‘Bodies’ Netflix series review: Stephen Graham’s time-travelling whodunnit just about brings it home

A still from ‘Bodies’ 

The fifth episode of the 2023 Netflix mini-series Bodies is titled ‘We Are One Another’s Ghosts.’ This, for me, came close to putting a finger on what the show is all about, which, given its sprawling scope and shifting timelines, is hard to pin down. The premise is far from simple: A detective discovers a naked body of a man with a strange mark on his wrist in Long Harvest Lane, London. Rewind to 1941, when another detective discovers the same body. Rewind further back: it’s 1890, another detective, the same body. And then all of a sudden, the calendar flips forward, and we’re in 2053, and there we have it again: another detective, the same body.

For a time-travel show, the scope of Bodies is ambitious. It’s not easy to juggle four different timelines, all while trying to stay true to historical eras, as well as juggle tiny, intricate plot points that criss-cross across all four times. But the show comes close, and once you’ve sat through the first two episodes, it’s hard to stop.

An eight-part series created by Paul Tomalin, Bodies is an adaptation of Si Spencer’s 2015 graphic novel, something you can see in the show’s use of split screens and contiguous panels to juxtapose different narrative threads. The first thread runs through the present, where Detective Shahara Hasan (Amaka Okafor) plays a Muslim single mom, whose work takes away from family-time and who has a way with troubled kids. Amid a far-right rally where Hasan’s been called in to maintain order, she spots a kid with a gun. She gives chase, only to be left with an absconding kid and a naked body. Amid air raid sirens of World War I, we are thrown back to 1941, where suave ladies’ man — not to mention a Jew in anti-semitic London — Detective Karl Whiteman (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), is receiving mysterious phone calls from a woman, one of which involves picking up a naked body with a strange mark on its wrist. Further back to 1890’s Victorian London, where Detective Alfred Hillinghead (Kyle Soller), a family man with a wife and a pianist daughter, teams up with a journalist from the Star to investigate a murder no one wants to look into, all while nursing secret desires he’s forced to hide from both family and society. And finally 2053, where Detective Iris Maplewood (Shira Haas) lives a lonely life in a repressive utopia that she has bought into so she can circumvent her handicap; the ‘establishment’ offers her the spinal implement that helps her walk. What ties all these threads together? Bodies. Or to be more precise, a single body that appears out of thin air each time, always on Long Harvest Lane.

I’d issue a spoiler alert, but the story has so many moving pieces that it’s impossible to spoil it with any single giveaway. Safe to say, keep your eye out for Stephen Graham, who is the leviathan at the heart of it all. Sometimes Harker, other times Mannix, he flits through times and timelines like a ghost, his various avatars alternately successors and predecessors of himself. His words, “know you are loved,” half-catchphrase, half-poignant assurance, ring through the show; though they may sound like a cliche, the show does a great job of demonstrating how something as pure as love can be flipped into an all-consuming greed to be loved, and that’s where evil begins. 

Stephen Graham in ‘Bodies’

Though Graham has acted well, for someone the show hinges on, we get very little of his internal churnings and thought processes. In fact, by the end, I still didn’t completely understand him, and was left feeling unsure of whether to hate him or sympathise with him. It would definitely have helped to have more character development here, just as it would have helped to build on some of the other characters in the show, all of whom felt paper thin. For instance, take Shira Haas, whose brainwashed allegiance to the establishment is never convincingly explained; not to mention her caricature-ish romance with Tom Mothersdale that was far from believable. Or Kyle Soller’s covert desires, which felt far too sentimental for the time travelling, crime drama genre. But that’s the drawback of the show’s ambition; it tries to do too much, and in the process, misses out on really investing in a place, time or character. 

That said, the plot never disappoints. Some of the reveals literally make you gasp, and for the most part, the little clues from each narrative thread carry over into the next, forming a loop that you don’t always see coming. Perhaps the best part of the show is the invisible, almost ghostly camaraderie shared by these four detectives across time: they’re doing things that will affect—sometimes help — the others, without really knowing it, in the process comprising each other’s safety net. The four of them really do seem like “one another’s ghosts”, a notion that quickly goes from eerie to a source of absolute salvation.

Bodies is currently streaming on Netflix