Fridge / For All Mankind

Fridge Horror

• The timespan of the seasons two and three (1983-1994) was during the Unabomber attacks in real life. No mention is made of him in the show, but presumably Kaczynski would have been at least as upset by this timeline's emphasis on space travel. Does he eventually also target NASA?

• Sergei, showing signs of torture from his stay in a labor camp, telling Margo that not even Gorbachev could rein in the KGB. How many other people who would have been free in our world remained in or were sent to the gulag in this alternate 1990s?

• Overlapping with Fridge Sadness, Colonel Lee's mission to Mars almost essentially dooms him. Even if nothing in the mission had gone wrong, he would have no way home par hitching a ride on another nation's craft, as the capsule he is sent in appears to have been built only to get him to Mars with zero concern whether he comes back, which comes to show the coldness of the North Korean regime.

• The former head of Roscosmos defecting to the US and revealing the continued existence of the gulags and torture of Soviet citizens by the KGB would have been a massive propaganda win for the United States, and significant for Ellen, who needed as much political capital as she could get after coming out. His fame would have made his assassination impossible, as doing so on US soil would have been an act of war (and no one would believe it was suicide; "Nikulov didn't kill himself" might even become a meme). Instead, he took an assumed name and lived in anonymity, which gave the Soviets cover to murder him and stage it as a suicide.