If you ask us what we love about For All Mankind, Krys Marshall and her character Danielle Poole will always be near — if not at — the top of our list. Even with as strong as the whole cast is, and with as much as we connect with so many of its longtime core characters, we’re not at all exaggerating when we say the series would not be what it is, or mean what it does to us, without Marshall and Commander Poole. And the recently-concluded Season 4 is no exception. Admittedly, Dani made some decisions this season that just…didn’t seem right (to say the least). Even so, we still couldn’t help but root for her.
A lot of that comes down to a combination of knowing the character for three seasons prior to now, counting as decades of her life. (As in, we’re just attached at this point.) Still, we never would’ve loved Dani this much in the first place without Marshall bringing her to life. There’s just…something about the humanity she brings to every single scene, even — and maybe especially — with the “smaller” places where she’s not quite the focus. This season, of course, Danielle’s emotional moments were anything but small. The type of restraint she’s known for, heroic in its nature, finally just broke.
So, in our interview with the actor, we gained some insight into that change, discussed the pain build-up to the pain finale, and even tried to understand the parts of this season’s arc that made us deeply uncomfortable. (We are still crushed that ACAB is supposed to include Danielle Poole now, ok?) And yes, that iconic Dani/Ed dynamic found its way into the discussion, too.
A walk down memory lane with Krys Marshall
So, to get to the root of pretty much everything, we really must start at the very beginning. Case in point: When we asked about Danielle finally letting go, Marshall took us on a journey through Dani’s history. But first, the easiest explanation for all that anger: “What comes to mind is the quote, ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,'” she told us. And as we know, Danielle Poole has been scorned for decades. By far too many people — but especially someone she’s proven herself to, again and again.
“I think that Danielle has been saying, to people in the program — but namely saying to Ed Baldwin — you have to listen to me. She’s been saying it in Season 1, when she’s warning him about Gordo and his…mental health crisis.” But it didn’t stop there. “We see it again Season 2, when they tell her, ‘you can’t do the [Apollo-Soyuz] handshake.'” Which came after having “to fight like hell to even command that mission” at all. So, “she says, ‘I’m tired of being asked to wait. I’m tired of being told to hold off,’ of [always hearing], ‘we’ll get to you eventually.'”
The rest, as they say, is history. Commander Poole completes the mission, shows the world a different way — a peaceful way — for the US and the Soviet Union to work together, and delivers one of the few bright lights in an otherwise terrifyingly dark second season finale. But…even that isn’t enough. After everything, people still don’t listen. (“People” most frequently means Ed, though we can’t stress enough that Danielle Poole’s story is not just all about him.)
“We see it in Season 3, when Danielle says, ‘Danny Stevens is not mentally sound, and he should not be coming up with us to go to Mars.'” At this point, Marshall sums up the series (but is still discussing the Danny Stevens issue): “Clearly she was right.” And it’s not just the disrespect that’s the problem. It’s the grave consequences. Last season, “Ed not listening to Danielle…actually caused people to lose their lives. Danny was responsible for the explosion, which turned into a mudslide. Which buried the M-SAM and killed people. And almost killed him and Ed.”
Over and over, nobody listens. And the cost gets higher every time. Because of the nature of this series, Marshall reminded us, “we’re not talking about just four seasons [of this happening], we’re talking about four decades of this woman saying again and again and again, ‘you have to listen to me.'” And, after decades of this, “seeing Danielle be so restrained and so…measured and thoughtful for so many years, she just can’t take it anymore.”
Krys Marshall on Danielle and Ed’s “massive fracture”
His name has come up a lot already, so let’s talk about Old Man Mars Ed. What leads to the utter breakdown in that friendship, that family dynamic? Well, him being one of the key people who just “continues not to” hear Dani out certainly doesn’t help. For a little more on that, Marshall told us, Ed “keeps putting his personal relationships, and his will, in front of what’s best for the mission and what’s best for everyone else.” It’s not just that, though. Dani doesn’t really open the floodgates of rage until Ed pushes the wrong button.
And that brings us back to the Danny Stevens of it all. Coming into For All Mankind Season 4, Marshall told us, she’s “so grateful that, in this season, we got to actually see what happened in the time jump. And most seasons, we don’t get to do that — we’re just told about it and kind of left to imagine…what happened in that eight-year gap.” This time, though, “we got to see what it was like for Danielle to discover Danny Stevens’ dead body.” That helps us “start to imagine, ‘what was that like, to bring home a corpse? What was that like, to prepare the body of her dear friend’s son? What were those calls back to earth like?’ So, she’s experienced some real trauma. [And] had to, in many ways bury that trauma.”
