Last weekend, instead of doing the mounds of school work I should have been doing, I decided to start a new mini-series on Netflix entitled “Bodies.” It follows the lives of four detectives as they all discover the same dead body in the same location, decades apart from one another. Detective Hillinghead finds him first on Longharvest Lane, Whitechapel, London, 1890. Then, Detective Whiteman in 1941, Detective Hasan in 2023 and finally Detective Maplewood in 2053. Without revealing too much, I will say that every event in this timeline is caused by the actions of a single man, Elias Mannix. Though he was born sometime in the 21st century, he died in 1941 at the hands of Detective Whiteman, and every action in between creates a time loop with no beginning and no end, but which leads to Mannix being born again and again and again from his very own lineage.

To say that things get a bit confusing would be an understatement, but the intrigue is too real to pass up; I was hooked within the first five minutes of the show’s opening. As a lover of procedural dramas and science fiction who is also a believer in time travel and the creation of paradoxes, this series captured multiple facets of my attention. I cannot emphasize how much I would recommend it.

For some real-world context, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity posits that, technically, time travel is real; it is affected by speed of travel and gravitational force. For example, a clock on Earth would move faster than a clock on an airplane that was traveling in the same direction as Earth rotates because “the faster you travel, the slower you experience time,” (NASA, 2020). On the other hand, if someone were to be at the edge of a black hole, that force of gravity would cause mere hours to pass while 1,000 years might go by on Earth (Scoles, 2023). All of this is to say that, though time travel is technically real, it is not in the way that the media portrays it; hopping into a machine or portal and simply disappearing.

In Bodies, time travel occurs through the discovery of a particle that splits the body in time. The closer one stands to the particle, the more they can feel their body splitting into the past, present and future. It is unclear how Mannix travels back to one specific time while the dead man travels to multiple different time periods at once, but so it goes. Nothing can stop time; everything that happens is supposed to happen, and there is no way to change what your outcome is meant to be. Unless, of course, there is.

This limited Netflix series is easily one of the biggest must-see shows this season. So while you may have plans this weekend, only time will tell what you are truly meant to be doing. Happy binging!

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Bucknellian.