Happy Valley is now a sprawling and ever-growing settlement on Mars, manned by astronauts from all over the world working in harmony. But the idealism of the moment is tempered, as always, by the logistical struggles to maintain and improve things. Old faces are confronted with difficult choices as new ones ready themselves to get involved.

I honestly hadn’t realised quite how much I missed For All Mankind until I sat down to watch this episode, and I have to take a moment here to acknowledge the emotional impact and resonance for me of a show like this appearing at the present moment. At a time when the news is filled with stories of conflict and division, a time when wars are breaking out across the globe, where violence continues its ever-decreasing cycle as the only solution anyone ever seems to find, it feels needed but simultaneously cruel to have a show like this highlight how different things might have been. Watching different nations come together to work towards a higher goal than simply outdoing one another for resources or position, on a place hundreds of millions of miles away from Earth, made me feel unashamedly emotional.

That’s not to say that it’s all sunshine and roses. Up in the Big Black, Ed is still acting as XO, having apparently not returned to Earth since Karen’s tragic death. Happy as he might seem being in his element, it’s clear that Ed is struggling, and clearer still that his daughter is well aware, back on Earth with a son impatiently waiting to see his grandad.

It’s a hallmark of the show that it wrings drama and tension from what might elsewhere be moments of mundanity in a show such as this. Here, the mission of the moment is the towing of an asteroid back to Happy Valley that will enable the production of more resources. There’s a lot of the logistical stuff you might expect, with cables and harpoons and machinery, and the calculation of various elements, and it could all be very dull if not injected with the usual feeling of simmering tension – the sense that at any moment, something might go catastrophically wrong with horrific consequences.

On Earth, Danielle is enjoying retirement, though still clearly haunted by the experiences she had on Mars. When last we saw Danny in Season 3, he was being exiled by his fellows to the far side of Mars on a crashed pod. Nothing is said here about what transpired with the errant Stevens progeny in the interim 7 years, but whatever it was, judging by the look on Dani’s face as she attends his son’s birthday party and catches sight of a photo of him, it wasn’t good.

Margo is coming to terms with life as an exile in Russia, and with being somewhat on the outside of events. Despite being theoretically a consultant to the Russian space program, she finds herself increasingly marginalised, even as incidents occur to which she feels she could provide meaningful assistance. It’s Margo, so you don’t imagine she will ever simply take no for an answer, but that ballsy attitude which got her so far in the USA isn’t necessarily calculated to win her any prizes in the former Soviet Union.

Our first new character is Dale, a down on his luck former oil rig worker who finds himself somewhat adrift in a world now using non-fossil fuels and on the verge of losing everything he holds dear. A chance meeting with a former colleague sees him signing up for the chance to get back to his roots in a whole new environment but as we watch him not exactly be 100% honest along the way, it feels like we are watching the very first moments of a potential avalanche of bad consequences headed towards a situation that really doesn’t need any more of them.

Aside from all this, we have Aleida still dealing with the trauma of previous experiences while trying to carry on working at NASA, a new Democrat president keen to cut costs and a lot to process for all concerned. As season openers go, it’s a corker, asking the audience to recall an awful lot of detail about what went before but rewarding them with a constantly surprising and evolving plot even as it re-introduces us to the comfort of a sea of familiar faces. I started out emotional as I watched the opening montage catching us up to the current state of play – an openly gay Republican female president, international co-operation, the impact of the Millennium bug on the space program – and finished outright weeping at a climactic set of events towards the end which set the board for a whole lot of drama in the nine episodes to come.

Verdict: A dose of sorely needed optimism that chafes as much as it comforts, given the state of the real world. It’s good to be back. 10/10

Greg D. Smith