Warning: Spoilers for For All Mankind season 3, episodes 1-3.
For All Mankind season 3 involves Karen in the space race more than ever before and it's allowing her to overcome the hardship she faced in seasons 1 and 2. Formerly married to veteran astronaut Ed Baldwin, Karen began her arc in the Apple TV+ series on the sidelines as a rigid housewife. As For All Mankind season 3 fixates on humanity's race to land on Mars, Karen finds herself at the forefront of the series' narrative. The three-way competition incorporates traditional players NASA and the Soviet space program, who are newly joined by Dev Ayesa's Helios — a private space travel enterprise. Karen's role in this endeavor takes her from co-founding the first space hotel to joining the leadership of Helios, embodying a worthy payoff to her confined role in For All Mankind's first two seasons.
Karen has endured plenty of adversity since For All Mankind's beginning. On top of the near-constant stress she faced from Ed's dangerous careers in the Navy and with NASA, Karen experienced a grave loss in the form of their son, Shane, who succumbed to his injuries from a bicycle accident. Ed's astronaut duties left Karen to grieve mostly on her own without an outlet to channel her pain. For All Mankind season 2 saw Karen take the step of cheating on her husband with Danny Stevens, which ultimately resulted in her and Ed's divorce.
In For All Mankind season 1, Karen subtly resented her life Ed and how she had to make sacrifices for his career with little return on her end. It’s clear that these struggles propelled her into realizing unhealthy coping mechanisms, yet at the same time, allowed her to eventually realize her full potential as an individual. Even though the Polaris space hotel disaster extinguished Karen's premier entrepreneurial venture, her acceptance of a job with Helios places her in the heat of For All Mankind's Mars race, which is right where she belongs given her unfortunate past.
For All Mankind season 1 hinted at Karen’s dissatisfaction with living solely as a mother and homemaker bred smaller changes. For example, Karen initially frowned upon Wayne Cobb and his marijuana-smoking ways, though later joined him as the two shared their worries about Ed and Wayne's wife Molly, who were both traveling to the Moon. In season 2, Karen broke out of her shell more through her affair with Danny and this is also aggravated by Shane’s death. For All Mankind season 3 represents the part of Karen's arc that allows her to flourish as an individual, which is why her divorce from Ed coincides with her career advancement.
Karen's entanglement with Danny in For All Mankind served as a major turning point in Karen's story. While having an affair with someone who's both her dead son's friend and her dead friend's son is a bizarre course of action, Karen's disillusionment with her life is understandable, especially considering Ed's faltering commitment to their relationship. At this point in season 3, a decade after the events of season 2, Karen has fully recognized the wrongness of her actions. This clearly paved the way for Karen to move on to better methods of self-governance such as entrepreneurship.
Karen’s transformation from a discontented housewife to a space pioneer represents her growth as a character since For All Mankind season 1. Her development also falls in line with the show's running trend of women gaining more opportunities in the professional sphere as a result of For All Mankind's alternate timeline leading to a prolonged space race beginning in 1969. Now in the midst of the 1990s, For All Mankind has granted Karen the payoff to her struggles from the show's first two seasons after allowing her the necessary time to discover her purpose.
New episodes of For All Mankind air Fridays on Apple TV+.