Moonhaven

The Weight of a Wooden Moon

In the forests of the moon, which are thick with unnervingly green foliage, a father and son pause before a dangerous confrontation. They crank a mechanical spinner, let the music chime, and just... dance. It is an earnest, synchronized swaying meant to process the overwhelming reality of the moment. I laughed the first time I saw one of these lunar emotional-regulation dances. Then I stopped laughing. There is something deeply, almost uncomfortably sincere about *Moonhaven*, a show that asks what happens if humanity tries to engineer the malice out of its own DNA.

Peter Ocko, the creator, has a habit of making television that plays like it fell out of a parallel dimension. He gave us the wonderful, prematurely canceled *Lodge 49*, and you can feel that same sun-baked whimsy here, transposed to a lunar colony a century from now. Earth is dying. A 500-square-mile terraformed patch of the Moon serves as a petri dish for saving the species, managed by an all-seeing AI named IO. Still, Ocko is not interested in the cold, metallic corridors of traditional sci-fi.



Moonhaven is built of wood. That is one of the first things you notice. There is no steel, no chrome, just impossibly bright fabrics and a community functioning like a high-tech yoga retreat. The camera glides through this paradise with a floaty, almost narcotic rhythm. When Earth-born cargo pilot Bella Sway (Emma McDonald) crash-lands into this utopia, the visual contrast is jarring. The lighting in her ship is harsh, steeped in the grime of a ruined planet, while the colony is perpetually bathed in a soft, diffused glow. It makes the air look thick, like you could scoop it with a spoon. Bella refuses to take off her heavy leather jacket, a stubborn piece of armor against a society draped in breathable linen.

McDonald anchors the whole bizarre experiment. She plays Bella with a perpetual tightening of the jaw, her shoulders hiked up toward her ears like she is waiting for a bomb to drop. She is a smuggler and a veteran dumped into an ashram, and her body language screams of a person who has forgotten how to rest. Opposite her is Dominic Monaghan as Paul Sarno, a Moon-born detective tasked with solving a rare murder. Monaghan, long removed from the heavy mythologies of *Lord of the Rings* and *Lost*, does something genuinely surprising here. He plays Paul with the bright, unclouded eyes of a toddler. He does not know how to interrogate a suspect because he is never met a liar. Watch him in the interrogation room with Bella; he leans forward, open and curious, while she recoils into her chair, her arms tightly crossed. He is trying to understand her pain, and she just wants to punch him.



The central tension is not the murder mystery, which is admittedly a little clunky. (Whether the uneven pacing is a flaw or a feature depends entirely on your tolerance for world-building over plot). The real friction comes from the collision of cynicism and hope. *Paste Magazine*'s Alexis Gunderson nailed the show's specific frequency, calling it a "hippy-dippy sci-fi murder mystery" defined by its "giggle-headed goofiness." But that goofiness is a Trojan horse. Ocko is asking if paradise is actually a trap. To achieve peace, the Mooners have suppressed human grief. They take pills to dull the ache of loss. They perform those strange dances to keep the darkness at bay.



We will never get the full answer to that question. AMC originally renewed the show, only to reverse the decision and cancel it during a corporate purge, leaving us with a mere six episodes and a cliffhanger that will forever dangle in the vacuum of space. I am still annoyed by that. TV rarely takes swings this weird anymore. For all its occasionally tin-eared dialogue, *Moonhaven* dared to suggest that the hardest part of saving the world is not inventing the right technology. It is figuring out how to live with each other once the machines are plugged in.