.

Armstrong-Collins-Aldrin flew Apollo 11 >>> ??? >>> Collins commands Apollo 23? -- 1.145.47.46 (talk) 18:45, 4 July 2021 (UTC)


 * No, this doesn't belong in the article. This looks like WP:OR. For All Mankind is an alternate history, so there are going to be many points of divergence with history. You could write a book about all of the differences, but that doesn't make it relevant to this article. This article is not the place for analysis of the show. Rmaloney3 (talk) 16:57, 6 July 2021 (UTC)


 * The history diverged from 1966 on. The whole point of the show is how the space program in particular responded to the Russian landing, crewing being one of those changes. Whether you think these changes are likely is just an opinion. What would be helpful I think would be notes on which characters in the main cast depict real people under their real names, and which are fictional, or the latter could be assumed otherwise. 111.220.83.242 (talk) 03:42, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

Surely the main reason for replacing historical figures with fictitious ones is that otherwise they would be connecting real people with fictitious character traits of drunk womaniser (Stephens) or man unable to hold on to his anger (Baldwin). Both of which improved the fiction being told, but not something you would want to libel real people as. ChrisMalme (talk) 20:02, 7 November 2021 (UTC)

Garrett Reisman as himself
Any ideas on how to describe Garrett Reisman's character in the show in the guest stars section? The script and Columbia mission patch do indicate that he plays a character named Garrett Reisman but he couldn't possibly be the real-life Garrett Reisman as the real-life Reisman was 15 years old in 1983 when the episode takes place.  Kevin W.  - Talk  06:23, 25 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Maybe we could write "as a fictionalized version of himself as a shutte pilot in 1983". IronMaximus (talk) 10:09, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

Ed Baldwin / Gordo Stevens "based on" real life characters.
Current page says the Ed Baldwin character was based on Thomas_P._Stafford and the Gordo Stevens character was based on Gene_Cernan. That seems to be based on an unsourced quote from an Ars Technica article, which was probably a guess simply due to their characters being CDR and LMP for the show's Apollo 10 mission.

But John_Young_(astronaut) seems a much better match for Baldwin. He was a long term astronaut who flew the highest number of different spacecraft types, and became head of the astronaut office. Had a strong military/patriotic character. And his looks are similar, whereas Stafford looked very different.

And Gordon_Cooper seems a much better match for Stevens. He was known as "Gordo". His wife was a pilot. He had a fast cars / planes lifestyle. And went a bit off the rails.

As noted above there's limited worth in comparing the characters to real life ones, but this is already included in the article. Maybe it would be better to just take those parts out? David M Riley (talk) 17:25, 11 December 2022 (UTC)