The Ending Of Netflix's Bodies Explained: What Actually Happens To Iris Maplewood?

Not to be confused with the A24 film "Bodies Bodies Bodies," the show "Bodies" is an underrated miniseries you need to watch on Netflix. What starts out as a seemingly straightforward police procedural quickly evolves into a genre-bending sci-fi series, complete with cults, dystopian societies, and time travel. The show's tangled time travel plot may remind viewers of another Netflix series called "Dark" (which may in turn remind viewers of "Back to the Future"). Like "Dark," "Bodies" involves a bunch of separate storylines that weave together to form an elaborate time travel conspiracy, one that spans more than a century.

If the timey-wimey stuff in "Bodies" has left your head spinning, don't fear. We're here to break down the mind-bending ending of "Bodies" — including that shocking twist with DC Iris Maplewood (Shira Haas) in the final scene.

"Bodies" follows four different stories on four different timelines. But they all have something in common: Each begins with a character discovering the naked body of the exact same man in the exact same location, even though these events happen decades apart. In 1890, Detective Alfred Hillinghead (Kyle Soller) investigates the death of a naked man found in the street. In 1941, Detective Charles Whiteman (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) secretly carries out the orders of his mysterious boss (who asks him to dispose of an identical naked body). In 2023, Detective Shahara Hasan (Amaka Okafor) tries to prevent a teenage boy from committing a devastating terrorist attack. And in 2053, Detective Iris Maplewood discovers that the organization she works for is not as utopian as it seems.

At the center of it all is a troubled teenager named Elias Mannix (Gabriel Howell), who seems destined to set off a bomb that will destroy London and then grow up to be a man (Stephen Graham) who orchestrates a vast time-travel conspiracy. After Mannix's bomb razes much of London in a 2023 attack, he and his cult of followers begin building a dystopian society in its place. In 2053, the now-adult Mannix then seizes a time machine and travels back in time to 1889. Once there, he spends the remainder of his life in the past, using his knowledge of the future to amass followers and carefully lay the foundations to safeguard his future. In fact, Mannix's future depends on events playing out exactly as planned, since Mannix knows he is going to become his own great-grandfather. Therefore, Mannix makes sure his younger self (for simplicity's sake, we'll call him Elias) has a traumatic childhood that will drive him to set off the bomb, because otherwise Mannix would not exist.

Once the detectives discover the truth, they realize that Mannix has essentially created a loop. No matter what they do, Elias will always detonate the bomb that destroys London, meaning he will always grow up to become Commander Mannix and travel back in time to trigger the tragic chain of events that transforms his younger self from a troubled teenager into a terrorist. It is a never-ending cycle — until our heroes discover a way out.

The biggest flaw in Mannix's plan, it turns out, is himself. At the end of "Bodies," Iris travels back to 1890, and with the help of Hillinghead, plants the seeds of doubt in Mannix's mind. Mannix's whole reason for doing this is because he was alone his entire childhood. Yet he endures it because knows he can look forward to the fulfilling life that awaits him in his future (even though it is technically in the past). However, thanks to Iris and Hillinghead, Mannix can no longer enjoy his happy future, because he knows it only exists due to him manipulating everyone around him to ensure the timeline happens exactly the way it is supposed to. His happiness is artificial.

Tormented by regret, he sends a message to his teenage self urging Elias to call off the bomb, insisting that it won't make him feel whole again, and Elias agrees to stop. As a result, the 2023 bombing never happens, creating an alternate timeline where none of these tragic events occurred. However, a twist in the final scene suggests that the timeline is not truly fixed.

First off, you may be wondering what happened to the titular bodies? How can the same person be found dead four different times? And why was the body found stark naked, with a bullet hole in its eye socket, but no bullet? The short answer: time travel.

The bodies found by each of the characters all belong to Gabriel Defoe (Tom Mothersdale), a scientist from 2053 who has invented a time machine called The Throat. However, the machine cannot transport objects, just people, which explains why the bullet that enters Defoe's skull right before he goes through The Throat is nowhere to be found when he arrives at his destination. (That also explains why Defoe is found in his birthday suit.) The Throat will send you backward in time and forward in time simultaneously, essentially splitting you into two people. It seems like the longer you stand on the threshold of The Throat, the more times it will split you, which is why there are four copies of Defoe's body.

In 2053, Mannix uses Defoe's time machine to travel back to 1889 to enact his plan, but not before ordering Iris to kill Defoe. When Iris shoots Defoe, he falls backward through The Throat, sending four versions of himself into the past and, presumably, four versions of himself into the future.

So many characters are involved in Mannix's conspiracy, so we don't blame you if you had trouble keeping track of them. Here is the role that each of them plays in his plans.

