‘Moonhaven’ Is the Smart Sci-Fi Show You’ve Been Waiting For – TIME

Why would a person ever willingly leave utopia? For the citizens of Moonhaven, a verdant, peaceful community nestled in 500 square miles of the moon, the answer is: in order to save the world. The year is 2201. Earth has been ravaged by climate change, war, and a cascade of related plagues. Now, the only hope for humanity lies with the so-called Mooners, whove spent more than a century building a kinder, more sustainable society. AMC+ sci-fi thriller Moonhaven, premiering July 7, opens just two weeks before a crucial event known as the Bridge, in which the first wave of Mooners will relocate to Earth to help their terrestrial brethren heal the planet.

Its at this moment that the lunar utopia starts to look less perfect. First, a young woman, Chill (Nina Barker-Francis), is murdered. Then, two hilariously ill-prepared Moonhaven detectives, Paul (Dominic Monaghan, a.k.a. Charlie from Lost) and Arlo (Kadeem Hardison, a.k.a. A Different Worlds unforgettable Dwayne Wayne), discover a strange connection between Chill and a pilot, Bella Sway (a taciturn Emma McDonald), who has just arrived from Earth with the powerful envoy Indira (Amara Karan from The Night Of) and Indiras bodyguard Tomm (True Bloods Joe Manganiello, playing a sentient snarl) to aid in final preparations for the Bridge. As an Earther with a violent past and a sideline in smuggling, Bella arouses the suspicion of the colonys leadersincluding Maite (Ayelet Zurer of Losing Alice), a council chair with big mother-goddess energy who is beloved by her people. Yet in Moonhaven, a philosophical near-future epic whose ambitious ideas compensate for sometimes-flimsy execution, characters tend to be more complicated than they seem.

All of these personalities provide ample research fodder for the shows all-seeing, yet unseen, main character: Io. Lurking beneath the moons surface and described in a commercial by its parent company Icon as humanitys self-teaching artificial intelligence, Io inspires an almost spiritual reverence on the part of the Mooners. With its sketchily explicated guidance, and after a few tragic false starts, they have constructed a society whose founding principle is interdependence. Couples raise other peoples offspring; children only encounter their biological parents at their own birth and immediately before the parents death. By obscuring bloodlines and forming unrelated families, Moonhaven incentivizes its citizens to value the collective.

Daily life in this utopia can feel generic by sci-fi standards, which is understandable in the absence of a Foundation-sized budget but also a bit of disappointment coming from creator Peter Ocko, an alum of AMCs exhilaratingly odd, prematurely canceled Lodge 49. The glimpses we get of the culture in Moonhavens six-episode first season suggest a familiar fusion of the Western canon (spot the literary references), Eastern spirituality (minus all deity worship), and techno-optimism. Because this is an earnest show set within an extremely earnest society, the dialogue can get precious. There is a lot of singing, dancing, and frolicking in bucolic bliss. Mooner fashion splits the difference between Comme des Garcons and ashram chic. Everyone seems thoroughly invested in the mission to save those unfortunate souls left on Earth. They are us. We are them, goes one of the colonys most frequently repeated maxims.

Emma McDonald in 'Moonhaven'

Szymon Lazewski/AMC

Yet theres reason to fear that the Bridge will fail. Not everyone on Earth welcomes the arrival of lunar elites. Nor are the naive youth of Moonhaven necessarily prepared for the horrors theyre sure to encounter hundreds of thousands of miles from home. Earth forges people like Bella: survivors who can throw a punch, land a kick, and sense when a persons motives are less than pure. Although Chills killer is easily apprehended in a world monitored by an omniscient AI, Bellas skills make her instrumental in the ongoing investigation by Paul and Arlo, whose goofy Sherlock-and-Watson schtick seems unlikely to detangle the knotty politics behind the murder.

Its this psychologically rich story line, which takes a few episodes to develop but dominates the back half of the season, that makes Moonhaven more thought-provoking and exciting to watch than some of its staggeringly expensive predecessors, from Westworld to Stranger Things. One compelling question is whether the lunar community has actually refined human nature to eliminate destructive traits like selfishness, or if the ease and abundance of life on the moon is simply holding those flaws in abeyance. How might Mooners navigate the harsh, kill-or-be-killed conditions on Earth? Will they compromise their collectivist values? Can Earthers really trust a privileged minority to sacrifice its security to help billions of strangers survive? Or is one character right to insist that the strong take what they want and leave the rest to suffer?

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These are the kinds of inquiries that good science fiction makes. And despite some tin-eared dialogue, Moonhaven poses them subtlya particular relief at a time when genre fiction more often screams its political allegories from computer-generated mountaintops. It doesnt gloat over the colonys multiracial families or overwhelmingly female leadership; if anything, it plays with the assumptions viewers might make about matriarchy. It doesnt linger over a nonbinary characters pronouns or explain the complete normalization of same-gender relationships. The result is a rare story with no use for identity politics. In a society that ignores external markers of difference, everyone is both an individual and an equal member of the group. Thats refreshing.

And its refreshing that Moonhaven, for all its minor flaws, trusts viewers to make our own connections between the lunar colony, what little we get to see of 23rd-century Earth, and the various geopolitical cataclysms of today. Of course the conflicts it sets up around power and privilege are relevant. But the resolutions arent simple; in a first season thats almost prefatory, apparently easy answers often lead to new, more complicated questions. Why would a person willingly leave utopia? Before you ask, make sure you understand what utopia really means.

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'Moonhaven' Is the Smart Sci-Fi Show You've Been Waiting For - TIME