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-…