Ed, of course, knows all of this. Because he was with Dani on that horrible day. So, “when Danielle is faced with Ed and he’s telling her basically, you know, ‘shame on you for sticking him in a capsule somewhere,’ she’s just got to let him have it…It’s been years in the making.” But even though we can acknowledge that the fight was kinda inevitable, we just can’t stand seeing these two characters at odds. To us, they’ve always been family. Which made their disagreement about where “home” is in the finale another difficult part of Dani and Ed’s journey this season.
When we asked Marshall about that conversation specifically, we wanted to know whether or not either character might realize, deep down, that they’re still family. (In their own weird, “hi, Bob” way, of course.) For her, “when you know somebody for as long as these two know each other…I think that he is steeped in her bones.” And the time they’ve spent stuck together in space certainly contributed. “Anybody who had a pandemic pod knows that the people that you’re in that pod with, you know them better after…than you ever did before,” Marshall told us, mentioning that those early days of the pandemic are her “only sort of…similar version of what happened in the “Hi, Bob” episode or what happened in Happy Valley, Season 3.”
(Again, no one’s claiming that was the same as being stuck in space, at all. But…just a taste of “what it’s like to be isolated in that way.”)
With all that being said, after all these years, “not only is the friendship a deep one and a long one. But it’s also — it’s bonded in a lot of trauma.” Looking way back, “Ed lost his son when he was on Jamestown.” Then, “the two of them almost died when they were on Happy Valley in Season 3. So, they have seen each other live, and [experience] loss and love again. They’ve both become, you know, widows and widowers. And there’s just so much history between the two of them.”
Put all that together, and “it’s hard for me to sort of imagine a world in which they can’t find a way back to one another. I always remain hopeful.” We’d tend to agree, which means Ed’s reaction to Dani’s shooting in the For All Mankind Season 4 finale came as a huge relief. (Or. Well. Almost. It would’ve been relieving if I wasn’t so busy shouting “not Dani” in my head. But. Anyway.) But that moment was an emergency — to say the least. So, we asked Krys Marshall if she thought the two would’ve ever reconciled if the shooting had never happened.
Starting with an “oh, God,” answered with basically our take on the situation — just from an actor’s point of view. “As delightful as it is to play the scenes of Danielle and Ed at odds, it’s also really painful to play.” (Painful being a great word for it.) “I adore Joel,” she continued, “I just think that he is such…he’s just a good guy. And we really have a lot of fun together. So, it is a real pleasure to have the opportunity to work with another actor who pushes you to really go the distance and to get ugly if you need to get ugly.”
Therefore, Marshall said, “secretly, of course, I was hoping the entire time, like, ‘please let these two come back together again.’ Because we just love them as characters, and we love seeing their interaction with one another.” But, with that being said, “I don’t know what would have happened” without the shooting. After all, many of us “have had falling out with friends that [haven’t] yet, to this day, reconciled.” So, with the “massive fracture in their friendship” that Dani and Ed faced in For All Mankind Season 4, “it’s hard to say if they would have found each other again, had there not been a near-death experience. But in many ways, I’m grateful that that happened because it brought them back.”
(Dear readers and fellow fans, Yours Truly was not grateful.)
On Dani’s choices in For All Mankind Season 4
The back half of Season 4 features some decision-making that just…how do we put it? We may have joked about the whole “we won’t say ACAB includes Commander Poole” thing in our reviews, sure. But those episodes really do contain disturbing elements of what it is to live in a police state. And none of them really feel like those things could’ve possibly been authorized by the Danielle Poole we know and love. The one who really seemed to want to hear the workers out earlier in the season, who (as Krys Marshall laid out for us so well above) has almost always wanted to do the right thing.
For All Mankind 4×10 alone features, as one character put it, “a lot of people pissed off about being searched repeatedly.” Some other low points: lockdowns for “non-essential” people, Avilov and Bishop’s torture tactics. All on this happens on Dani’s watch, except for when she purposely turns a blind eye. And, all along, the security forces and torture fanatics are, at least tacitly, following her orders. So, the obvious question is just…why?
