AMC Plus’ Moonhaven review: Homework from the future

It is by no means a sin to open your TV series with an on-screen text offering that’s known as an info-dump. For as unappetizing as that pair of words may be, excellent stories have begun this way before (“Oceans are now battlefields,” anyone?) And they will. Front-loading your series with too much textual density seems unwise. A humble TV critic might be forced to go back and read it again before shrugging off and moving ahead. I’ll catch up,That’s what a humble TV critic may think. Is anyone else ever so ignorant?

It’s thus a worthwhile exercise simply to try and summarize the premise of the new AMC Plus series Moonhaven. After all, it’s essentially all the series does across its six-episode first season — explain itself and its world repeatedly while elucidating remarkably little. It is now 2201 and Earth is almost uninhabitable. A century ago, the moon was terraformed and colonized, with that colony being observed and managed by history’s most advanced artificial intelligence, an entity known as Io (or is it I.O.? This is the least of the series’ baffling ambiguities). This mission was to develop human culture to enable lunar colonists return to Earth with new technology and social norms. It will ensure that humanity survives.

The story’s preamble alone could provide enough narrative grist for at least a feature film, but so far we’ve only covered that textual info-dump. The series’ main action picks up with the murder of a young “Mooner” (Nina Barker-Francis), a virtually unheard-of occurrence in the utopian colony — not only is this a place of peace, but technology has advanced sufficiently that the killer can be identified by waving a futuristic scanner at the victim’s body. So far, so tech noir, but there won’t be much time for pondering the case, as moments later we meet the series’ protagonist, Earthling pilot Bella Sway (Emma McDonald). Bella makes frequent cargo runs to the moon, but as we meet her, she has been tasked with transporting the colony’s envoy (Amara Karan) and her bodyguard (Joe Manganiello). On arrival, though, Bella’s true mission is revealed: She’s been hired to smuggle a powerful moon drug back to Earth. Bella’s key connection to the moon is what will make it more complicated for both her and viewers. She will be forced to stay to weave the story of drug smuggling into a crazy web. Is there any way to find out what the moon drug is like? What are the side effects? MoonhavenThe viewer quickly realizes that there is no need to question the author, and any possible lore rabbit holes are only hints at as the story moves on.

Photo: Szymon Lazewski/AMC

Photo: Szymon Lazewski/AMC

The remainder of this review could easily be devoted to additional nooks and crannies in the series’ premise. Moonhaven is essentially — and, after a fashion, literally — Showmanship in the World. But this would be to commit the creators’ (chief among them former Lodge 49And Black SailsPeter Ocko, writer and producer. His cardinal sin is prioritizing drama over setup. With life on both a futurescape planet and its impossibly habitable satellite to explain, the series’ early episodes are so profoundly devoted to leaden dialogue that there is little chance to build gut-level associations with the characters, their dilemmas, or their relationships. And that’s to say nothing of a truly dizzying density of ulterior motive, double-cross, and subterfuge. It is clear that so many pizza toppings have been added that it seems that the show could be in a completely different sub-genre. The fourth hour concludes with the possibility that they may actually have one foot in sci-fi. At that point, the frequently excellent performers — including MVPs Dominic Monaghan and Kadeem Hardison as a pair of endearingly gentle cops patrolling a community that’s heretofore had little need for them — have generated enough sparks between them that there can be some investment in, say, the outcome of a visceral brawl. However, the central conflict’s ambiguous stakes halt this investment.

Moonhaven’s aesthetic vision of the future is at least more coherent than its narrative, though this comes down purely to its reliance on cliche. Earth is a Blade RunnerThe vertical and smog-choked Hellscape is the sarcastic version of the show’s smog-choked heavens. Meanwhile, the lunar paradise is home to a hippie community with wooden furnishings, prim-colored tunics, frequent group tai-chi sessions, and stock furniture. If there’s any insurmountable leap of logic in this show, it’s the viewer’s requisite acceptance that decades of rigorous social trial and error aided by unimaginable technology has yielded a lifestyle roughly equivalent to a SoCal flower-power retreat circa 1969. Meanwhile, the speculative development of communication is limited to a few swapped words (“thoughts” have become “thinks”; “thanks” has become “grats”) and the introduction of some profoundly silly emotional neologisms (“giggleheaded” and “nogginswirl” being a few prime examples) beyond which the characters speak and behave like 21st-century Westerners. This show is as dedicated to the creation of a world as it gets. Moonhaven, corners are cut whenever convenient, presumably for the sake of getting back to the important work of unspooling a plot so convoluted that “byzantine” doesn’t begin to cover it.

Moonhaven is such a hodgepodge of tone and subgenre that it’s difficult to put it in conversation with a specific set of sci-fi reference points — aside from offering a neo-rustic spin on the Minority Report school of dystopian detective (or ’tective, in MoonhavenIf you tell a story that is short, it might have echoes from the shorter-lived. Battlestar Galactica prequel series CapricaIn its dense brick-like lore. This world is not just fictional. Moonhavenis most in contact with ours is its own. This choice has side effects that reduce the potential for it to attain the pulp entertainment value they seem to want.

Photo: Szymon Lazewski/AMC

The first words of the pilot’s opening info-dump are: “The Earth is dying, and its people with it.” The phrasing may be severe, but as anyone with even passing powers of perception is aware, this is not some fantastical premise, and may in fact be a frank description of the situation facing a social structure buckling under the weight of compounding crises, all of them exacerbated by climate catastrophe to which those in power evince crushing indifference. Some viewers may find the idea that Earth can support human life within 200 years to be optimistic. However, this does not mean that the series arrived at an untimely time. Science fiction is a mirror of its creators’ culture. Many of these great science fiction works use speculation as a lens to provide prescription or condemnation. Storytelling has no responsibility to comment on the world as it is — nor, really, any responsibility at all save rewarding the viewer’s attention (whether this critic believes MoonhavenIt should be obvious that it does. The greatest problem with this series is the inutility of its questions and the results it appears to offer.

As life on the moon descends into chaos, it’s not hard to wonder what the season’s underlying theme might be. Is it possible to create a functional utopia? That the project of preventing humanity’s extinction will be so complicated as to be potentially hopeless? Our innate nature to be selfish, paranoid and violent is unaffected by technological or social advancements. Any and all of the above would seem to be suggested by the series’ first season, and these implied takeaways are so self-evident as to inspire numb despair, offering little food for thought in the bargain. MoonhavenWhile they might not be required to do so, stories that echo and extend upon real life should have some sense of urgency. This is in addition to the fistfights or footchases. This is a show likely to inspire very real dread in a segment of its audience, and it would be nice to believe that such an unnerving experience served any purpose aside from offering bargain-basement-blockbuster thrills.

As the potential leads and red herrings pile up, it’s natural to hope for a finale that reconfigures Moonhaven’s first season into a work of narrative harmony. The viewer will be left with an average see-you-next season handful of threads. This means that any feeling of satisfaction can wait. Clearly, the show’s producers have faith in its potential, and in our desire to see that potential fulfilled. We are not able to recommend spending six hours on this story because of the few outstanding performances. And with so many of those performers saddled with distracting “futuristic” pancontinental accents, one’s mileage could well vary. Although the moon is not made from cheese, MoonhavenIt is, and seems to be turning.