For All Mankind Just Rebooted An Awesome Battlestar Concept
Is Admiral Baldwin a descendant of Admiral Adama?
The alternate timeline series For All Mankind is currently unfolding in an alternate 2012, one in which a Mars base is a fact of life and humanity is trying to reach further into the solar system. But, in the first two episodes of For All Mankind Season 5, the primary action has been focused on whether or not Lee Jung-Gil (C. S. Lee) committed murder, and if his Mars-based companions are going to bust him out of space jail. At the same time, Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) is pushing for a crewed mission to Titan to investigate possible signs of life. Amid all of this, Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) tells Kelly and Alex (Sean Kauffman) that “sometimes you’ve got to roll the hard six.”
The name of the episode is also “The Hard Six,” a phrase that has been used in For All Mankind before. But, science fiction fans know that his phrase actually originates in the rebooted version of Battlestar Galactica, co-created by Ronald D. Moore, who is also the co-creator of For All Mankind. It’s a very cool Easter egg, and applies just as well to FamK as it does to BSG, but could there be something deeper? Could For All Mankind’s alternate history exist as an outgrowth of Battlestar’s timeline?
Spoilers ahead.
Battlestar Takes Place in the Distant Past
Mary McDonnell as Laura Roslin and Edward James Olmos as Admiral William Adama in Battlestar Galactica Season 3.
As with the original 1978 series, Battlestar Galactica does not take place in the future, but rather, in our past, chronicling the journey of humans that evolved separately, outside of our version of Earth. While the original canon had Galactica (along with the series Galactica: 1980) finding a contemporary version of Earth , the more famous reboot series ended with the survivors of the fleet settling on a prehistoric version of Earth. The finale of BSG suggested that humankind evolved from humanoid Cylons and conventional humans, suggesting a panspermia event was responsible for all life on Earth.
Now, so far, For All Mankind hasn’t really touched on the idea of artificial, synthetic human life like the Cylons, but since Season 1, we do know that it takes place in a different timeline. The question is, could For All Mankind just be Battlestar Galactica, but millions of years later?
In the Season 1 Battlestar Galactica episode, “The Hand of God,” Adama (Edward James Olmos) says, “Sometimes you gotta roll the hard six.” In that context, he’s talking about the fleet trying to take a Cylon base that has way more firepower. In the scene, everyone accepts this as a normal thing to say; clearly, rolling a six in a dice game can be hard and risky. But does everyone accept this phrase in For All Mankind?
For All Mankind Could Be a Low-Key Battlestar Sequel
Generations of Baldwins, rolling the hard six.
The scene in For All Mankind’s episode titled “The Hard Six” is full of a few other Easter eggs connected to the show itself. Ed, Alex, and Kelly are having a family dinner consisting of pasta, and Ed is pouring a ton of the cheap store-bought Parmesan cheese onto his plate, a habit established in Season 2, when he, Kelly, and Karen are having a family dinner at the restaurant known as Outpost. In Season 4, when Alex was a small child, Ed tried to get Alex into this kind of cheese, which Alex didn’t want. In this scene, Ed is the only one having this kind of cheese, which is a slightly hilarious nod to everyone thinking he’s nuts for liking this slightly cheap brand.
So, everyone is familiar with Ed’s oddities, but when he says, “You’re a Baldwin, when things get a little tough, you roll the hard six!” to which Alex responds, “Roll the what?”
It’s a fun moment, but considering the fact that Battlestar established that several words and phrases from contemporary Earth — not to mention at least one song from Bob Dylan — originated in the distant past, it’s not nuts to make the following leap: The phrase “roll the hard six” is ingrained in Ed’s psyche, because he, like many other humans in the FamK timeline are also descended from the humans in the Battlestar timeline.
That said, when Inverse asked Ronald D. Moore, directly, in 2021, if he could see a way to crossover Battlestar and For All Mankind, he answered like this: “I mean, if I ever think about that kind of thing, the stray thought is like how could I have crossed certain Battlestar characters in Star Trek. It was something I did think about during Battlestar...But I always thought of it in terms of the multiverse.”
So, while that answer feels like a no, and the “hard six” is probably just a fun Easter egg, it still feels possible that some version of Battlestar exists in the backstory of For All Mankind. If not in this universe, then maybe in some alternate timeline we’ve yet to glimpse. We’re not saying Ed Baldwin is a Cylon, but we’re also maybe encouraging some fan fic that asserts that very thing. So say we all?
