How I Met My Mother: The Dark Side of the Moon

Physically traveling back in time is a much less direct rebuke to the very idea of either progress or entropy, because awakening in a younger body is an obvious regressive fantasy.  Lukyanenko's Solnyshkin/Petrov is a dying old man rewarded with a literal second childhood, while the protagonist of Save the USSR gets to relive his teenage years with the confidence, maturity, and foreknowledge of his adult self. This adds an uncomfortable element to the fantasy, since now we find ourselves witnessing the seduction of teenage girls by a middle-aged man effectively disguised as an adolescent.

The sexual transgressions, whether teased or realized, are revealing.  Consider Claude Lévi-Strauss's classic reinterpretation of the Oedipus story in "The Structural Study of Myth."  In nearly every aspect of the story, from the parricide and the incest on the one hand to the riddle of the Sphynx on the other, Lévi-Strauss sees the centrality of kinship, whether overemphasized (incest) or underemphasized (parricide), resulting in a mythic investigation of the drama of origins:  the strange mystery of biological reproduction (the child is the product of the mother and father) and the confrontation with the opposing myth of autochthony (creatures like the Sphynx arise from the earth without parent or precursor).  The attempt to answer the question "where did my country go wrong?" (and subsequently remedy the error through personal extrahistorical intervention) is bound up with the problem of individual human origin and development (how did I get this way, and how can I be better?). 

An Oedipal undercurrent flows throughout the first season of the hit series The Dark Side of The Moon (Obratnaia storona luny 2012); so Oedipal, in fact, that it satisfies the criteria for Freud, Levi-Strauss, and even Sophocles. Dark Side of the Moon is one of the many international remakes of the British series Life on Mars (2006-2007), about a Manchester police officer who gets into a car accident in 2006 and wakes up in 1973 (Czech and South Korean versions aired in 2017 and 2018, respectively, and a Chinese series is said to be in the works). Part of the fun in Life on Mars was vicariously experiencing the hero's culture shock as he is confronted by the crude and racist police tactics of the 1970s.  Imagine how much greater the contrast is for the Russian (and, presumably, the Czech) remake:  the years represent a catastrophic rupture, with the hero traveling not only in time, but from a relatively new country to the collapsed empire from which it emerged.

The drama inherent in the Soviet collapse could have been enough of a hook, but the producers of the Russian remake added a significant personal complication.  Where Sam Tyler, the hero of Life on Mars, goes back to 1973 as himself, Moscow Police Captain Mikhail Mikhailovich Solovyov wakes up in the body of his father, Moscow Militia Captain Mikhail Ivanovich Solovyov.  This is particularly poignant, since the show begins with Solovyov and his mother sitting in a hospital corridor after Mikhail MIkhailovich, the estranged husband and father, has just died.  Mikhail Mikhailovich has always been a mystery to his son, one he will never have a chance to solve.  Or will he?

This mystery, it turns out, is as Oedipal as can be.  Oedipus, we recall, had to solve the riddle of the Sphynx ("What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the evening?"), the answer to which is "man." As a man, Oedipus is a subset of the riddle's solution, but also a particularly exemplary one, since, as Levi-Strauss points out, his biography acts out wordplay based on his name.  "Oedipus" means "swollen foot," an apt description based on the result of his foot being tied to a stake when he was exposed on a hilltop as an infant. As a result, he walks an errant path, which is true in every sense: he runs into his unknown father (and kills him), and marries his own mother.  The answer to the Riddle of the Sphynx is not just "man," but the human lifecycle itself, and Oedipus is the human lifecycle as twisted tragedy.

Solovyov, now in his father's body, cannot see himself in the mirror as his father; like Oedipus, he does not recognize his sire.  His mother thinks of him as her husband, and Solovyov's horrified rejections of his mother/wife's affections only increase his parents' estrangement.  Even worse, Mikhail Mikhailovich Solovyov is already alive in 1979, as a small boy who finds his father's behavior baffling.  In the first episode, Solovyov frantically tries to stuff his childhood self's head with useful knowledge about the future, only to confuse him completely ("Buy dollars before the ruble collapses!"). He tells his son not to get involved with Svetka, who will give him the "hussar's drip" ("gusarskii nasmork"), slang for gonorrhea.  When little Misha asks his mother about dad's case of "hussar's drip," she draws the logical conclusion.

Solovyov's interference in his own timeline is tantamount to the destruction of his parents' marriage, a combination of both Oedipal wish-fulfillment as nightmare (taking the father's place) and the child of divorced parents' guilty fantasy (that they are responsible for their parents' separation).  Every encounter Solovyov has with an adult woman, no matter how innocent, puts another nail in the coffin of his parents' marriage.  When Lyuda, his mother/wife, sees him talking with the nurse who helped him at the hospital, she tells him that their son (little Misha) will never be like him (Misha's father, or adult Misha in Misha's father's body). In fact, she says, "I'll make sure of that" ("Ia postaraius'").

Solovyov's possession of his father's body makes all his interactions with Lyuda impossible. The Oedipal taboo has taken firm hold of his adult consciousness precisely at the point when his physicality and living situation would make breaking the taboo conventional and expected. Meanwhile, his meetings with Lena, young Misha's teacher, are complicated by the same dynamic, but with the valences reversed:  as he himself informs her, little Misha has (had) a crush on her, and we can see that those feelings live on in the adult Solovyov.  Lena, of course, could harbor no such romantic sentiments for a prepubescent boy, but finds Solovyov's father irresistible.    

Let us dispense with the niceties that Oedipal language affords us:  the Solovyov family is fucked up when we meet them, and The Dark Side of  the Moon's first season, in the guise of time-traveling police procedural about catching a crazed killer, is the story of how Solovyov himself fucks up his family (the metaphor works in both English and Russian, if somewhat differently).  The Dark Side of the Moon is a remake,  but the incestuous, dysfunctional family drama is entirely the invention of the Russian series' creators.  What does it add, and what does it have to do with the historical drama that the time traveling metaphor affords?

Surely, it is about more than mere paradox.  Time travel paradoxes are a dime-a-dozen, as are cautionary tales about leaving history alone.  In any case, the radical indeterminacy of time travel as a plot device in The Dark Side of the Moon does not make the series a compelling vehicle for such messages. As in Life on Mars, the show never lets the viewer be sure just how real the past in which the hero has found himself actually is;  repeated attempts by doctors to contact a comatose Solovyov in 2011 could mean that the entire series is nothing but a hallucination.  And if it is not a hallucination, what is the point in highlighting the dangers of temporal interference if the hero has no control of his comings and goings?