AMC Plus’ Moonhaven is homework from the future

polygon.com:

It is by no means a sin to open your TV series with an on-screen text offering that’s known as an info-dump. For as unappetizing as that pair of words may be, excellent stories have begun this way before (“Oceans are now battlefields,” anyone?) and will again. What seems ill-advised is to front-load your series with enough textual density that a humble television critic will be compelled to rewind and read your info-dump a second time before shrugging and deciding to plunge ahead. I’ll catch up, that humble television critic might think. Has anyone ever been so naive?

It’s thus a worthwhile exercise simply to try and summarize the premise of the new AMC Plus series Moonhaven. After all, it’s essentially all the series does across its six-episode first season — explain itself and its world repeatedly while elucidating remarkably little. This much is clear: The year is 2201, and Earth has become nigh-uninhabitable. A century ago, the moon was terraformed and colonized, with that colony being observed and managed by history’s most advanced artificial intelligence, an entity known as Io (or is it I.O.? This is the least of the series’ baffling ambiguities). The purpose of the mission has been to perfect human culture so that the lunar colonists can eventually return to Earth armed with new technologies and social norms that will transform civilization and ensure the survival of the species.

The story’s preamble alone could provide enough narrative grist for at least a feature film, but so far we’ve only covered that textual info-dump. The series’ main action picks up with the murder of a young “Mooner” (Nina Barker-Francis), a virtually unheard-of occurrence in the utopian colony — not only is this a place of peace, but