Bodies

Bodies is a Netflix scifi series about four British detectives across three centuries trying to solve murders in which a body is dumped at the same spot in London. It's the same dead guy, each time.

From here on, what I write may contain spoilers. So I am writing it in a white font. If you want to read it, highlight what follows.

The crux of the story is that there is a time loop in place from 1889 to 2053. But it's not a recurring loop like Groundhog Day, it's more like a bight of line. One character goes back 164 years in order to change history, but he jumps into the past and those left behind continue on.

Then another character jumps from 2053 to 1890 and slightly alters the timeline. Those left behind in 2053 know something is changed; they find a clue that possibly evidence has left to repair things. A third character then jumps from 2053 to 2023, finds the evidence, teams up with her younger self and the timeline is repaired to what it was before all of the jumping. (Maybe, there's a suggestion that opens the door to a second season.)

My opinion about SF is that all shows get to have one big violation of the laws of physics. Most space operas opt for FTL transportation. (Star Trek did two, tossing in teleportation as a way to speed up a story.) Bodies's big one is, of course, time travel. But therein lies the biggest plot hole in the story: What triggered the time loop?

It gets a little worse. In the story, 2053 England is a dictatorship that came about following a nuclear terrorist bombing in 2023. The detonation of the nuke (which appears to be a very early generation plutonium bomb) was triggered by a kid born about 2007-ish. The kid, as it turns out, grows up to be the character who jumped back in 2053 to set things in motion. But the kid is the great-grandson of the man who jumped back-- he's his own great-grandson/father. So if the timeloop is started by the man jumping back to 1889, but he couldn't exist in 2023/2053 unless he jumped back to 1889, then what started the timeloop? Where did he come from?

It's sort of an oruboros plot. So I guess the thing to do is not think about that.

The portable 78-rpm record-cutting machine was very cool, though.

There is also a time issue regarding the bomb itself that was noted by another cop: The bomb may have been sitting in a large individual bank vault since 1941, a bank vault which has been in the name of a character who wasn't born until the 1990s.

That is all.