That '70s Show
The stakes of the Solovyov family drama lie outside the science fiction genre, because the problem is fantasy itself. Here I am deliberately conflating "fantasy" in the Freudian sense (a desire that is entertained and perhaps simultaneously suppressed) and in terms of genre (stories with a fantastic premise). Solovyov the adult is forced to act out the fantasies of Solovyov the child, and as a result, putting the grown-up Solovyov in a strangely childlike position (it doesn't help that the actor is constantly contorting his face into bug-eyed confusion). By going back in time, Solovyov is enacting inherently regressive fantasies (about his mother, his father, his teacher). Technically an adult, he becomes a child's projection of an adult's behavior ("When I grow up I'm going to be a militia captain and date my teacher'). In The Odyssey, Telemachus remarks that "it is a wise child that knows his own father." Misha never understood Mikhail Ivanovich, and now that the child has become the father (to the man?), he gains practical knowledge of the events of his family's rupture, but remains in the dark about his father's inner life, to which he has no access now that he has taken over his body. When he looks in the mirror, it is his own reflection that looks back at him: he literally cannot see his father.
This is all well and good, but to care about Solovyov's time-displaced Oedipal angst might require that we care about Solovyov, or at lease to argue for the psychological complexity of the show's characters or the depth and nuance of its writing and direction. On those terms, The Dark Side of the Moon provides too weak a foundation to support a theory-heavy exegesis. It stands out as one of the better serials produced in the beginning of the Teens, but as police dramas go, it's not exactly Russia's answer to The Wire.
What, then, do Solovyov and his family tell us about the show's central conceit, that is, about the immersion of a present, post-Soviet consciousness into the Soviet past? If the time travel is viewed as a metaphor (where it certainly functions better than as an actual science-fictional trope), any possible cautionary tale would be about a particular kind of preoccupation with the past, an interrogation of the nostalgic impulses that dominated so much of Russian mass culture in the first Putinist decade.
On that level, The Dark Side of the Moon is deceptively seductive. Many episodes include a moment when Solovyov happens to run into a future luminary under humorous circumstances. Whether it's meeting future shlock pop star Filip Kirkorov as a little boy expressing contempt for pop diva Alla Pugacheva (whom he will grow up to marry), or interrupting the filming of a Soviet adaptation of Astrid Lindgren's Karlson on the Roof series (a beloved children's franchise so ubiquitous in the Soviet Union and its successor states that it may as well be Russian), The Dark Side of the Moon provides a steady supply of just the sort of nostalgia-tinged easter eggs to satisfy the tourist/viewer's demand for recognizably dated realia.
But one of the best easter eggs appearing in the second episode mixes humor and politics in a fashion that should give the viewer pause. Solovyov stands by as a young woman breaks up with her boyfriend, who protests that one day, he will accomplish great things. She calls him "Khodor," which, in Russia in 2011 is less likely to be associated with the Game of Thrones character than with the exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky spent a decade in prison on what are widely considered politically-motivated bribery charges. Upon his release in 2013, he devoted himself to funding opposition and civil society initiatives in the Russian Federation.
When the episode aired, Khodorkovsky was still incarcerated, and at the time the story takes place, he would have been 16, with no legitimate reason to imagine himself as either a rich man or a political prisoner. Only Solovyov (and the viewer) can see the future oligarch in the form of the gangly boy. Trying to reassure a heartbroken Khodorkovsky, Solovyov tells him, "Everything is going to work out fine for you. [Beat.] Well, almost everything."
It's clever and funny, but it is also ethically complicated. As a joke in 2011, Solovyov's remark is a perfect example of the way what could be a hot-button political issue gets addressed on state television. The moment relies on our knowledge of Khodorkovsky's career without in any way commenting on either the validity of the prosecution against him or the legality with which he (and all the other oligarchs) amassed their fortunes. Between 1979 and 2011, things just happen to Khodorokovsky; his wealth and incarceration, like Kirkorov's marriage to Pugacheva, are simply recognizable milestones on the road from the Brezhnev era to the Medvedev years.
There is nothing that Solovyov could reasonably have been expected to do in order to change Khodorkovsky's fate (presuming that this would be a desirable goal), so this scene is simply one of many in which Solovyov as the viewer's stand-in is not faced with any real-time ethical dilemma. The fact that the show refrains from taking any kind of stand on Khodorkovsky at all is, in itself, a decision with ethical ramifications: is this a matter on which one can really simply be "neutral"? The reasonable fear of political repercussions for taking such a stand in 2011 in many ways gets the creators of the show off the hook--who would really expect to turn on Channel One and watch a fantastical police procedural defend the country's most famous political prisoner?
But there is another aspect of this scene that must be kept in mind: Solovyov's role here is simply that of random observer. He is not operating in his professional capacity as an officer of the Moscow militia. Elsewhere, however, his encounters with potentially loaded historical moments unfold as part of his job. This raises a question that the show studiously avoids: what does it mean to enforce the law under a completely different political system? And are these the laws that should be enforced?