What follows is a personal riff by Martin Jameson on the season that just aired on Apple+ TV and so… (adopts growly Daniel Day Lewis Voice)… ‘There Will Be Spoilers!’

Everything I’m about to say needs to be prefaced by this: I Loved Season 1 of For All Mankind.

Some people weren’t so sure, it took them a while to get into it, but as a 61-year-old who mainlined anything and everything to do with the Apollo Program from the age of seven to the last moon landing when I was twelve and a half years old, who ate, slept and dreamed everything astronautic, it was as if they’d made this series just for me.

I had a degree of trepidation, for sure. Would we ever buy into the counterfactual that the Russians had got to the moon first? But they had me from the word go. So much forensic well-researched thought had gone into the often brilliantly counter-intuitive ramifications, ensuring, for the purposes of compelling drama, that the space race didn’t sputter to a halt.

Season 1 pulled off a great trick. It had politics and social commentary making it a sort of Mad Men and The West Wing in Space; some high-end CGI; and nail-biting adventure, every second of which was earned by the momentum of the narrative arc and the dynamics between truthfully drawn characters. Edge of the seat stuff with something to say. Not many shows can make that claim.

Not so, Season 2, that difficult second album, where the writers literally lost the plot – or multitudinous plots – but, sadly, not just down the back of the sofa.

There are some fine elements, but all of them are fumbled in one way or other. Flight director Margo’s developing relationship with her Soviet oppo Sergei is beautifully played, but it goes missing at a crucial stage in the action (see below for the desk/head interface caused by the season finale). It also splits Margo’s focus leaving a potentially interesting story about Aleida’s troubled return to NASA (will a Mexican migrant be allowed thrive – or allow herself to thrive – in the American scientific establishment?) with nowhere to go. Then there’s Ellen, choosing the same sex love of her life over her job, only to be offered the directorship of NASA by the president himself. This is great material – social, political, emotional – but it, too, goes missing before it really has a chance to drive the action, diminishing it to an inconsequential side bar. Molly Cobb getting fried in a solar storm and losing her eyesight is probably the most rounded of the series arcs.

‘But what about the shoot-outs on the moon between astronauts and cosmonauts?’ I hear you say. Yes please! Except, no thank you, if the Russians are all going to be scowling stereotypes. I got increasingly frustrated with episodes that were little more than soapy fluff for 80% of their screen time with a bit of ‘Ruskie’ rough and tumble tacked on at the end. Why should I care about who gets shot, when I don’t know the Russians, and neither do I know most of the American characters at Jamestown either?

There were also some dreadful dead-ends that should never have been driven down in the first place. The buttock clenching Mrs Robinson story for Karen, getting off with Gordo’s son Danny, anyone? The worthy adoption story for Ed and Karen’s Vietnamese daughter – which diminished the subject matter by appearing to be no more than cheap-to-film filler. And while ‘who owns The Queen Vic’ or The Woolpack may be the staple of UK daily soap opera, does selling The Outpost – the astronauts’ watering hole – really have a place in a show about life or death space politics? I literally couldn’t have cared less.

And, finally, I’m sorry, but we have to talk about it… the Season Finale…

Are you kidding me?

This wasn’t just jumping the shark, it was a 1500m shark hurdle. This was an electric-shark hop-along pogo race.

Ok, so the narrative spine of the series is Gordo’s return. Can the hard-drinking overweight loser we meet in the opening episodes, doing the after-dinner circuit, become a hero again?

There’s nothing wrong with that as a premise – until you make the motivation his desire to win back his annoying wife, Kelly, from some equally annoying guy or other. For a start, why does Gordo want her back – she really is very annoying? And who is the annoying rival anyway? Do we care? No, because a) he’s not a proper character and b) he’s annoying. There’s no emotional jeopardy, because there’s no fully fleshed out alternative for Kelly, and therefore no real emotional work for Gordo to do. This is page-one stuff for storyliners who should know better.

We really need this central narrative arc to work because it is going to be the engine for the final heroic act of the series. I was willing it to work!

Did I mention there would be spoilers? If you really don’t want to know what happens next, look away now.

