As the new season of For All Mankind approaches, Alasdair Stuart presents a reminder of the key events of each season.

Season 2 opens in 1983. Ronald Reagan is President, Ed is chief of the Astronaut Office, Karen runs the local astronaut bar and Jamestown has expanded into a thriving base. It’s nice. It doesn’t last.

Molly gets a near fatal dose of radiation saving fellow astronaut (and actual real life astronaut) Wubbo Ockels from a solar storm. She survives but eventually goes blind and is grounded. On Earth, Tracy and Gordo are a divorced couple with two sons. Gordo is spiralling, his PTSD undiagnosed and his fitness and focus collapsing. Ed sends Gordo and Danielle to the Moon on the next run. On the ground, Margo and her functionally adopted daughter Aleida reconcile and Aleida begins working for NASA as a Systems Engineer.

The first ever nuclear-powered shuttle, the Pathfinder, prepares for launch. Ed, controversially, appoints himself Mission Commander and gives Molly his old job. Danielle is appointed the commander of the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous mission, which is intended to help inspire world peace. This one actually happened by the way. At the same time as it’s planned, the Americans discover the Russians bugged Jamestown years ago and ship weapons that will work in vacuum and a fire team of Marines to the Moon.

Gordo continues to struggle with PTSD while Tracy, now the public face of the astronaut corps, spirals into boredom. Increasingly a liability as anything other than a figurehead, she’s sent to Jamestown to try to straighten out.

Kelly, Ed and Karen’s adoptive daughter, begins attending naval college despite her parents’ objections. Margo gets closer and closer to Sergei, her Russian counterpart on the Apollo-Soyuz team. In a real world parallel, the current NASA Administrator is aboard Korean Air Lines Flight 007 when the Russians shoot it down and Ellen, still concealing her sexuality, is appointed the new director of NASA.

Pathfinder is armed with missiles..

Karen begins cheating on Ed with Danny, one of Gordo and Tracy’s kids.

Gordo and Tracy reunite on the Moon and Gordo confesses that Danielle voluntarily broke her arm to cover for him when they were trapped in Jamestown years ago. Sergei and Margo continue to get closer and the inevitable finally happens on the Moon. The Marine unit encounter two cosmonauts at an offsite mine, and shots are exchanged. One cosmonaut is badly wounded. The other is killed. This is one of the two nastiest deaths in the series, with one cosmonaut burning alive in his suit as the oxygen ignites.

A standoff begins. The Russian shuttle Buran is launched to blockade Jamestown and Ed’s Pathfinder mission is scrambled early to intercept it. The Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous launches.

On the Moon, two cosmonauts visit Jamestown and ask to see their injured comrade. He later asks to defect. The Jamestown crew are trying to work out how to deal with this when a cosmonaut shoots out one of the windows, depressurising the control room and killing an astronaut as the Russians storm the base.

The Apollo-Soyuz team is repeatedly told to delay docking. The Marines and cosmonaut engage in an ugly firefight that kills four and damages the cooling system for Jamestown’s nuclear reactor. Houston are initially unaware of the attack but the reactor damage raises alarms. Hiding out in an airlock (they were doing pretty much exactly what you think there), Tracy and Gordo are told the reactor will go critical unless someone repairs it and no one can do that from the inside.

Daniel and her counterparts ignore orders and the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous anyway, the public gesture of friendship defusing a lot of the tension. In orbit over the Moon, a similar situation takes place as the Pathfinder and Buran face off. At the last minute, Ed opts to destroy the unmanned supply vessel he’s been sent to guard instead. The two shuttles pass close by, the crews acknowledging one another.

With time running out, a newly reunited Tracy and Gordo pitch a last ditch plan. Using improvised suits made of duct tape, they depressurise their airlock and run across the surface to fix the reactor. No oxygen, no protection. They make the repairs, but in the most upsetting sequence the show has produced to date, are horrifically injured by the harsh vacuum and temperatures. Falling again and again, their suits rupturing at every joint, they make it back to the airlock but die in each other’s arms

Jamestown is saved, and the world relaxes. But Sergei is revealed to be a KGB asset ordered to get close to Margo. And in the second of the show’s iconic time jumps, we see a human on the surface of Mars in 1995…