What's Up Y'all!?
Happy Sunday! Hope everyone had an amazingly stellar week! This week I'd like to welcome James, Lenyn, Vera, Joy, Juan, and Mainak to the Cavalcade! Thank you very much for being part of the Cavalcade! And Happy Labor Day everyone! Real talk when I was growing up I really thought Labor Day was a holiday in appreciation of the struggles women go through giving birth. I thought that whole women don't wear white after Labor Day thing was part and parcel of what the holiday was commemorating. I really thought this for the longest time, for years and years, hahaha! But now I know what Labor Day is really about and I'm with it although I still think the holiday could celebrate both the history of labor struggles and appreciate the struggles of women giving birth, lol!
Anywho loool, a lot of interesting reviews for you guys to look forward to! Today's review is of a streaming television show! I would like to review more TV shows in the future, but we'll see, there's still a lot of interesting movies out there to review as well! I guess that's all for the spiel this week. As always links to the MRC Sign-Up Form, Cavalcade Archive, Cavalcade Categories, and the MRC website password can be found below! And as always any feedback, recommendations, or any thoughts is always awesome and much appreciated! On to the Cavalcade!
(Song Of The Week: "Wouldn't It Be Nice" by The Beach Boys - The Chipper Fresco remix! I thought this laid back yet electro-infused remix of a legendarily classic song would be a good choice what with the kind of 1960s theme of today's review!)
In 2022's AMC+ streaming series Moonhaven [link to the trailer. The first episode is also available to view online for free. And the entire series can be binge watched through a free-trial of AMC+.] the new age commune finally gets it's long heralded due. Oh the 1960s. San Francisco, yuppies, hippies, Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, freak-outs, LSD, MK-Ultra, Easy Rider, and the moon landing. What an age. But then came the 1970s and the Alex P. Keaton Reagan 80s. But for a few, that hippie vision of serene and peaceful living, of good times, and simple joys, never gave way to anything else.
And now AMC+ has gifted those remaining true believers with the depiction of the new age hippie commune that they have always dreamt of. Imagine your typical 1960s hippie commune. But then populate it with literally the best and brightest shining stars of gifted children found all over and across this vast planet earth. Then give those incredibly intelligent people an actual 100 years to work out all the kinks in their new society. And remove them so completely from the turmoils of an Earth riddled with man-made disasters and conflicts, that you actually place this new commune on the moon. What would you get? You would get the new age society to end all new age societies, the one commune to rule them all, hah! The commune all the hippies since the 1960s have been waiting for. Heck, since John Maynard Keynes wrote The General Theory Of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936.
But how can Moonhaven be described really, as a series? It's a science fiction detective mystery thriller. In Moonhaven's science fiction imagining of the future, the earth is plagued with environmental problems, wars, disease, and strife. To solve these issues, a long time ago a council made-up of the world's governments punted. They couldn't agree on any solutions, so they shoved off a compromise to the far-off future. It was decided that those aforementioned best and brightest would be sent to a newly terraformed portion of the moon to interact with an incredibly advanced artificial intelligence named "I.O." and for the settlers and the artificial intelligence (which would be monitoring and learning from the settler's behavior) to jointly create a new form of society, a society whose design would eventually be instituted back on Earth, thus solving all of current (future) Earth's intractable problems.
Well, the 100 years have passed and now the time for the Moonhaven settlers (at this point generations deep in both progeny and societal designing) to return to Earth and institute their wide-reaching changes to human civilization, is fast approaching. Obviously, there is a lot of tension, disagreement, and uncomfortable feelings about this now quickly nearing point of transition, which was birthed a long time ago by fallible humans who were attempting to shove difficult decisions way off into the far temporal distance.
The protagonist of Moonhaven is Bella Sway, a space pilot, "Earther," and veteran of resource based wars on Earth. She ends up on Moonhaven because she was chosen as a last-minute replacement pilot for the head of Earth's transition team, who is traveling to the moon colony to initiate the process of sending the first wave of "Mooners" back to Earth. In reality, Bella is also using this opportunity to perform an undercover smuggling run of a medicinal psychotropic drug produced by the inhabitants of Moonhaven as a favor for her black-market associates. However, Bella gets entangled with a Moonhaven police detective named Paul Serno (Dominic Monaghan) who is investigating a recent murder that occurred within the colony when it is revealed that Bella's mother was a Moonhaven settler and that the murder victim was Bella's blood (as opposed to water) sister.
I recommend this series as a quick binge-watch, it's only 6 episodes, and has already completed airing. It's kind of quirky fun. It's just odd and bizarrely enchanting to see how strange and off-beat the Moonhaven inhabitants are. And their technological capabilities are quite astonishing and oftentimes indistinguishable from magic because they are simply so implausibly advanced. But what is truly so amusing about this show is how much the Moonhaven settlers resemble a kind of "post-post modern" hippie commune, with their new fangled wellness based vocabulary and speaking patterns, and just their optimistic outlook about life and their society in general. They really are true believers in the idea that they have created a society worthy of emulation by the beleaguered inhabitants of the once mighty Earth.
I applaud this series' creators for having crafted an intriguing and deeply thought-out future world which they allow the show's viewers only partial glimpses of, I'm sure partly due to budgetary constraints and partly to sustain and prolong a sense of wonder within the viewers of Moonhaven. By the end of this six episode first season, I was into Moonhaven not as some kind of amazing high-art or literature like television. But because it was so eccentrically and kookily imaginative in an oddball way and even thought-provoking while also just being a fun, and laid-back, enjoyable show to casually watch that wasn't too edge-of-your seat thrilling, or too contemplative or philosophical, it was just a pleasant show that seemed to hit a line drive straight into left field for a couple of bases.
You can sign up for a free-trial of AMC+ right now and binge watch the first season of Moonhaven (it has been renewed for a second) and I give this show a hearty recommendation. I wonder where it will go in it's sophomore outing, the series has left itself a lot of interesting threads to pull on, and it could go in a lot of different directions, with a more grounded, reality-based approach, or it could focus more on politics, or it could even veer off into more stranger sci-fi. I for one, am excited to find out, whenever the second season of Moonhaven does end up rolling out!
Well that's it for this week's Cavalcade. I hope everyone has an amazing week! As always any feedback, recommendations, or any thoughts is always awesome and much appreciated! Much more next week and much more after that!
Peace Y'all!
-Nandhish
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