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Hard Sun premiere recap: ‘The Sun, The Moon, The Truth’

By Kelly Shanaphy

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There’s something impressive about how boring “The Sun, The Moon, The Truth” manages to be despite the interesting premise of Hard Sun.

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What started out as a neat concept quickly falls apart as the series chooses to push the apocalypse into the background. While Agyness Deyn and Jim Sturgess are both impressive, their characters aren’t well defined outside of typical cliches.

From the opening sequence, it’s clear the audience is supposed to sympathize with Deyn’s broken detective, Elaine Renko. Her son, Daniel, attacks her with a knife before setting the house on fire with the hopes of killing her. On the other side, Sturgess’ Charlie Hicks does the opposite as a womanizing cop. He’s cheating on his pregnant spouse with his dead partner’s wife. There’s almost nothing redeeming about Hicks throughout “The Sun, The Moon, The Truth” since he walks through the episode with an unearned swagger.

In Hard Sun, The two are thrown together to investigate the death of a young hacker. Things take a turn for the worse when they end up catching the guy’s partner trying to sell an important government file. In what could be a cool chase scene, Hard Sun chooses to have the two catch the culprits right away.  On their way back to the precinct, neither Renko or Hicks seem to notice all of the new “diversion” signs that have popped up on their route. Both react even slower when a mysterious car shows up behind them and assassins shoot the suspects in the back seat.

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However, the most ridiculous scene in “The Sun, The Moon, The Truth” is the chase scene that takes place between the MI5 agents and the protagonists. Armed with only batons, the two are surrounded by about twenty highly trained agents who choose to approach them slowly. Why wouldn’t they charge the cops? Not to mention, how would Hicks manage to break into a car and hotwire it before any agent could stop him? Hard Sun tries to explain away these flaws by having the head MI5 agent say “they handled it poorly,” but it just feels like poor writing.

Hard Sun is going to have to work hard to make Hicks seem like more than just a coward. In the final moments of “The Sun, The Moon, The Truth,” he wants to hand over the hard drive detailing the apocalyptic event to ensure his family’s safety. Renko keeps a steady head and knows that giving away their only leverage only makes them expendable. In an attempt to mess with her, he brings up her son’s hatred for her as well as the rape which produced him.

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While she doesn’t give in to his pettiness, Renko does give him a beating before making a break for it to find a newspaper willing to publish the story.

Hulu and BBC co-created this series which is probably why it feels like it’s being pulled in two different directions. The latter wanted a procedural and the former wanted something edgy like Luther. Sadly, the final product suffers from the indecisions from its creative team despite Agyness Deyn’s impressive performance.

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