For All Mankind | 4x09 "Brazil"

Wrenn Schmidt as Margo Madison Piotr Adamczyk as Sergei Orestovich Nikulov

In advance of S4 coming out this week, I give you... For All Mankind characters as Barbie quotes:

put those internationals in relations!

Honestly trying not to lose my mind over Sergei's new last name. Bezukhov. As in Pierre Bezukhov who waited years and years to be reunited with his love and marry her? This Bezukhov?? Fuuuuuuck

👀

Sergei absently exchanged the blue marker for another colored marker from the tray, began shading in the sine wave. Orange. In lines like strands of hair. Margo’s hair. The memory of it soft through his fingers, of the scent of her hair, her skin, clean and warm, the sweet, strong smell of the brandy on her lips.

He moved to the negative half cycle, the white of the board again alternating through a fall of orange hair. He wondered when her hair had turned white. Did it happen slowly over the last eight years? Had the long, cold, lonely winters she wasn’t used to, hadn’t, couldn’t have prepared for, slowly leached the color from her hair, from her life? She was not meant for a cage, no matter how gilded.

Automatically, he filled in the last positive half cycle, the orange strands thinning and fading as his mind continued to wander and his pressure against the board slackened. Or had her hair turned white all at once in a shock? Was it upon learning of the bombing? Worry for her colleagues? Aleida? Did she blame herself? Was it something that happened after? Something they’d done to her? He froze. Lefortovo…

“Uh, Mr. Bezukhov?”

Slowly, he blinked, the whiteboard and the classroom refocusing around him.

“Mr. Bezukhov?”

Sergei turned, taking in the students behind their desks, their faces, some smirking, most disinterested, a few studious. Right. He had a class to teach. A life she’d paid for with her own. He owed it to her to live it. This thought had sustained him through the years, kept him moving forward, moving on. It didn’t matter that she was alive. It shouldn’t. It couldn’t. 

“So, as you can see, the current is not always constant.”

Svetlana Efremova on set of FOR ALL MANKIND with Wrenn Schmidt & Piotr Adamczyk

Very clever. This will work for us.

THEY WERE GONNA GO TO BRAZIL AND DO SCIENCE TOGETHER, WHY

For All Mankind | Margo and Sergei + Apollo-Soyuz/Soyuz-Apollo

2x06 "Best Laid Plans" 4x09 "Brazil"

"I know what I did in the past and why I did it" - Margo

it is so devastating that their end was not both of them running away to brazil to live out their love …. 62 years it took Margo to understand that feelings prevail over work, you have to live life. To love.

My tribute to the story of margo and sergei <3

"Remote in my darkened exile, the days dragged by so slowly. Without grace. Without inspiration. Without life. Without tears. Without love. Then my spirit woke and you... you appeared again. Like a transient vision. Like pure beauty's spirit."

It’s a poem Pushkin wrote in 1825. He wrote it to Anna Petrovna Kern, with whom he had an affair. (Irina Morozova in episode 4x04 House Divided)

After almost two months of Season 4 finale, I wonder now what exactly the writers intended to do bringing in such a beautiful poem. Pretty clear that it echoes Margo and Sergei relationship. But I feel that such a heartbreaking piece didn’t meet the expectations we had in the couple. Firstly, because the writers only brought them together for only two scenes but, especially because I feel unsatisfied with both scenes.

In the first scene, the expected reunion after 8 long years, we have them keeping the distance and also they sounded like reprimanding each other. WTF. And in the second, in a far safer environment, they still aren’t able to break the distance or to pour out their feelings. Not to mention Margo’s reluctance to take the risk with him and the poor editing that didn’t show how Margo covers his hand with hers. Finally, to make matters worse, the episode 4x09 ending. It feels the writers were making fun of them with the burgers thing. 😰

The bottom line is that I didn’t feel the writers made justice to them at the end after such a wonderful beginning back in season 2. Thankfully fan fiction writers (god bless them 🙏🏼) come up with more satisfying ideas to fill the gap they left.

margo risked everything for sergei and had her life destroyed.

sergei risked everything to help margo and his life got taken.

i hate it here.

They keep getting closer and closer as each year passes. 💕

Margo opened the file and closed her eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath before flipping up through the pages as she had earlier that day. The post-it. She had almost convinced herself it had been a dream, a sudden madness, but there it was just as she remembered it and her heart once again skipped a beat. Sergei’s handwritten equation called to her comfortingly like an old friend. 

Careful not to bend or curl it too much, she lifted it from the page and held the equation between her fingers, feeling the grooves of the figures made by the pressure of his hand through the pen. She recalled the gentle yet urgent pressure of those same hands on her face, her neck, her body, and a heated flush climbed out of her memory and up over her chest and neck. Shocked by the intensity of the feeling ten years on and after everything that had passed between, she started, her back straightening as she willed herself back into the moment and to the task at hand.

Replacing the post-it on the page, Margo set about solving for Sergei’s message.

It wasn’t long before she had a time and a location… This is a secret place for you?

Frank’s was adjacent to 11:59, she’d had many a hurried meal there before or after a set over her years with the house band. At least until the club closed up well over a decade prior in the years following the Apollo-Soyuz broadcast. Soyuz-Apollo…

Did he truly want to unearth their meager past? Surely he must have moved on by now?

She had forgiven him years ago. Mourned what might have been. God knew he must have done the same, believing along with everyone that she had died with her colleagues. Wildly she wondered if he had shared a memorial borscht with his family in their honor, in hers? She’d eaten a lot of borscht that first fall in Moscow, learning the true meaning of cold before winter had even officially started. Her nightly memorials did little to warm the chill of grief. She shifted in her chair and swallowed down the old guilt that rose like bile in her throat at thoughts of the bombing.

She had to get up, had to move, shift her weight, her perspective.