Incomprehensible and epically anti-climatic: Netflix’s Bodies reviewed

Bodies is another of those ‘ingenious’ time-travel apocalypse mash-ups so tricksy and convoluted that by the time the ending comes you’re praying fervently that the nuclear bomb will go off and everyone will die as punishment for the hours of life you’ve wasted on this angsty, politically correct, humourless tosh.

The premise is initially intriguing: four detectives in different time periods – 1890, 1941, the present and the near-future – have to solve the same murder mystery. But it soon becomes clear, as is the way with these things – see, for example, the mind-bending irksomeness of Christopher Nolan’s Inception – that the solution will be simultaneously incomprehensible and epically anti-climatic.

What really lets it down, though, is the sanctimoniousness. It is based on a graphic novel by the late Si Spencer, which was published in 2015 at the very peak of the fad for comics that were more interested in pushing relevant, empowering social issues than they were in entertaining readers.

It opens – where else? – at one of those far-right demos that TV drama so loves. Luckily, feisty, no-nonsense but supremely fair and decent female Muslim detective Shahara Hasan (Amaka Okafor) is on hand, taking great personal risks to ensure justice is done. No doubt such female Muslim detectives do exist but – apart from giving her a hijab and a lovely, educated, well-spoken dad who might be Somali – no effort has been made to contextualise her socially or explore the complexities of her religious background. She’s female and a Muslim and she’s flawless: deal with it!

Meanwhile, in 1941, the key thing you need to know is that the Metropolitan police is riddled with anti-Semitism. The Blitz, the war generally, the telling period detail (which mainly comprises people in a pub singing ‘We’ll Meet Again’) are all subordinate to the fact that Detective Charles Whiteman (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) suffers intra-departmental racial prejudice on account of Jewishness.