Week-to-Week: for All Mankind's Car Crash of a Character

My only hope with the Danny character this season has been that at some point the show would, uh, swerve (sorry!) and acknowledge Danny’s trajectory for what it is: a response to the fact that someone who was a surrogate parent for most of his life had sex with him when he was still a teenager, and then (at best) prolonged that trauma with a pattern of emotional closeness-then-rejection that has lasted for more than a decade.

On the one hand, this would feel like a possible pay-off for all of the “Who is Danny to me, really?” business that Ed has been experiencing, and a powerful kind of story to tell on a show that deals in a multi-generational time frame. On the other hand, the "kids" on this show still feel like they exist primarily as supports or antagonists to the "parents," and I'm not sure the show is ready or willing to give them equal standing. (Or, tbh, to acknowledge the darkness of Karen's actions.)

Making this swerve even less likely is the fact that, in their responses to the backlash against the Danny & Karen storyline, the show’s creators have never given any hint that they view what happened as anything more serious or concerning than a generic affair. (On the official podcast, someone—possibly a writer?—said that when they heard some viewers characterize the “affair” as abuse they were really surprised, because that interpretation had never come up as a possibility during writing or filming.) It's an oversight that has dimmed some of my appreciation for their otherwise impressive character work, even as I keep hoping that maybe, at some point, they'll see things differently.