We finished watching Bodies on Netflix last night. It reminded me of Cloud Atlas meets Looper. There was another movie that came to mind, with a Victorian sex and drugs cult thing, the title of which I can't recall at the moment.

In that regard, it was disappointing. These series that rely on multiple stories separated by time and space can't seem to do enough in the way of character development to make them reward the investment of the time it takes to watch them. I'm also thinking of Foundation here. Invasion to a lesser extent, as it's only dispersed in space, not in time.

Cloud Atlas and Looper were much smaller chunks of time, and so the plot moved along quickly and the gimmick was the star of the show. In this case, I got the gimmick right away, because I'd seen it before, and so that wasn't especially entertaining. I was mostly just wishing they'd hurry up and do something.

Peripheral was much better in that regard, in that I quickly became invested in the main character. I don't know if that's coming back or not. Probably not, since I liked it.

To the extent that I did become invested, I mostly just wanted to see how they would resolve the thing as a technical exercise; not that I cared about any of the characters. It was modestly successful in that regard, though there were a lot of loose ends and a couple of holes I think. I'm not going to watch it again to take detailed notes, but I think if you watch it you may have a similar experience.

Solid "Meh."