Netflix’s latest mind-bending thriller, Bodies, has become something of a sleeper hit for the streaming platform thanks to its timeline-hopping murder mystery and twist-ending. Over the course of the show’s eight episodes, the British crime caper tells the story of three London detectives discovering the same man murdered in three separate decades. It’s a wild, physics-defying ride that keeps viewers guessing until its end.
But, where did the inspiration for the series come from? Who is the Si Spencer the show’s first episode is dedicated to? And will we be treated to more of this sci-fi thriller? Here’s everything we know about Netflix’s Bodies.
Is Bodies Based On A Book?
The main storyline in Bodies is based on a mini graphic novel written nearly 10 years ago. In the books, the killing of an unidentified man happens at the same place, in the same manner, across multiple eras. In 1890, Detective Alfred Hillinghead (Kyle Soller) finds a man’s naked body in London’s Longharvest Lane with a bullet hole through his eye. Detective Charles Whiteman (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) finds the same man dead in 1941, while Detective Shahara Hasan (Amaka Okafor) finds the body in the present day. Each detective tries to solve the mystery of why John Doe was killed and by whom as an investigator from the future works to put the pieces together with the help of a time-traveling professor who may know more than he’s letting on.
It’s a trippy murder puzzle that showrunner Paul Tomalin said he was “scared sh*tless” to adapt. “At first I thought no one’s gonna commission this, it’s too wild, it’s just too mental to do it,” he told Yahoo. “There are big differences to the graphic novel, but the characters are the same, the themes are the same, and there’s enough psychedelic madness from the graphic novels. I’m pretty sure we did our best to nail it.”
Who Is Si Spencer?
As the show’s first episode fades to black, a dedication to a man named Si Spencer pops up on screen. Spencer was the author of the graphic novels on which the show is based. He wrote volumes for DC’s Judge Dredd and Hellblazer series while also working on British TV shows like EastEnders and the Doctor Who spinoff, Torchwood. Spencer passed away from heart failure in February 2022, just one year before his Bodies series would be picked up by Netflix.
Will There Be A Season 2 Of Bodies?
According to Tomalin, the show was always billed as a limited series meaning it’s unlikely fans will get another installment of this exact storyline with the same main characters. Tomalin said wrapping up the season-long mystery was his way of honoring fans of Spencer’s work.
“We went to Netflix like, ‘This is one series, this is a one and done, we wanna close this off’, because I think when you have such an amazing concept up front, you [expletive] your audience off if you don’t solve it,” he told Hello! “As the viewer, I hate it when you get this amazing thing. And at the end it’s like, ‘Duh, duh, duh’, and you’re like ‘Right so I’ve got to wait a year and a half’.”
While there are no plans to continue Spencer’s story as of now, the show still teased a futuristic plot point that might open things up for a spin-off of sorts later down the line.
“We really wanted you to feel that you’d seen the red curtain at the end,” he explained. “That being said, when you see the back end, there’s certainly a dot dot dot. But the premise that the show sets comes to an end.”
(Via Yahoo!)