Spoilers follow for the Netflix series Bodies, eight episodes of which debuted on October 19. 

To its credit, Bodies knows that time loops are a headache. The Netflix series is structured around one, with four detectives in 1890, 1941, 2023, and 2053 investigating the same crime in each of their eras, which they eventually learn is caused by someone traveling backward from 2053 to 1889. But instead of dwelling on the mechanics of how any of this works, Bodies offers hand-waving vagaries: “There is no science yet to explain what it is,” a character says of the phenomena that allows them to move through time. That approach means that Bodies preemptively excludes itself from established genre rules about how time-loops, alternate realities, or parallel universes could function; the series’ chunks of dialogue on physics, quantum gravity, dark matter, and naked singularity remain impenetrable seemingly on purpose.

Bodies’ avoidance of the theoretical questions at its core can be excused, though, when the series’ most engrossing episode digs into the impact of those questions instead. Penultimate installment “Catch Me If You Can” is a show-don’t-tell showcase for actor Stephen Graham — you could watch only it and grasp Bodies’ whole point about thedangerous vulnerability of wanting to be loved.

Based on Si Spencer’s 2015 same-named comic and created by Paul Tomalin, who brought over police-procedural experience from his years on British series No Offence, Bodies uses one crime to link four time periods. In 1890, 1941, 2023, and 2053, a man’s nude body appears out of thin air and lands on Longharvest Lane in London’s East End. His only distinguishing marks are a tattoo of three vertical lines crossed by one horizontal line on his wrist and a bullet hole in his left eye, and the cops who find him are all stumped as to who he is, who killed him, and how he ended up here. The various detectives don’t know about each other — at least, not yet — but they’re all tacitly united by being outsiders to the force.

In 1890, Alfred Hillinghead (Kyle Soller) hides his queerness from his colleagues and his wife and daughter, but his growing feelings for newspaper photographer Henry Ashe (George Parker) are making his secret harder to keep. In 1941, as London is bombed nightly by Germany and Charles Whiteman (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) puts up with his superiors insulting him as “Jew boy,” his involvement in a shadowy criminal organization starts testing his religious faith. In 2023, hijab-wearing Muslim Shahara Hasan (Amaka Okafor) deals with microaggressions like her one white male boss assigning her to protect the route of a far-right rally and her other white boss boxing her out of a major case involving a teenager named Elias Mannix (Gabriel Howell) who is wanted for murder. And in dystopian 2053, when England is run by an authoritarian government presenting itself as equitable and where genetic modification among citizens is commonplace, Iris Maplewood (Shira Haas) is personally selected by the country’s ruling leader Commander Mannix (Graham) to find a terrorist group called Chapel Perilous that he says wants to “erase our progress, destroy our whole world.” If Chapel Perilous is successful, Mannix says, the technology that allows the formerly paralyzed Iris to walk is only one of the developments that will disappear.

Bodies sets all this up in the first half of the season with a lot of scene-to-scene jumping between time periods, the frame dividing itself horizontally, vertically, and diagonally to compare the detectives’ actions. Eventually, the series reveals that the “know you are loved” phrase heard coming out of suspicious characters’ mouths throughout time can be traced back to Mannix — did you catch that shared last name in 2023 and 2053? Here is Bodies’s time-loop: Elias grows up without his absent father and abandoned by his addict mother, and when he’s adopted by a foster family, they tell him he’s meant for greatness and train him for a terrorist attack in 2023 that will kill hundreds of thousands, but also make the U.K. a better place. Elias can only exist as he does in the present, his foster parents tell him, because he’s already designed and enacted the terrorist attack that happens in the future, and already lived the events in the past that lead to the now. Remember Dark? It’s a lot like Dark!