The Russians invade the Jamestown moon base (killing someone we didn’t care about who really ought to be wearing a Star Trek red shirt) and in the fracas they shoot through a wall and damage the cooling system for a nuclear reactor – which for some shark-vaulting reason – we are supposed to believe Margo didn’t know was there, having been slipped onto the base by the military, somehow un-noticed by any of the civilian astronauts.

Stuffed down someone’s underwear no doubt. Is that a plutonium rod in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

Luckily for us, Gordo and Kelly are having a lengthy (but tedious) photo love story conversation in the broom cupboard and the Russians don’t know they’re there. Meanwhile the Soviet raiding party have taken over the control room, but for some reason they aren’t getting any alarms that the whole station is about to be blown sky high in a massive nuclear meltdown that will irradiate the area for generations. However, mission control in Houston – which for some shark jumping reason is also handling the Apollo Soyuz link-up and Pathfinder – from the same room – are getting the alerts of the imminent catastrophe, despite being too stupid to notice that a Russian sounding voice they didn’t recognise had told them that Jamestown was going offline for an hour or two. Conveniently, Gordo discovers an old comms link that everyone had forgotten about (it’s always helpful when that happens) and the Mexican engineer woman back in Houston just happens to hear his message coming from an old store room which she is randomly passing, and whose door is randomly ajar. Wow! It’s all coming together in such a fortunate way!

So, comms established, Mission Control tells the besieged Americans that the only way to stop the nuclear meltdown is go outside into the lunar vacuum and plug the ‘thing’ into the ‘thing’ – but they’re locked away from their space suits so Gordo and Kelly will have to do it by making Blue Peter space suits out of gaffer tape and sticky backed plastic.

The thing is, I could buy this, if it was genuinely the only option. But now I’m shouting at the TV! Margo’s got a hotline to Sergei in Star City, so surely if she tells him, the Russians won’t want to be nuked either, so they would willingly just pop outside in their space suits, plug in the doofer to the thingy, and Yuri’s your uncle!

At the most basic level this plot point – Gordo and Kelly’s heroic sacrifice – doesn’t work. My disbelief bungee has well and truly snapped. It’s not tragic heroism, it’s very, very stupid.

Meanwhile there’s a Mexican stand-off going on in Lunar orbit, because for some reason the crew of the Pathfinder all have handguns.

Oh yeah, and then World War III is averted because the Apollo-Soyuz handshake happens on TV, which everyone watches despite being in their nuclear bunkers.

I genuinely hate being mean about this. I don’t want to hurl rotten tomatoes for the sake of it. I can see what went wrong. You can smell the panic in the writers room – perhaps the process was rushed – a dozen stories that don’t hang together, most of which miss their orbit and fly out into deep space never to be seen again, while the ones that are left are abruptly yanked together in an ungainly and implausible finale. Gordo’s heroic out-story was a perfectly respectable starting point, but the storytelling needed to be watertight, and the characters needed to have the maturity and complexity they demonstrated in series one, and not behave like dreary teenagers. There were a lot of the right notes, but definitely not in the right order.

Why is it worth these column inches? Because we give a lot of time to these dramas as audience members – in a year when home entertainment has taken on a significance like never before – and I believe that writers have a duty to respect that. Writers ask people to invest in their stories, to open our hearts to their characters, so it is just plain rude not to treat that investment with the care it deserves. I say this not simply as an armchair critic, but as someone who has worked in UK TV drama for a quarter of a century with over a hundred TV credits to my name.

I have a plea to the story team for Season 3. Start from the centre and make sure everything about your series spine is thought through and really works. Make sure your subplots earn their keep and aren’t just FX-free time fillers. And if at any time you catch yourself saying: ‘it doesn’t matter if it isn’t entirely believable, the audience will just go with it…’ STOP!! Wipe it off the white board and come up with something better.

Lastly, speaking as a veteran writer of many UK hospital shows, just as all successful stories in a medical drama are driven at their key moments by medicine, so the domestic storylines in a space series must have that astral quest somewhere at their heart.

Never forget what your series is about.

Otherwise it’s just any old multi-stranded soap opera. I have nothing against soap opera – I’ve written enough of it in my time – but I do want For All Mankind to be something more, because the opening season did something very special for one little boy, aged 61, for whom man’s first steps into space defined his life.