Review: _Bodies_

[jducoeur]

My morning-exercise watching for the past couple of weeks was the Netflix limited series Bodies, loosely based on the Si Spencer graphic novel of the same name. It's solidly good and not well-known, so worth an overview.

Mild spoilers for the first episode or so, but I'll avoid getting into any serious ones.

tl;dr -- four times, four detectives, one case that twines around all of them more intimately than they realize. Worth a watch.

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The story features four London police detectives, in four different years, each a bit of an outlier in their own way:

• In 1890, Alfred Hillinghead is a good upstanding family man, who is so deeply in the closet that he can't even see the door from where he is.
• In 1941, Charles Whiteman is treated with some suspicion by the rest of the force, partly because they (correctly) suspect that he's on the take, but mostly because he is Jewish.
• In 2023, we have Shahara Hasan. I will note that the series does not get into the modern-day tensions around being a female probably-Muslim woman of color on the force, but she's a bit busy being the most central character in the story.
• In the crypto-fascist quasi-utopia of 2053, Iris Maplewood is (more or less) a true believer, whose spinal implants let her walk despite her family's genetic issues.

(There is one more central character, but even naming them would be a pretty major spoiler.)

The story starts on the day when each of them finds a body in Longharvest Lane, a back alley in London. The same body -- naked, with a strange tattoo on his wrist, shot through the eye.

I will note: this tale is less a whodunnit -- we eventually get to that, but it's not the heart of the story -- that it is "WTF is going on here?" The setup is fairly unsettling to each of them on their own, even before the historical parallels start to come to light and the over-arching plot reveals itself. These folks dig in deeply and do their research, and do gradually start to realize that something larger is going on.

It's not a major spoiler to say that there is some time-travel involved, because seriously: how could this story not involve time travel? But this isn't a Doctor Who tale with people zipping back and forth -- rather, it's a mystery with existential implications, playing out over the better part of two centuries, with the detectives slowly piecing things together from the shreds of information they have.

It starts out looking like this is going to be four parallel and very similar stories, but that's very much not the case. Each person's situation is very different, and how they relate to the situation is very different: each one turns out to be personally involved with the case. (This does eventually make sense, if you buy the premise of the story.)

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The story is pretty tight. It's a complete one-and-done novel, starting out slow and mysterious in the first half and going to roller-coaster speed in the second. (There are a couple of cutesy WTF details at the very end, with hints that nothing is ever completely finished, but I don't think there's any likelihood of continuing: this story is done.)

It reminds me inescapably of Dark (which came out a few years ago), but it's a much more concise tale, and not as nihilistically bleak as Dark. It feels like it's going wind up similarly doomed somewhere around the sixth episode -- fortunately, it's an eight-episode story (about an hour each), and manages to pull out a largely satisfying conclusion.

The writing and acting are quite solid on all parts, and that helps underscore that this isn't simply one story being told four times: our protagonists are all very different, and each has their own story to tell here, whether it be Alfred finding love (and trying to keep that from destroying his life and family), Charles figuring out what he really cares about, or Iris slowly coming to understand the choices that her world was built upon. (Shahara kind of has the curse of the protagonist: she is so busy with plot that she has a bit less time for character-building than anybody else.)

Cinematography is important here, and well-done. The story bounces back and forth between times pretty freely, but each one looks slightly different, with 1890 told in slightly sepia shades and 1941 in blues that almost feel slightly black-and-white. You're pretty much never left scratching your head over when you are, and all four stories proceed forward linearly, so it's nowhere near as confusing as Dark sometimes was. (One of the later episodes ties the whole thing together -- by that point, you already have enough information to have pieced it together yourself, but it's a helpful confirmation of what's going on at the big-picture level.)

The time-travel model does not quite work logically. It's not bad as these things go, I'd say above-average, but there are some aspects that didn't quite work IMO. That's not a harsh criticism -- there are relatively few time-travel stories that are completely internally consistent -- but if such things matter to you, that's worth keeping in mind.

Content warnings for homophobia and anti-semitism, and moderate television violence -- nothing terribly gory, but folks do get shot and stabbed, and there's some blood. Also nudity and sexual situations: not a ton of that, but Alfred's sexuality is pretty central to his story. And some implied mistreatment of a child, not on camera but it's important backstory.

Overall, I liked it quite a bit. It starts as a "WTF?", becomes a mystery, and gradually shades into a thriller as everyone figures out at least their individual angles on what's going on and try to do something about it. It's highly character-driven throughout -- while the plot is a bit twisty, it's primarily about these people and their individual stories and motivations, wrapped in a science-fiction-tinged suspense story. Not at the "You must get Netflix in order to see this" level, but if you have the service, it's worth putting on your list.

Comments

[danabren]

So THIS is the show that everyone is sharing images of but not naming, thank you!

[mermaidlady]

We enjoyed it quite a bit.