Mannix’s travels through the past have given rise to a cult and conspiratorial network, of which Elias’s foster parents are a part, that works to ensure his birth and his 2023 terrorist attack. So everything Elias is told pans out in 2053; the attack has occurred and his grownup self, Commander Mannix, is firmly in charge of the U.K., insisting that, despite strict control and lack of freedom, everyone is “loved” — the thing Mannix was deprived of in his youth and which motivated him to craft this new and rigid society. Hasan now leads the Chapel Perilous group that is trying to assassinate Mannix so he can’t travel back in time, become his own forefather, and set all these events and murders in motion. It’s a weird oversight of Bodies that, despite Mannix’s efforts to ensure his existence in different eras being a major instigating element, no one in 2053 really ponders how if they successfully stop the time-loop from happening, everyone born after 2023 might be affected, or even killed, by the altered reality. But Bodies does explain that Chapel Perilous member and scientist Gabriel Defoe (Tom Mothersdale) tried to follow Mannix into his time machine and was split into four versions of himself that existed between different time periods as a result, and all of that leads to “Catch Me If You Can,” in which we see how Mannix’s time in the past was spent.

Previous episodes showed glimpses of Mannix, who in the 19th century assumed the identity of dead aristocrat Sir Julian Harker, blackmailed Hillinghead, and amassed wealth by using his knowledge from the future to manipulate London’s economy. But “Catch Me If You Can” devotes significant time to Mannix’s perspective from 1889 to 1890, and its focus is a needed counterbalance to the series’ inability to sit still. Graham has always been a compellingly snarky actor (think of his work as gangster Tony Pro in The Irishman, Dead Rabbits member Shang in Gangs of New York, and boxing promoter Tommy in Snatch), but some of his most complex work is as a man who fights his way into a position of authority, power, and violence and whose self-assuredness is then complicated by moments of sensitivity, insecurity, and weakness. Graham’s Mannix-as-Harker is in line with his Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire and Captain Brownlee in The North Water in that he plays this future terrorist as quite likable. Despite his sharper edges, Mannix is quick with a smile and a joke and compassionate toward people who need tenderness, like Harker’s real mother Agatha, who takes in Mannix and treats him as her own once he promises to love her “like a son” and “turn this old house into a home,” and Hillinghead’s daughter Polly (Synnove Karlsen), whom he first sees at church. The scenes where Mannix and Polly fall for each other, with their stolen glances and light flirtation, are so quietly lovely that you almost forget Mannix sets up Polly’s father to be executed for a murder he didn’t commit, and their excitement over Polly’s pregnancy so lively and delightful until you remember that Mannix has now succeeded in becoming his own great-great-great-grandfather.

Graham makes the most of the fact that “Catch Me If You Can,” unlike the other episodes of the series, isn’t driven by surprises, like the detectives discovering new evidence about Defoe’s killing; the dialogue isn’t withholding, the way other cops keep Hillinghead, Whiteman, and Hasan at arm’s length. Mannix says what he means, and the character’s straightforwardness allows Graham to slot himself into the character’s oppositional villainy and kindness. The episode is well-served by moments that let Graham play all kinds of emotions, from the comfortable look on his face as he brushes Polly’s hair in their bedroom to the bashful pride with which he introduces Polly to the cult he’s amassed with his revelations from the future. If “Catch Me If You Can” cut out all the other timeline stuff in this episode, Mannix and Polly’s marriage, seemingly genuine but also built on a lie, would work as a great standalone drama. And the beatific nature of this episode is so strongly imagined, its vision of marital bliss so clear, that it gives us an understanding of who Mannix was before the events of the finale, “Know You Are Loved,” alter his personality and motivations in 1890 and 1941 and introduce another timeline into existence.

“What if Mannix realized he was selfish?” is basically what the turning point in “Know You Are Loved” boils down to, after Iris travels back to 1890, connects with Hillinghead, and has him confront Mannix about his relationship with Polly. It’s about as thinly conceived as Mannix’s unhappy-upbringing motivation in 2023, but as with its treatment of time travel, Bodies is more interested in the effects of its ideas than their causes. Yet “Know You Are Loved” succeeds emotionally with its depiction of Mannix’s moral transformation and his decision to call off his planned terrorist attack, thanks to scenes that directly reference events in “Catch Me If You Can.” These comparisons are the series’ best execution of its time-loop premise, and they’re grounded in Graham’s performance: His mirth over Polly’s pregnancy now curdled into despair, his triumph when explaining to his wife that he’s from the future turned remorseful, his last moments with her no longer a tender embrace, but his sad resignation to her wishing for his death. Bodies struggles when it has to explain itself, but Graham’s performance helps us feel what the series doesn’t say.

Bodies Feels Its Way Through a Perilous Time Loop