I am completely in love with the show For All Mankind. The sheer audacity of the whole thing is wonderful. It’s out there but also somehow grounded in reality. If you’ve not seen it, or read my thoughts on Series 1, the premise is an alternative history where Russia landed on the moon before the US, and everything that follows from that. I read a review of the show that explained how anything that tries to exploit the butterfly effect - small things creating exponential changes - is bound to start slow but gradually pick up speed.

When I first wrote about For All Mankind, it was out of duty rather than enjoyment really. This was a show about the moon with a sprinkling of feminism and couldn’t have been made more for me if it tried. I talked of how the first episode dragged and the second picked up and by the third I was hooked. Well, I should have sensed the pattern there because every single episode that went by was better than the one before and by the tenth episode, the season finale, I was enthralled.

I am intensely aware that my recent posts have been all Apple this and Apple that. With Arcade and Books and Oprah and Swift and more, it’s like everything has come out all at the same time. I’m loving the content on Apple TV+ but some of it has been harder work than others. Dickinson was a surefire hit, but For All Mankind took some perseverance. The first episode didn’t grab me at all.

After my rather foolish admission that I hadn’t necessarily paid much attention to those that went to the moon after the main three, Steven Roy recommended I watch this documentary film on 4OD - In the Shadow of the Moon. I watched, and I learned, and I made notes. I’ve posted the distilled version for Film Watch, but these are the full notes I made along the way - 90 minutes of brilliant space travel stuff, I highly recommend it.