I didn't know anything about Bodies until it showed up on my screen when I opened Netflix for what to watch next, and the premise intrigued me. I finally finished the show yesterday (at work, of course, during my lunch break) and loved it. And how long did it take me to finish an 8-episode series? Two months.
Now granted anything to do with time traveling will forever fly way over my head because of all the discussions and debates over paradoxes and why such-and-such won't work while such-and-such will. There's a very good reason I count the first Terminator film to be the ONLY one to watch in that franchise.
I stand by that claim, by the way.
That said, I love the idea of four different timelines finding the same dead body in the same place. And from what I understand, the Netflix series takes the original graphic novel and tweaks the plot, taking away the paranormal elements (something to do with the dead body being a creature from another dimension or something along those lines). A tricky venture especially when it comes to working with time travel and how that affects events down the line. I've even seen people hotly debate the Grandfather Paradox or Temporal Paradox while I sat in the sidelines, my brain throbbing.
Okay, so firstly, the premise. Love it. Acting? Perfect. I especially appreciate the fact that all four heroes in different timelines are outsiders: a gay man, a Jewish man, a Muslim woman of color, and a disabled woman. Each timeline has its drama and the struggles of each hero against a system that's actively working against them -- and, worse, has been infiltrated and corrupted by a doomsday cult that will destroy anything that threatens their plans. The protagonists' personal relationships, their work situations, etc., are compelling and are what kept me plugging away whenever I had the time.
What I didn't like was how the ending somehow took away from the rest of the episodes. I read somewhere that the series writers must have thrown the final scenes in probably in hopes that Netflix would order a second season. So none of the closing scenes (set in 2023) make any sense. I'd have been happy had they left the series as is without that extra twist, but it is what it is, and we'll see what happens next.
There's a small but active fandom over at Tumblr that I keep checking on for either fanfic, fanart, or just cheeky .gifs. Oh, and you bet they're shipping Henry and Alfred (as do I, naturally), but I'm really enjoying some of the what if scenarios being posted involving all four detectives being in the same space together as well as reactions like this:
And this:
So on the whole, I do recommend this series (only 8 episodes on Netflix), but watch it for the episodic stuff and especially the characters and their individual stories. If you're into time traveling and are pretty diehard about it, proceed with caution. I do wish the plot was given a little more room to breathe and expand with more than eight episodes, but I think that's the standard for a limited series run on Netflix. Given the complexity of the sci-fi elements of the show, I feel like the story itself wasn't given the justice it deserves, and a number of loose threads were left hanging by the end.
Moving forward, I'm now watching Paranormal, which has been on my queue for what feels like forever, and the first episode was terrific. Crossing my fingers that the rest of the limited series run will prove to be as creepy and darkly funny as that.
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