Review: Bodies (Netflix show)
Nov. 26th, 2023 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrA twisty scifi drama miniseries about diverse London police detectives from different time periods trying to solve the mystery of identical dead naked men who appear in the same alleyway in each era.
I overall liked this, it does a pretty good job of making you care about the different characters, and the central mystery holds together moderately well as Scifi Mystery Stories go. Themes of Society and Choice etc are vaguely gestured at but ultimately it just cares about it's characters solving mysteries, struggling against scary situations, and finding some measure of happiness. And on that level it's pretty enjoyable! My most significant problem with the show is that some parts/characters feel underwritten.
Trailer, though I'd skip it if you'd rather go in totally unspoiled:
No significant spoilers under the cut just more information, including content notes.
Content notes: child/teen harm (I found it bearable but did have to ask Cam if one character would be ok and play some parts on high speed), homophobia (including internalised), antisemitism, internalised ableism, implied islamophobia, mild-ish incest, lots of shots of a naked cis man who has been shot in the eye, major character death.
The narrative overtly thinks prejudice is bad and I thought overall treated the diverse characters with compassion and a moderate amount of thoughtfulness. I've seen criticism of how it handled disability, I thought it was fine but ymmv. The actor for a (relatively minor) wheelchair using character doesn't use a wheelchair afaict but does have cerebral palsy. A significant character with a very intermittent disability is played by an able bodied actor.
The actors are pretty good but there's some casting mis-matches with respect to age, accent etc which I sometimes found jarring or confusing. Includes a tiny cameo from Tim Downie aka Gale of Waterdeep.
The scifi aspects are very handwavey and sometimes self-contradictory.
It feels like they had a pretty good outline for the whole story that could have all been filled in with interesting character dynamics and Themes About Free Will And Choice etc, but then only bothered to actually flesh out maybe 70% of it, with certain characters/dynamics/settings being left flat and perfunctory. Since it's based on a comic I don't know if this is a flaw of the comic or the adaptation but either way it was sometimes very frustrating. There were a few significant parts/characters which would have really added to the overall narrative if they'd been made to feel real and consistent, but the writers just Did Not Care Enough, and this undermined the story as a whole.
It's not not copganda, but mostly just has police protagonists because That's Who Solves Mysteries. The officers from the 19th century and 1940s struggle against homophobia and antisemitism respectively, as well as general Social Injustice and Corruption, and I found this engagingly written. But while the female muslim officer from 2023 is implied to face islamophobia, and there's references to institutional violence/bad practices, it's all much more vague and softened, with the implication that Things Are Better Now But Society Still Generally Sucks. Alas, how and why society sucks is one of the themes that get gestured at and then underwritten because the writers don't really have anything deep to say about it.
So yeah. You have to turn your brain off for some aspects, while keeping it engaged to follow the moderately twisty plot and timelines. But if you can roll with that, the show is pretty good for what it is.
I overall liked this, it does a pretty good job of making you care about the different characters, and the central mystery holds together moderately well as Scifi Mystery Stories go. Themes of Society and Choice etc are vaguely gestured at but ultimately it just cares about it's characters solving mysteries, struggling against scary situations, and finding some measure of happiness. And on that level it's pretty enjoyable! My most significant problem with the show is that some parts/characters feel underwritten.
Trailer, though I'd skip it if you'd rather go in totally unspoiled:
No significant spoilers under the cut just more information, including content notes.
Content notes: child/teen harm (I found it bearable but did have to ask Cam if one character would be ok and play some parts on high speed), homophobia (including internalised), antisemitism, internalised ableism, implied islamophobia, mild-ish incest, lots of shots of a naked cis man who has been shot in the eye, major character death.
The narrative overtly thinks prejudice is bad and I thought overall treated the diverse characters with compassion and a moderate amount of thoughtfulness. I've seen criticism of how it handled disability, I thought it was fine but ymmv. The actor for a (relatively minor) wheelchair using character doesn't use a wheelchair afaict but does have cerebral palsy. A significant character with a very intermittent disability is played by an able bodied actor.
The actors are pretty good but there's some casting mis-matches with respect to age, accent etc which I sometimes found jarring or confusing. Includes a tiny cameo from Tim Downie aka Gale of Waterdeep.
The scifi aspects are very handwavey and sometimes self-contradictory.
It feels like they had a pretty good outline for the whole story that could have all been filled in with interesting character dynamics and Themes About Free Will And Choice etc, but then only bothered to actually flesh out maybe 70% of it, with certain characters/dynamics/settings being left flat and perfunctory. Since it's based on a comic I don't know if this is a flaw of the comic or the adaptation but either way it was sometimes very frustrating. There were a few significant parts/characters which would have really added to the overall narrative if they'd been made to feel real and consistent, but the writers just Did Not Care Enough, and this undermined the story as a whole.
It's not not copganda, but mostly just has police protagonists because That's Who Solves Mysteries. The officers from the 19th century and 1940s struggle against homophobia and antisemitism respectively, as well as general Social Injustice and Corruption, and I found this engagingly written. But while the female muslim officer from 2023 is implied to face islamophobia, and there's references to institutional violence/bad practices, it's all much more vague and softened, with the implication that Things Are Better Now But Society Still Generally Sucks. Alas, how and why society sucks is one of the themes that get gestured at and then underwritten because the writers don't really have anything deep to say about it.
So yeah. You have to turn your brain off for some aspects, while keeping it engaged to follow the moderately twisty plot and timelines. But if you can roll with that, the show is pretty good for what it is.
