The fifth and penultimate season of For All Mankind came to a close this week, concluding another tense and eventful series that moved quite a lot of storylines on, and inevitably led us to the next decade time jump. The show has been renewed for the sixth and final series - I think the creators initially had planned seven, but I’m happy they know it’s ending and can plan accordingly.

The fifth series was good - it didn’t live up to the highs of this show at its best but it was entertaining enough. It felt like a season of two halves really. The first half was very much bogged down on life on Happy Valley, the Mars base, and various dramas kicking off there. It was fine, you know, the worst of For All Mankind is still better than a lot of other TV. But it did just feel like a regular drama that just happened to be in space.

However, the second half went back to its roots - yes there was drama and guns and alliances, but there was also humanity and science and exploration. The turning point, sadly, seemed to be the passing of mainstay character Ed Baldwin. I didn’t know I particularly cared about Ed Baldwin either way until that special episode that saw the character succumb to old age finally. When the next episode started and the credits began without Joel Kinnaman’s name, ooh it hit me in a way I wasn’t expecting.

Once Ed was at one with the stars, things really ramped up. The episode featuring two crews racing to get to Titan was proper old school For All Mankind and was brilliantly fraught and unmissable. And the final extended episode that brought everything to a satisfying, heartbreaking, and intriguing conclusion was uneven but excellent.

As always, we got a glimpse of where we’re headed in the next, and final, season. Was it Saturn? What spaceship was it? What about the Titan discovery? How are we wrapping this all up in one more series? I can’t wait, but in the meantime the first series of Star City - set in the same universe but seemingly a very different style of show - has got underway, so that will pass some time!