A Hero of Someone Else's Time

Perhaps due to its roots in the original Life on Mars, The Dark Side of the Moon stands out not just for the close attention to family dynamics, but for the relatively low stakes of the entire first season.  By "low stakes" I do not mean that the events of the series are inconsequential--far from it.  After all, Solovyov's interference in his own timeline creates the alternate reality that is the setting of season two.  But this is an accident unrelated to the overall plot of season one, and is, in fact, a rather arbitrary consequence of the series’ events.  Unlike so many other Time Crashers, Solovyov is not on a mission of historical import; he is not intervening in a battle, preventing a war, averting a catastrophe, or advising a leader.  Arguably, this is a more appropriate use of the Brezhnev era setting than turning it into the last chance to save the USSR (as it functions in so many other cases).   To the extent that this "Period of Stagnation" has taken a nostalgic hold in the popular consciousness, it is precisely as a time when an ordinary, uneventful life was possible.  Where dissidents were stymied by the near impossibility of inciting any kind of meaningful change,  many post-Soviet Russians find real comfort.

The low stakes are also a function of the show's generic hybridity.  Like its prototype, The Dark Side of the Moon slowly advances its fantastic premise over the course of a season whose individual episodes function primarily according to the conventions of the police procedural.  For many Time Crashers, the trip to the past is the moment when they trade in their dull, everyday lives for a heroic role that could previously only have been the stuff of daydreams: the office worker becomes an action hero.  But Solovyov is a police detective--he already is an action hero.  The series continually highlights the differences between Soviet-era militia practices and twenty-first-century police work, but the comparison rests on the fact that, by and large, Solovyov is doing the same job in each time period.

The Dark Side of the Moon repeatedly teases the viewers with the possibility that the whole time-displacement storyline takes place entirely in his head; in 1979, Solovyov gets brief communications from doctors and friends sitting by his comatose body in 2012.  It is no stretch to imagine the show as  an expression of Solovyov's fantasy.  But the fantasy is primarily personal, centered around his childhood and his parents.  More often than not, Time Crasher tales are personal in an entirely different way, functioning as heroic fantasy projections involving an authorial stand-in.  If, as I suggested earlier, Time Crasher stories are fan fiction whose fandom is history, their heroes often resemble a familiar fan fiction type known as the "Mary Sue."

Mary Sue  is the teenage protagonist of the 1973 Star Trek fan fiction parody "A Trekkie's Tale," written by fanzine editor Paula Smith.  The youngest officer in Starfleet, Mary Sue solves every problem she faces over the course of the ten-paragraph story, even taking over the bridge from Captain Kirk while he runs out to get them coffee.  When she dies, she is surrounded by all the show's protagonists, "all weeping unashamedly at the loss of her beautiful youth and youthful beauty, intelligence, capability and all around niceness. Even to this day her birthday is a national holiday on the Enterprise."  Smith came up with Mary Sue in response to the countless story submissions she received featuring protagonists who were idealized self-insertions of the author into a beloved fan universe.  The name quickly became a term for this type of character,  with fans simultaneously embracing it as the recognition of a familiar, widely-loathed trope while also expressing concern that it could easily be used for the sexist dismissal of any competent female character.

Time Crashers rarely match the classic Mary Sue in sheer insufferability, probably because their effectiveness under their new circumstances owes less to their innate superiority than to the power granted by hindsight.  Coming from the future, they have the advantage thanks to knowledge of the past and, occasionally, either a greater facility with technology or the assistance of the near-magical laptops that somehow keep working in their new, inhospitable environments.  Their superiority is almost democratic; virtually anyone who stayed awake during history class and is also handy with tools could do just as well.   

The classic Mary Sue is, as her her names suggests, female, reflecting fan fiction's largely female demographic;  Time Crashers, by contrast, skew male.  There are, of course, plenty of male Mary Sues (referred to by various masculine names, such as "Gary Stu").  But the self-insertion practiced by Time Crasher authors need not be a matter of self-aggrandizement;  the protagonists of To Save the USSR and The Generation of Winners  are more like the passive heroes of Russian fairy tales, who need magical helpers in order to save the day.  As heroes, they represent the triumph of a particular kind of male mediocrity.

In these Time Crasher stories, the protagonist can be both authorial stand-in and cypher, since the true hero is more setting than person. The protagonist exists in order to allow the reader's consciousness to move back in time with him,  looking at the past from the privileged vantage point of the present in the hopes of intervening in the course of history.  The Dark Side of the Moon frames its hero's involvement in history as more than simply the solution of an intellectual puzzle, downplaying the historical questions in favor a personal, Oedipal soap opera that, in turn, comments on the historical machinations of the Time Crasher narrative.  Rewriting the past is tantamount to rewriting the self, hence the prevalence of the grandfather paradox in more traditional time travel stories.