An Officer of the Law

Science and geopolitics create the setting for Season Two of Dark Side of the Moon, but they rarely rank among its hero's top concerns.  At heart,  the show is still a police procedural.  As in the first season, many of the legal violations that Solovyov encounters are  difficult for the contemporary viewer to call "crimes." Take, for example, the  store managers who manipulate the algorithm that determines eligibility for purchasing new furniture; because of them, some select customers can buy a couch in two months rather than eight.  Certainly, there is an element of corruption involved (the managers are probably accepting bribes), but the algorithm itself is hard to take seriously. As always, Solovyov might have an opinion, but it does not affect the performance of his duties. His willingness to enforce the law--any law--makes him a good cop, but why are his actions so acceptable within the framework of the series?  

Solovyov's refusal to engage with the ideology behind his country's laws, whether in the 1979 Soviet Union, the 2011 Russian Federation, or the 2011 USSR, makes him the perfect hero for the twenty-first century's second decade.  One of the great successes of Putinism has been its ability to push back any cognitive dissonance one might have about unconditional love for the Motherland in any of its historical iterations.   The Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation are all avatars of the hero of the country's history: the state.  Its laws and actions may be justice or unjust, but that is not up to the individual to decide.  

Here the imperatives of the genre come close to clashing with the overriding logic of the State.  As an action hero, Solovyov must make decisions that will almost always be correct, and as a police officer, he must uphold the law, but as an accidental time traveler who inadvertently disrupts history, he exemplifies the dangers of individual improvisation.  Upon his return to the proper timeline in the last few minutes of the series, Solovyov asks a passer by, "Who's the president? Putin?" and gets the response, "No, Medvedev!"  The answer is correct, and it does not matter that, after 32 episodes of time travel, Solovyov forgot that Medvedev was (technically) running the country.  The Russian Federation's leadership matters to him only to the extent that the leader is whoever the leader is supposed to be.