Episode 2 of For All Mankind’s third season continues the story in new and interesting ways. I’ll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, but you should watch the episode right after this if you haven’t already watched it.

In Episode 2, the Polaris Orbital Hotel is salvaged and converted into a Mars spacecraft for a different company — Helios, a copy of Relativity Space and SpaceX, with a billionaire founder, an ostensibly egalitarian company structure, methane oxygen engines, and 3D printed tanks.

Helios wants to be the first on Mars before either of the nation-states: the United States or the Soviet Union. In this episode, the three projects choose the crews for their Mars spacecraft, though for NASA and Helios they don’t get who they initially wanted.

NASA leadership finally wrestles in this episode with the idea that not all astronauts have to be macho test pilots – which is something that did happen in real life as well but much earlier than 1992 – and a clash between old and new ideas on how to run NASA, which the old ideas lose, setting up more tension for the rest of the season. And with that loss, so goes a major character who has been with the show since episode one. The character gets some closure, though I don’t like how NASA made this decision in the episode; one of the characters had to get her way, and that’s not how you run things when it’s important. The consequences of this decision will be interesting, to say the least.

Also in this episode, a subplot I actually like started to take on more significance. I have been wondering what they were gonna do with it since they started setting it up in the very first season, and I’m interested to see what they do with it. If I say anything more about it, I’ll give things away so you’ll have to watch the episode for yourself and see if you can figure out what I’m talking about.

Of course, this episode also continued the squicky plotline I still don’t like, so you win some, you lose some. I’m betting it’s to set up some tension during the Mars trip. There’s lots of drama that could happen during the trip that would be more interesting than the romantic relationship between two characters.

As I mentioned in my last review, and it’s true of the previous seasons, they still haven’t managed to make any of the technical discussions in this episode feel natural, which really bugs me. This is a show based on what would happen if technology developed differently than our timeline, but they never really make this key part feel like it flows with the rest of the politics and other narrative elements of the show. Hopefully, this will change in future episodes, but I’m not holding my breath.

For All Mankind is created and written by Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi and produced by and available on Apple TV+.