To save our dying planet a utopian colony has been built on the Moon to find solutions to Earth’s apocalyptic problems, however when murder comes to Eden, Space Pilot Bela teams up with a lunar detective.

Where to start?

Ehm… (scratches head) … I know.

Nothing about AMC’s new sci-fi thriller Moonhaven makes any sense whatsoever.

OK, the whole of planet Earth is polluted, overcrowded, poisoned etc etc Soooooo…. some bright spark has decided that the best way to solve this is to terraform a great big chunk of the moon – about the size of Ireland from the look of the CGI – and set up a god-awful New Age colony, where they spend all day dancing in the park and riding wooden bicycles and talking in a sort of gnomic cod Olde Worlde language.

Aside from the dreadful dancing and the impractical bicycles (and the gnomic cod Olde Worlde language), the terraforming is amazing. This Ireland-sized lunar Garden of Eden has full Earth gravity, and is lush and green with nineteenth century parks in it, a bit like… Ireland! Which is fortunate because they managed to find somewhere in Ireland to film the series. Lucky, or what?

So, you might be thinking that the logical thing to do is to terraform the whole of the moon and then everyone can go and live in this verdant Irish utopia. Problem solved, right?

Wrong! For some reason, which evaded the logic centres of my brain, once these awful passive aggressive lunar hippies have established their colony, they are going to be sent back to smoggy old planet Earth to teach us all how to dance in the park and ride wooden bicycles and speak in a gnomic cod Olde Worlde language, and that’s going to fix things… or something.

Enter Bella (Emma MacDonald), a crusty but benign pilot who has to ferry some big knob Earth bod to this Lunar Hibernia, along with her dodgy bodyguard, in a spaceship that she controls with a pair of stainless-steel towel rings (I promise you, I’m not making any of this up). When she gets there, she befriends that chap from The Lord of the Rings (Dominic Monaghan) who is a hessian-clad comedy detective, who says gnomic things and dances during interrogations. Anyway, someone called ‘Chill’ gets murdered, and there’s some kind of conspiracy, and now everyone’s talking in gnomic cod Olde Worlde language… and at the end of a very long hour indeed, I had to go into a darkened room and lie down.

I’m desperate to find something positive to say about this. I genuinely believe that a critic should always look for something good to say if they possibly can – and I’m sure that the intentions of everyone involved are entirely laudable – but in all honesty… in this instance… I’m struggling.

Verdict: Moonhaven seems misconceived on every level. The acting is uniformly wooden, but to be fair to the cast, they are wrestling with a script so over written, buckling under endless info-dumps and backstory, not to mention the gnomic cod Olde Worlde gobbledygook, that I actually started to feel nauseous. I take no joy in saying that I want to banish Moonhaven from my memory as soon as I possibly can. 2/10

Martin Jameson