PR in the Philippines

(SeaPRwire) –   The alternate timeline show For All Mankind is currently set in a 2012 that’s not our own—one where a Mars outpost is a daily reality, and humanity is striving to venture deeper into the solar system. However, the main plot of the first two episodes of For All Mankind Season 5 centers on whether Lee Jung-Gil (C. S. Lee) is guilty of murder, and if his fellow Mars residents plan to break him out of space prison. Meanwhile, Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) is advocating for a crewed mission to Titan to check for potential signs of life. In the middle of all this chaos, Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) says to Kelly and Alex (Sean Kauffman), “Sometimes you’ve got to roll the hard six.”

The episode itself is titled “The Hard Six”—a phrase that’s popped up in For All Mankind before. But sci-fi fans will recognize that this line actually comes from the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, co-created by Ronald D. Moore, who’s also a co-creator of For All Mankind. It’s a neat Easter egg, and it fits FamK just as well as it does BSG—but is there a deeper connection here? Could For All Mankind’s alternate history be a continuation of Battlestar’s timeline?

Spoilers ahead.

Battlestar Takes Place in the Distant Past

Like the original 1978 series, Battlestar Galactica isn’t set in the future—it’s set in our past, telling the story of humans who evolved independently, away from our Earth. The original canon (including Galactica: 1980) had the Galactica crew finding a modern-day Earth, but the more popular reboot ended with the fleet’s survivors settling on a prehistoric Earth. BSG’s finale implied that humans evolved from both humanoid Cylons and regular humans, hinting that a panspermia event was the source of all life on Earth.

To date, For All Mankind hasn’t explored artificial, synthetic life forms like the Cylons, but we’ve known since Season 1 that it’s set in an alternate timeline. The question is: Could For All Mankind be Battlestar Galactica, but millions of years down the line?

In the Season 1 Battlestar Galactica episode “The Hand of God,” Adama (Edward James Olmos) utters the line, “Sometimes you gotta roll the hard six.” There, he’s referring to the fleet’s attempt to capture a Cylon base with far superior firepower. In that scene, the phrase is treated as a common saying—after all, rolling a six in dice is both difficult and risky. But is this phrase as widely recognized in For All Mankind?

For All Mankind Could Be a Low-Key Battlestar Sequel

The scene in For All Mankind’s “The Hard Six” episode is packed with other show-specific Easter eggs. Ed, Alex, and Kelly are having a family pasta dinner, and Ed is heaping cheap, store-bought Parmesan onto his plate—a habit first shown in Season 2 when he, Kelly, and Karen dined at the Outpost restaurant. Back in Season 4, when Alex was a little kid, Ed tried to get him to like this cheese, but Alex wasn’t interested. Now, Ed’s the only one using it, which is a funny nod to everyone thinking he’s odd for favoring the inexpensive brand.

Everyone’s used to Ed’s quirks, but when he says, “You’re a Baldwin—when things get rough, you roll the hard six!” Alex replies, “Roll the what?”

It’s a lighthearted moment, but given that Battlestar established that many modern Earth words, phrases, and even a Bob Dylan song have roots in the distant past, it’s not a stretch to think: The phrase “roll the hard six” is part of Ed’s subconscious because he, like other humans in the FamK timeline, are descendants of the Battlestar humans.

That being said, when Inverse asked Ronald D. Moore directly in 2021 if he could imagine a crossover between Battlestar and For All Mankind, he responded: “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 even though that answer feels like a denial, and the “hard six” is likely just a fun Easter egg, it’s still plausible that some version of Battlestar is part of For All Mankind’s backstory—if not in this universe, then in another alternate timeline we haven’t seen yet. We’re not claiming Ed Baldwin is a Cylon, but we might just be encouraging fan fiction that says he is. So say we all?

For All Mankind streams on Apple TV.