Hijack 2.3: On Counting on Actors Who Play Good Guys Not to Play Bad Guys

We find out lots of essential things in Hijack 2.3. 

[And there will be spoilers ahead .... ]

First and foremost: Of course Sam Nelson was not going to sacrifice any innocent person's life for anything he had planned for the train he had hijacked.   His threatening to sacrifice that man was just a ploy to get the people running the trains in Berlin to do what he needed them to do.

This raises, at least to me, the interesting question of can you predict what a character will do in a TV series or movie based on who the actor was, or more specifically, what characters the actor has previously played.  Even in The Wire, in which Idris Elba played someone high up in a drug cartel in Baltimore, he displayed a conscience and a heart.  That in itself was why I was sure that Sam, who was an honest man with a big heart in the first season of Hijack, wouldn't trade in an unthreatening person's life in the second season.

Of course, actors occasionally do switch from playing heroes to villains. Elba has indeed done that a few times.  Ronald Reagan played a bad guy for the first and last time in his acting career in The Killers.  He would go into politics after that, and become Governor of California and then President for two terms.  Not the greatest President, in my humble opinion, though almost any predecessor looks good in comparison to the current occupant.  I was surprised to see Eddie Redmayne play a villain in the brilliant  Day of the Jackal -- after his performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything -- but he was charismatic in Jackal, and I saw, after a bit of research, that he's played lots of villains in his career.

Back to Sam, we also in the third episode of this second season find out that the reason he hijacked the train was to save his former wife from the brutal people who hijacked the plane in the first season, and in between the two seasons killed his son.  Lots of tension building up, and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next.

See also Hijack 1: Don't Miss It! ... Hijack 2.1: A Tale of Two Vehicles ... 2.2: What Is Sam Nelson Really Up To?

For All Mankind 2.8: Really Lost in Translation

In terms of humans going out into our solar system, the only really significant event happened at the very of For All Mankind 2.8.  But it was a significant event indeed.

[Spoilers follow]

We -- the Americans -- killed one Soviet cosmonaut, and badly wounded another, on the Moon. Our astronaut Marines thought the Soviets were reaching for a weapon, when they were reaching only for a translation card.  Brings a whole new devastating meaning to lost in translation.

Because what has now been lost in this alternate history is the thin veneer of peace in space, the For All Mankind mantra that is the very title of the series.  True, the Soviets took that little lunar base from us.  But surely there had to be a better response than bringing our violence on Earth up to the Moon.

The repudiation of peace is consistent, though, with the Ronald Reagan in our own reality. Although his anti-ballistic missile "Star Wars" initiative, which I strongly supported, undermined the Soviet Union and got it to crumble,  Reagan's militarism in South America in the Nicaragua Contra business almost led to the undoing of his administration.  We were provoked in both realities -- ours and the one in For All Mankind -- by the Soviet shooting down the civilian KAL 707 airplane.  But sending a military force to the Moon with shoot-to-kill orders if necessary was not the way to go.

The U.S. in this alternate history also wants to arm the Pathfinder flight to Mars.  This would not be to fight off Martians.  In our reality, again, Trump initiated the Space Force.  I'm all in favor of military in space if we're talking about Captain Kirk and the Federation.  But that's idealistic fiction about the future.  For All Mankind, at this point, is fiction about an alternate past.  That past looks, as of now in episode 2.8, to be leading to a far more dangerous future than Star Trek.

Although I don't like that development at all, to say the least, kudos to For All Mankind for showing it to us, or showing us to us, in the new episode up today on Apple TV+.

See also For All Mankind, Season 1 and Episode 2.1: Alternate Space Race Reality ... For All Mankind 2.2: The Peanut Butter Sandwich ... For All Mankind 2.3: "Guns to the Moon" ... For All Mankind 2.4: Close to Reality ... For All Mankind 2.5: Johnny and the Wrath of Kahn ... For All Mankind 2.6: Couplings ... For All Mankind 2.7: Alternate History Surges

*** Note added 27 October 2023:  Check out my review of Jack Dann's new book, The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History