When Mannix travels back to 1890, a mother named Lady Harker (Anna Calder-Marshall) grieving her dead son adopts Mannix as her own son and agrees to help him build "a great and glorious future." Soon Mannix begins recruiting other followers. Along the way, Mannix uses Hillinghead's daughter Polly (Synnove Karlsen) as a pawn in his plan. Behind her father's back, Mannix wins Polly's trust (and her heart). So after Mannix kills Hillinghead to silence him for good and tells Polly that her father killed himself, Polly believes him. Polly turns to Mannix for comfort, and it isn't long before the two are married and Polly gives Mannix a son named Hayden (Michael Shaeffer). Over time, Mannix brainwashes Polly and Hayden until, by 1941, they are both doing his bidding.

Decades later, Hayden's son Danny Barber (Michael Jibson) fathers a child named Elias. Barber abandons his pregnant girlfriend Sarah (Natalie Gavin) because he knows she will be unable to take care of her future son Elias, which in turns means that Elias will bounce around in foster care until this trauma shapes him into Mannix. Conveniently, Barber also works in the police alongside DS Shahara Hasan, allowing him to misdirect and sabotage her at every turn. The couple who adopted Elias — Andrew (Mark Lewis Jones) and Elaine (Kate Ashfield) — is also involved in the conspiracy.

The phrase "Know you are loved" is said by various characters throughout "Bodies," underscoring a key theme of the series. Many members of Mannix's cult repeat it, whether as the slogan of Mannix's futuristic society or a mantra his followers whisper with their dying breath to assure themselves that their sacrifice is worthwhile. Once viewers see Mannix's backstory, the phrase takes on a much deeper meaning.

What motivates Mannix to launch his time-travel crusade is the lack of a loving presence in his childhood. His father bailed on him, his mother couldn't care for him, the foster care system failed him, and his foster parents were in on the plot to shape him into a terrorist. But Mannix is the source of his own childhood woes. He has always been the one pulling the strings to make sure he would grow up unloved. Yet, Mannix tells himself it is worth all the pain, because someday in his future, he will be loved.

He is referring to his marriage with Polly, which lasts more than four decades. Mannix tells himself that he can endure all sorts of trauma growing up because he knows that marital bliss awaits him in his promised future. Yet it turns out it was an empty promise, because his marriage to Polly isn't quite what he hoped. So "Know you are loved" is more than just Mannix's motto — it also exemplifies the way people will tell themselves anything to cope with their pain, even inventing the false promise of a better future.

Throughout "Bodies," Hasan is trying to steer Elias away from his tragic path. In spite of this, Andrew, Elaine, and even Elias himself tell Hasan that they have seen the future and know that she will be the one who pushes Elias over the edge. They claim Hasan will be the reason that Elias detonates the bomb. Hasan tells herself that she would never let this happen. Yet, as she tries to change Elias' fate, she only ends up sealing it.

At any time in the series, Hasan could have theoretically prevented the bombing by killing Elias before he had a chance to detonate it. However, she refuses to punish Elias for something that hasn't done (yet). Hasan believes in free will and second chances. So when Hasan is tasked with taking Elias to prison to make sure he won't hurt anyone, she decides to take him to see his mother first, feeling like she owes it to him to give him one last chance to say goodbye. Although Hasan's heart is in the right place, her actions backfire when she discovers that Sarah is afraid to meet Elias, thinking her son wants nothing to do with her. Elias sees this, and his mother's seeming rejection hurts him so badly that he decides right then to detonate the bomb.

So, yes, Hasan did inadvertently create Mannix. However, this is not because Elias is not capable of redemption or worthy of mercy. Instead, it is simply because Hasan underestimated how triggering the circumstances would be for him.

To stop Mannix's plan, Iris travels back in time to 1890, where she enlists the help of Detective Hillinghead. Hillinghead warns Mannix that he will be no more happy married to Polly than he was in his childhood, and that both of them will be miserable. Mannix kills Hillinghead, but he is shaken. Suddenly, he can no longer be certain of what he has told himself all his life: that he will be loved.

His doubts make him cold and detached when around Polly, who senses that something is wrong and soon discovers what Mannix has done. She can never forgive Mannix for killing her father, and while she remains married to Mannix because she has no other choice, she hates him. That's when Mannix realizes that no amount of time-travel trickery will fill the hole in his soul, and he starts to see how his actions have ruined the lives of so many people (including his younger self).

So, Mannix records a message, and, with the help of Whiteman and Hasan, passes down this message to Elias right before he detonates the bomb. When Elias hears it straight from the mouth of his future self, he realizes that his future is not set in stone, and this knowledge sets him free. At Mannix's urging, Elias chooses not to detonate the bomb. Unfortunately, this means that Elias vanishes from the timestream, since without the bomb there would be no Mannix, and without Mannix, Elias will never be born.

