Time-Travel Meets Dystopia

The power of speculative fiction to ask "What if?"

Even in 2019, when it was originally released, Netflix’s In the Shadow of the Moon seemed prescient.

In the opening scene, a title card tells us our story starts in Philadelphia, our nation’s birthplace, in 2024. We see an empty office, bland and unremarkable. The camera pans and we notice there’s a breeze in the room. Odd. Highrise offices generally don’t have windows that open.

Then we see the windows have all been broken. The camera pulls us, almost against our will, closer to the blown-out windows so we can see the devastation below. A hole in the pavement, in the buildings. Smoke. Sirens. And then, a partially burned American flag falling from above.

But it’s not quite an American flag. The number of stars… is wrong.

With that shot, we are hurled back to 1988 to meet Thomas, a young beat cop in Philly. This is the story we were promised in the blurb Netflix provided. The summary promised a story of a detective who tracks a female serial killer over decades. But the image of the bomb-ravaged building and that wrong American flag hovers over this scene. We now know this is not a regular serial killer-cop drama.

The serial killer in question is unique because she is female. More so because she is black. Either of those aspects makes her rare in the criminal world. Both of them combined make her a unicorn.

No one is sure how or why she selects her victims. They are normal people, working their jobs. And it is not until much later in the film we notice they are all white.

So when Thomas tracks her down, ending her reign of terror, that should be the end of the story. And it is… for nine years. But then, the killing happens again. Is it a copycat? No. It is the same woman. The woman Thomas killed nine years earlier.

Part of the power of this movie is how thoroughly it catches you off guard. But as the story progresses and you follow Thomas in his obsession, understanding it while seeing the wreckage it is making of his life, something else creeps up on you. The terrible sense that you are watching our actual current history in real time.

In the Shadow of the Moon predicted the rise of racial animus and the violence that occurs as a result of it. The writers saw what was coming and the film served as a warning.

Like all good scifi, the movie asks us to consider if we had access to the technology our “killer” has… what would we do with it? Would you take life to save life? These moral questions are never easy and this movie doesn’t take the easy way out by making it seem as if they are.

Part of the reason scifi and other speculative fiction is so well-loved is because it asks us to consider those hard questions. In an era of reboots and sequels and CGI nonsense, Netflix has brought us some great scifi that makes you think and touches your heart. It is this powerful appeal to emotion that holds me back from giving more spoilers.

It’s because I want you to watch this one for yourself. To wonder if the worst for our country is yet to come. Or perhaps to resolve that, in real life, we won’t need time travel to prevent a catastrophic collapse.