Based on the 2008 Hugo Award-winning novel. The three body problem by Liu Cixin and created for television by writers and executive producers David Benioff and DB Weiss (game of Thrones) and Alexander Woo (True Blood), 3 Body problem brings some serious sci-fi pedigree to Netflix, transporting us right into all the action and mystery afoot with an absolutely dynamite debut episode. What happens to humanity when the scientific tools we develop that explain our world and the universe fail completely? When the models we rely on to provide empirical results return data that look similar Alice in Wonderland written in chaotic numerical code? The answers to these questions will reveal decades-old secret programs and current conspiracies; They will immerse us in mysterious virtual reality landscapes and force us to confront what an unbiased reading of theoretical physics allows: that science recognizes space for something like God to exist, or at least space for something that our puny brains can exist. Do not conceive outside of a pine context. And if none of that helps, stay with chain-smoking Benedict Wong while his gruff intelligence agent tries to solve the case.
Beijing’s Tsinghua University, 1966. During a rabid wrestling session in Maoist China, physics professor Ye Zhetai (Perry Yung) is humiliated on a stage before a growing crowd. Is it true that he taught the theory of relativity and counter-revolutionary ideas about the Big Bang? Didn’t Albert Einstein help in the construction of the atomic bomb by American imperialism? The teenage Red Guards hurl insulting questions at the professor while his daughter Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) is restrained, unable to intervene, and the session culminates in him being publicly beaten to death. Wenjie was once her father’s brightest student. She is now banished to a rehabilitation labor camp in Inner Mongolia.
In the London of 2024, at the Oxford University particle accelerator, researcher Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo) stares at the results of his tests, confused. “According to experiments, all our theories are wrong,” Saul worries to his boss, Vera Ye (Vedette Lim). “All the physics of the last 60 years is wrong.” And although she is also frustrated, none of her colleagues expect it when Doctor Ye commits suicide by calmly walking towards the facility’s enormous Cherenkov tank. The scientist’s death adds to a growing list carried by Clarence “Da” Shi (Wong), whom we first meet at a London murder scene tinged with sinister horror movie music. Another scientist gouged out his eyes after scrawling a cascading numerical sequence on the walls of his house. “I still see it!” he wrote in blood.
To Da Shi and Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham), the head of his intelligence agency, Saul is part of the “Oxford Five,” a group of former physics students and friends that also includes Augustina “Auggie” Salazar (Elza González), Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), Will Downing (Alex Sharp) and Jack Rooney (John Bradley, aka Samwell Tarly from GOT). Like Saul, Jin has noticed that particle accelerators around the world are generating nonsensical results. It does not make any sense. But what makes even less sense is the mysterious numerical countdown that begins to appear to Auggie, like a constant overlay on his vision.
“How far has it come? Your countdown? “You don’t want it to go to zero.” The anonymous woman who approaches Auggie doesn’t elaborate, but what she said is pretty scary, especially when she suggests that the innovative nanotechnology Auggie is developing needs to end. immediately.
In 1967 Mongolia, Wenjie works clearing forest land until the Chinese military recruits her to work on their top-secret Red Coast Base project, defined by its massive radio telescope that fries flocks of birds every time it’s turned on. . She has to have something to do with destroying enemy missiles or satellites, right? No. Wenjie’s physics background becomes key to what’s really happening on the Red Coast, which is the generation of powerful transmissions intended to communicate with aliens. Yes, aliens. Extraterrestrials, who at the end of the 1960s have not yet responded to humanity’s texts.
In 2024, Wenjie (played in the present by Rosalind Chao) tells Jin that his work on the Red Coast is long forgotten, another life. But the sudden suicide of Wenjie’s daughter Vera is at odds with a family that has always championed the facts of science and research over things like God and prayer. What led Vera to do it? Maybe she was a golden helmet. Wenjie gives Jin the sleek but strangely ugly device, which she claims her daughter was using to play a video game. And when Jin herself tries it on, she suddenly finds herself immersed in a strange augmented reality. Traditional clothing, simple and featureless, a tall stepped pyramid and an enormous sun that devours the horizon and awakens dissected human forms in the sand around it. Jin rips the unit off her head. “What the fuck?”
—No confirmation bias. Look at it and tell me what you observe, if you observe anything.” Auggie and Saul have a romantic history together, but this midnight meeting isn’t about any physical issues. Rather, it is related to the Red Coast radio telescope and something else that the woman on the street told him. “Look up at the sky and the universe wink.†Auggie has brought Saul along as an observer and as moral support, because he doesn’t know if the visual countdown is perhaps an indication that she’s going crazy. But when the bright starscape above them begins to literally flicker, Da Shin and Thomas Wade witness the same phenomenon separately. What is it? the intelligence agent asks. And Liam Cunningham as Wade just gives a scowl worthy of Davos Seaworth. —That, Clarence, he is our enemy.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is a freelance writer and editor living in Chicago. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.
