Bryan Fuller has become one of the modern masters of the cult following. Fuller has been writing for television for nearly 20 years, cutting his teeth on Star Trek: Voyager before creating his own shows — shows typically known for both their quality and lack of commercial success. When the website HitFix did their bracket of the greatest cult favorite TV shows that were canceled too soon, Fuller had three of the 32 entries: Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me, and Wonderfalls. Fuller’s current show, NBC’s Hannibal, is already his longest-running at 30 episodes.
High Moon doesn’t belong on the same level as Fuller’s previous underappreciated works, but it’s still a shame the project didn’t get a chance to grow. Fuller developed High Moon as a pilot for the Syfy network, which chose not to pick up the show but did air the pilot as a TV movie on Monday night. High Moon was ostensibly based on the entertaining kids’ book The Lotus Caves by John Christopher, but as Fuller freely admitted in interviews, the similarities between show and book are scarce. The Lotus Caves was about two boys growing up on the moon in the future who discover an alien plant and mysterious caves. High Moon pretty much just takes the mysterious plant on the future moon and ditches everything else.
The strategy allowed Fuller a lot of room to build his own world, and he made that world suitably complex. Within the runtime of only around 90 minutes, Fuller managed a weave involving a lunar penalty colony, complex lunar mining for futuristic tech, an evil mega-corporation, cyborg and robot technology, interesting relationships, and a tense international conflict between three superpower countries — all while only getting to tease the alien lifeform(s).
The pilot/TV movie was certainly not perfect. The dialogue is silly at times, and multiple characters seemed to play too closely to type, particularly the overbearing general (Peter Macon) and his rebel daughter (the gorgeous Dana Davis). The relationship that we’re supposed to invest the most in is between brothers Ian (Chris Diamantopoulos) and Marty (Jake Sandvig). That, too, felt a little too familiar — the older responsible/disapproving sibling and the younger screw-up — but Diamantopoulos and Sandvig sell it well.
The spotlight is really stolen by the enigmatic Stanislav, played with overflowing charm by Jonathan Tucker (above). Tucker starred in a movie years ago called 100 Girls, which I loved as a teen but have no idea if it holds up. Here, he’s largely responsible for making High Moon as good as it is, with a highly layered character who’s full of surprises. His romance with the Russian officer Trofim (played by accomplished voice actor Kirby Morrow) had the highest potential if the pilot had become a show.
High Moon worked reasonably well as a TV movie, though not surprisingly, we’re left with many unanswered questions. The stunning Charity Wakefield gave us an intriguing villain in Eve; she, too, was robbed by the lack of a series order, as that character’s motivations and plans could have used more exploration. And of course, there are a lot of sci-fi elements that are set up but not fully delved into; so much of the pilot revolves around the fun political intrigues that the big reveal of the actual caves from the book isn’t until the last scene. Fuller has other mysteries, with weird eyes and mysterious Indians, that are introduced but will now remain unanswered.
As other reviews have said, High Moon is just fun, despite its flaws. Sure, the dialogue and type characters can induce some mild eye-rolling, but that somehow manages to be part of the pilot/movie’s charm. It manages to create a serious and complicated political/economic conflict while also managing to not really take itself seriously at all — there’s a scene with a giant robot dinosaur on the moon, after all. I’m not sure there would have been enough there for a long-running series, which is the one résumé item Fuller is still searching for, but I think it could have made for a killer miniseries. And a miniseries was at one point an option in what sounds like the development process from hell, but it instead became a series pilot, which in turn got thrown out as a standalone TV movie.
I suppose we’re lucky to have seen even that much, since failed pilots almost never see the light of day. Still though, it was hard not to watch High Moon and think about what could have been — which unfortunately, is nothing new for Bryan Fuller’s shows.