Headscratchers / Bodies (2023)

• Why does the conspiracy need Esther dead? She can only pin it on Whiteman himself, who as we see can easily be sacrificed with or without her. Whiteman was already out as a rat and didn't know who he was reporting to.
  • Presumably they've become so paranoiacally secretive by this point that any outsider with random knowledge is perceived as a threat to be exterminated.
  • You can make a case that this is two-fold: Polly believes that Whiteman being completely outed will create so much interest in the body that it might become dangerous for the cult itself (which can't be discovered before the bomb goes off under any circumstances). Elias on the other hand certainly knows that Whiteman is the one who kills him, and since he is obsessed with maintaining the loop as closely to the original circumstances as possible, he needs this to happen — but Whiteman also needs a reason to want to kill him. And since Esther is the person he most obviously cares about, Esther needs to die to make Whiteman want to avenge her.
• What is it that scares the Asian kid in 2023 in the first episode so badly that he kills himself? The conspiracy are powerful and knowledgeable, to be sure, but can they really have convinced him that they are omnipotent?
  • They told him things that would happen in the future, starting with the body appearing. This is a disenfranchised kid who fell into the hands of incredibly manipulative people, who probably told him his death would help usher in a new glorious era, and they were able to prove they had knowledge of things to come. I mean, Does This Remind You of Anything? It's like every teenager radicalized by a fundamentalist ideology or terrorist group.
• How did Iris Maplewood become Shahara Hasan’s cab driver in 2023? Also the NYAL sign on the building … does this mean the movement was re-established somehow? Maybe with Iris as the leader?
  • We don't exactly know why Maplewood drives Hasan's cab in the final scene - other than that it mirrors her first scene on the show - but we can speculate that despite the original loop getting dissolved, something happened in the new version of the timeline that caused Maplewood to time travel back to 2023 and contact Shahara. And despite Mannix seemingly ceasing to exist, someone still seems to have founded a version of KYAL that already works in the open in Hasan's time, hence the logo.
• Bonus: Explain Iris's hideous haircut.
  • The haircut seems like a "this is the future, we have moderately strange hair" thing? A lot of the younger people seemed to have undercuts, at least in the police.
  • "Weird haircuts of the future" may indeed verge on being a minor SF movie trope. Actually, it already exists here on TV Tropes, in the more limited form of Sci-Fi Bob Haircut, which Maplewood's 'do kind of approaches, while avoiding the full standard trope/cliche. And, after all, this is sort of Truth in Television; try explaining punk mohawks to a time traveller from the 1940s, or mullets to someone from the 1950s, or rocker quiffs to someone from the 1920s.

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