Back to the Radiant Future
When Mikhail MIkhalovich Solovyov awakens in the first episode of Dark Side of the Moon's second season, his 1979 odyssey is finally over. But the story is only beginning, or really, beginning again. In real time, three years have passed since the first season's premiere, while on the show, Solovyov has jumped 32 years into the future/his original present. The show has been rebooted, not once, but twice. The first season ended with a cliffhanger: Solovyov, who had spent the first season in the body of his father, tells the doctor who address him that he is not Mikhail Mikhailovich (the Solovyov of 2011), but Mikhail Ivanovich (Solovyov's father, who died in the very first episode of the series). The scene is set for a new round of disorientation, this time a form of future shock: how will Solovyov pere react to the twenty-first century world of Solovyov fils?
Unfortunately for any viewers who might have spent almost three years waiting on the edge of their seats to find out, this question is left unanswered. During the series hiatus, the producers must have rejected this conceit for their sequel season. In Episode One of Season Two, Solovyov repeats the claim that he is MIkhail Ivanovich, but immediately retracts it. Mikhail Ivanovich remains stubbornly dead. Instead of enacting a mere inversion of the first season, now Solovyov slowly comes to realize that the 2011 to which he has returned is not the same as the 2011 he had left after his initial car accident. He is still in the militia, but he is a beat cop instead of an officer. Unmarried in the original timeline, now he is separated from his wife, who is raising his daughter with her new lover. His daughter's schoolteacher is Katya (his love interest from Season One), and the red-headed murderer he chased into the past now teaches at the same school. But the biggest difference, of course, is that the Soviet Union never collapsed.
One might expect that, after Season One, Solovyov would adjust to his new world like an experienced Time Crasher, but instead, he makes the same rookie mistakes, repeatedly exposing his ignorance to his colleagues and family and letting them chalk it up to a post-accident concussion. As in the first season, the producers treat the viewers to numerous in-jokes and easter eggs. In the first season, when Solovyov insists on finding his mobile phone, a doctor offers him a toy telephone on wheels and a string. Now, everyone has a phone, but the Soviet-made phones are oversized and made of wood. Muscovites still watch the TV show "Dom-2" (literally, "House 2"), but instead of the familiar "Big Brother" reality show clone, the Soviet version is a documentary about groups of young people building actual houses. And when a case brings Solovyov in contact with an eccentric beekeeper, the man turns out to be named "Sergei Sobyanin" (in our world, the mayor of Moscow since 2010).
These trivial examples are dwarfed by the scope of the USSR's transformation since 1979 (when Solovyov was in the past) or since the late 1980s (when perestroika apparently never materialized). From news reports and throwaway lines, we learn that there is a bridge to Alaska under construction in the Aleutian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), that Finland is the 23rd SSR, and that, thanks to a deal signed by the "Baron of the Gypsies" making him a "Baron of the USSR(!)," the Gypsy Soviet Socialist Republic brings the overall count up to 26 (as opposed to the historical 15). It is not enough for the USSR to fail to collapse; it has expanded both in territory and hegemonic influence.
As in the first season, Solovyov has to relearn a great deal about the profession to which he has devoted his entire adult life. The crime rate is apparently even lower than it was in the 1970s, but with little evidence of a significantly repressive state security apparatus ferreting out free thinkers and suppressing dissent. True, some of the system's success has dystopian overtones. The militia is completely unprepared to hunt a serial killer such as the redhead because they solved their "maniac" problem years ago. Children with mental problems are detected early and "fixed." Overall, the militia seems to have degraded in the absence of any real challenge. Solovyov meets with indignation when he casually reminds his superior that, in an investigation, you always toss out your first theory; any good militiaman knows that the first theory is always right.
For Solovyov, at least, the flaws in the Soviet 2011 are hardly deal breakers. This revitalized Soviet Union is closer to a utopia than the country ever came, even if minor imperfections help make it seem more grounded. By making this brave new world feel somehow lived in (lived, in fact, in Minsk, since Belarus does a good job standing in for a twenty-first-century USSR without any special effects at all), Dark Side of the Moon Season 2 offers an extended twist on some of the phenomena we've already seen in this book. The series projects the past onto the present without ignoring the passage of time. Dark Side of the Moon presents its alternate Soviet Union as a kind of conditional-subjunctive nostalgia.