Given that "Bodies" is a time travel story in which the characters are given the opportunity to "reset" their timeline and start over, it's fitting that the series is all about second chances. Each of the main characters in "Bodies" gets a chance at redemption.

Although Detective Hillinghead initially turns a blind eye to the murder and throws his partner Henry (George Parker) under the bus, he later turns himself in to save Henry. Likewise, Hasan isn't able to stop Syed (Chaneil Kular) from killing himself in Mannix's name, so she does everything she can to save Elias. To atone for his past crimes and avenge Esther (Chloe Raphael), an 11-year-old girl who got caught in the crossfire, Whiteman sacrifices himself to pass along a crucial message to Hasan 82 years in the future. Meanwhile, Iris realizes that she shouldn't have sold out Defoe and the Chapel Perilous to Mannix, so she risks everything to travel back to 1890 and set things right.

Even Mannix redeems himself after decades of plotting and manipulation when he decides to sabotage his own plans. And Elias makes the choice to save many thousands of lives, even though he knows it means he will cease to exist. All of these characters' stories send the message that (even without time travel) it is never too late to do one good thing.

While "Bodies" wraps up its central storyline nicely, there's one thing about the ending that people still don't understand. In the final scene, Hasan appears to have "fixed" the timeline to ensure there is no bombing in 2023. Yet the final shot zooms out to show us a building displaying four giant letters: KYAL, Mannix's acronym for "Know you are loved." Previously, we only saw these letters in Mannix's dystopian city in 2053, so it's chilling to see KYAL looming over Hasan in 2023. We thought Hasan successfully broke the loop and stopped the rise of KYAL, but this reveal suggests otherwise.

One way or another, this alternate version of 2023 must be the result of more meddling from time travelers. Maybe it means that, even if Mannix had a change of heart, one of his loyal cronies in the past, present, or future made some changes to restore the status quo. (Obviously it's not exactly the way things were, since Mannix's "utopia" only existed after the 2023 bombing in the original timeline, yet it seems to be already happening in this new timeline.) Or maybe, when Hasan altered the timeline to ensure Elias never detonated the bomb (and thus never existed), this change rippled outward to create some rather unexpected results. Who knows what a world without Elias Mannix would look like. Either way, the series finale leaves us with more questions than answers and suggests that the time-travel shenanigans may not be over just yet.

The final scene of "Bodies" introduces another twist. Hasan hails a taxi in 2023 and discovers that Iris Maplewood is the driver, even though Iris ought to be still stranded in 1890. Iris traveled back to 1890 knowing she would probably die there because there was no way to return to 2053. We last saw Iris in an 1890 jail cell, but clearly, this wasn't the end of her story.

It's possible that, if Mannix ever returned to the police station in 1890, he would immediately recognize Iris. If he did, it's likely he would have tried to get some answers out of her. Through Iris, Mannix could have learned about their plan to stop him — and then tried to change the timeline again (before years of festering guilt would make him have a change of heart). That might explain why Hasan now exists in an alternate present.

So we know what likely happened to Iris in 1890, but there is still one loose end. If you recall, traveling through The Throat is a one-way trip. Since The Throat doesn't exist in 1890, Iris would have no way of getting home. So how did she end up in Hasan's taxi? Most likely, the Iris in the taxi is not the same Iris who went hurtling back to 1890. Instead, it is probably another version of Iris that got sent to the future after she dove into The Throat (since the show has already established that this splitting happens every time somebody time travels). Maybe future-Iris realized that past-Iris failed to stop Mannix, and now she is traveling back to 2023 to seek Hasan's help.

Unfortunately, we may never know the exact implications of the show's ending. Although "Bodies" is one of the best Netflix original series of 2023, a second season doesn't seem to be in the cards. This was always the plan: Series creator Paul Tomalin has explained that he intended for the story to be told in a single season. However, he wisely left the door ajar on the off chance that demand for Season 2 was high. "If it's a ridiculous hit and people are storming Netflix [for more], we left that ellipsis just in case, with a very exciting idea that does justice to the set up and develops it further," he told Cosmopolitan.

Seeing as "Bodies" is billed as a "limited series" on Netflix and so far Netflix has not announced any intentions to renew it, we probably won't see a second season. And Tomalin would be totally okay with that. Speaking with Hello! magazine, he said, "Well, if it doesn't get a second season, then this is the meal, there's the dessert, there's the coffee. It's the whole thing." Unfortunately, those of us still wondering what happened to Iris Maplewood will be left hanging.