It was better than the average Netflix series — which isn’t saying much — but also has a better than average time travel story line, so definitely recommended. The premise, which you get from the promo, is that the same dead body shows up in the same London alley in four different time periods; the following few bullet points have mild spoilers, so, caveat lector:
- In the way it deals with travel through time it most directly resembles Predestination (2014), and if I were to directly compare the two I would say that Bodies makes the point that both of them are attempting to make in a much better way, and adds a few more points that are as important if not more so.
- And yet there is still a plot hole, and of course the plot hole — as in Predestination — has to do with biology. Either writers of science fiction can’t quite grasp how chaotic life is, or are hoping that the general public doesn’t so that they can prove their point.
- You may think, as the story takes its second-to-last turn, that it poo-pooed its own premise, and I had this sinking feeling that we were in Back to the Future land, but this was ultimately unfounded. Whew.
- We are much further away from World War 2 than WW2 was from the Victorian period, and it is one thing to read about progress and stagnation and yet another to see what a person born in the 1870s–1880s experienced in their lifetime.
- There is mercifully little of the future in this series, but what little of it there is serves as an excellent example of humans being better at creating the future than imagining it.
- There is a “Deutsch particle” in Bodies, and it ties with Hofstadter’s Spiderverse… mention as my favorite meta/physical Easter egg, which is, admittedly, a rather narrow category.
- I haven’t read the graphic novel the show was based on, but I much preferred its stylistic choices in how it showed its roots than those that Watchmen (2009) or The Sandman (2022) took. However, Watchmen (2019) is still five heads and ten shoulders above everything else.