For Marshall, a lot of it comes down to how Dani has “completely dedicated her life to this program.” And she pays for that dedication through trauma and a lot of personal loss. Danielle was “not able to be there for Clayton when he is ailing in Season 1. And then, we discovered the beginning of Season 2, he’s committed suicide because he wasn’t able to handle the grief of his experience in Vietnam. Danielle goes on to get remarried and now, is not able to be there for her current husband and her stepson. She has sacrificed so much of her personal life” (See also: The absolute agony watching that vidmail in “Brazil.”)
On top of all that, “she’s actually broken her arm” to create a way for Ed to call in a “medical situation,” as he puts it in the episode, and send Gordo home from the moon without ending his flight career. (Remember this? “Clayton’s lost, Ed. And he’s not coming back. I know that. And if they ground Gordo…he’s not coming back either.”) Years later, Danielle “almost sacrificed her life when they were marooned on Mars.” All those sacrifices add up, and, as Marshall put it, “all of this was in service to continue to forward science and technology for mankind.”
And this latest mission has, possibly, the highest stakes ever. The “Goldilocks” asteroid “is not just some gimmick. It really does contain these precious metals that could slow down, if not stop, global warming. That can change the fate of mankind…It really is a once in a lifetime opportunity.” In order for Commander Poole to complete the mission and seize that opportunity, Marshall says, “there are decisions that she has to make about looking the other way.”
So, while “as we get later and later in the season… [she makes some] decisions that I don’t personally stand behind,” there’s still a reason for it all. “Danielle is…she’s committed to the mission. Truly committed to the mission, no matter what. And as you mentioned, she says to Palmer, ‘I’m gonna get that rock. I’m gonna get that rock or die trying.’ And that’s exactly what she does.”
And speaking of “die trying”…
There appear to be a lot of little hints in For All Mankind Season 4 about this finally being the end for Danielle Poole. And right up until the bitter(sweet) end, it really does seem like we’re being purposely set up to believe her life was going to end as tragically as so many other beloved characters’ did. (Gordo, Tracy, Karen, and Kuz all come to mind.) But was it on purpose? How much was Krys Marshall intentionally misdirecting us, and how much was just being in the moment?
“I have to just play it minute to minute,” she told us. But “there’s no way you can keep the secret from yourself. You have to read the whole script, and know everything and memorize everything.” Because the series isn’t always filmed sequentially, Marshall told us, she did that scene “way before I shoot some of the calls home. And so, your brain just has to kind of…compartmentalize everything. So for me, I’m just playing the truth of what’s happening in that moment.'”
In For All Mankind 4×09, Marshall said, “Danielle really is calling home to Corey, or to Isaiah. And she’s excited about meeting her grandbaby, and excited about teaching her all about Star Trek, and all the other favorite shows of hers. Those moments are real, and they’re connected. And they’re played just totally in the present.” If viewers felt like we could predict the worst-case scenario coming in the finale, that’s not because of any acting choice.
Instead, at least in this case, that’s “the responsibility of our editors, and our visual effects team, to sort of…pull it all together. But I think for me as an actor, I try to remain true to my little portion of the story, rather than trying to tell it all at once. I have to just be a steward of this moment of Danielle’s life. This moment by moment, by moment, by moment. And then, have faith that it all strings together as a cohesive story.”
But, as we were discussing all these things — from the call home to family, to the finale itself — the interview took an interesting turn. As in, Krys Marshall had a question for me. “Wait, let me ask you. When you saw that bit, did you think this was the end of Danielle?” And, after previously having said “I was not grateful” in response to her comment about how the shooting might’ve helped bring Ed and Dani’s friendship back, I figured it was best to go with full disclosure.
“Look, I was sitting here watching it going, ‘no.’ Because again, with the videos leading up to it, I’m going, ‘oh, they’re gonna do this this time, aren’t they? Right?’ Because they —…this show is not kind about how it ends seasons. And it has never, ever, ever been, right? So I’m like, ‘yeah, this is happening. Oh, this — oh God. No. This is not happening.'”
For the record, even knowing how it all turns out, a second viewing (after this interview) produced almost the exact same results. I’d say that’s pretty good news for how well Krys Marshall’s goal to portray Danielle moment by moment worked out. And it’s a testament to the series that, even while not being totally fair, it still kept us on our toes by actually ending Season 4 on a happy note.
