‘For All Mankind’ Just Revealed a Major 2-Minute Clue About the Final Season

Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for the For All Mankind Season 5 finale.

The Season 5 finale of For All Mankind is one for the alt-history books, keeping with the series’ tradition of setting up the next season in its final scene. “This Land Is Our Land” barely gives viewers any time to recover from the shock of losing Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) as the episode jumps past Saturn and a few years into the future, to 2020. To the tune of The Weeknd‘s “Blinding Lights,” a derelict spaceship suddenly comes back online as a computer lights up with Russian text. This ship is named Mars-94, while the text onscreen teases the possibility of an old acquaintance somehow returning and influencing the events of the series’ final season.

‘For All Mankind’ Season 5’s Final Scene Teases the Return of Mars-94

The return of Mars-94 is a direct tie to For All Mankind Season 3, which premiered in 2022. Back then, the events of the so-called race to Mars were at the center of the story, as NASA, Roscosmos, and Helios Aerospace each sent their own spaceship to try and claim the red planet first. Only two ships made it all the way: NASA’s Sojourner and Helios’ Phoenix. Mars-94’s engine is similar to the Sojourner, since, at that time, Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) was secretly sharing information with Roscosmos’ Sergei Nikulov (Piotr Adamczyk). Both have nuclear fission engines, but Mars-94’s was put under too much stress and failed. As a result, radiation started leaking into the vessel itself, forcing its crew to abandon ship. Since then, Mars-94 has been adrift in space.

As a spaceship, Mars-94 is a single-stage-to-orbit craft, meaning it doesn’t lose any component during its ascent and remains a single unit from launch to landing. It took off from Earth and didn’t make any stops until it caught up with Sojourner and Phoenix on the way to Mars. That’s why, in Season 5, Mars-94 looks mostly intact and dark — it’s still technically in one piece, but with radiation flooding its interior, making it impossible for humans to command it from the inside.

Sergei Nikulov Could Play a Surprising Role in ‘For All Mankind’s Final Season

For All Mankind is a gem of speculative sci-fi on TV, but it’s definitely not the kind of show where the dead return. Still, the Russian text on the Mars-94 computer will definitely get fans talking about why Sergei’s name is there at all. Translated, it reads: “D:/ Detection of GW 3.06.0451 // Nikulov Loading…” Sergei’s last name is Nikulov, and he was the director of Roscosmos at the time of the mission, so his name showing up isn’t particularly strange, but the ship coming back to life after 26 years definitely is.

It’s worth remembering, however, that Sergei was assassinated by the KGB in 2003, so there is absolutely no way it’s him reaching out to Mars-94. What’s more likely is that he left code within the ship’s systems with specific guidelines or instructions, and Mars-94 might just have activated one of those in the vastness of space. Although it was evacuated, the ship hasn’t stopped coasting, and its nuclear engine could very well have the power to turn systems back on even decades after going dark.

The big question is what that code might be for. As Irina Morozova (Svetlana Efremova) mentions in the Season 5 finale, there are older Soviet satellites that can still be activated, and that’s how Happy Valley learns about the ceasefire ordered by the U.S. government. It could be that Mars-94 has the same system, and Mars (or another human outpost in the Solar System) has reached out to the ship for some reason. If there is a way to get rid of the radiation, the ship is still largely usable, and spacecraft of a similar construction have been reused before — Sojourner itself traveled to both Mars and Titan.

It’s also possible that Mars-94’s system has been programmed to boot up whenever it stumbles upon certain events. The “Detection of GW” part of the script is particularly curious. The letters likely mean “gravitational wave,” which could imply that Mars-94 is approaching a massive celestial body. There was no reason to ever assume Mars-94 would ever find itself in such a position when it launched, but Sergei was a dreamer and an idealist, so his programming it with more specificity isn’t that much of a stretch.

Mars-94’s Position in Space Might Be Tied to ‘For All Mankind’s Endgame

Image via Apple TV

For All Mankind has always told a deeply optimistic story about humanity’s potential to reach the stars, but Season 5’s final scene might actually be about the stars reaching back. Fans have always speculated that the series might end with first contact, and, with Season 6 confirmed to be the show’s last, this possibility just became even more likely.

Mars-94 is one of the furthest human-made objects from Earth in For All Mankind, and, given its specifications, it’s not impossible to consider that it might have reached another star system, like Alpha Centauri. The first contact theory could involve Mars-94 being acquired by another civilization and booted up as a response. Sergei thinking beyond the scope of the original mission is well within his character, and this system might be his final gift to humanity: a way of letting those who survived him know that they might not be alone in the universe.