“In nature, nothing exists alone.” If the way Chinese physicist Ye Wenjie and Mike Evans, the rich and handsome hermit, shared that phrase in 3 Body problem Episode 2 (“Red Coast”) seemed to you as if it had more than one meaning, your reward comes in 1982. Mao is dead, the Cultural Revolution is over, and Ye Wenjie is now a professor of astrophysics at Tsinghua University, where her the late father taught. While she is in London for a conference, she contacts Evans and her fingers remain close to each other on the restaurant’s clothes. She tells him what she did. The message she sent. Who she contacted. And the next time we see them, they’re kissing passionately in the broadcast center that Evans built. Doomsday, the Panamax oil tanker that he converted into a gigantic floating base. Evans has placed his enormous satellite dish on the ship’s superstructure. He has filled the ship with true believers. And he has maintained the alien hotline that Ye first established on the Red Coast.
So, Ye Wenjie was not a passive observer of her daughter Vera’s participation in the three-body game and her shiny golden helmet delivery system. She knew exactly what she was when she gave the unit to Jin, after Vera’s suicide. But Jin still doesn’t know it as she mourns Jack Rooney with Auggie. At a meeting with Da Shi and Thomas Wade at Wade’s Dave Allen overall-like an office camera, the black bag guys show them security footage from inside Jack’s apartment, where he is murdered by an invisible hand. “They” killed Rooney when he wouldn’t play, and “they” forced Auggie to disconnect the nanofiber technology from him. But through the mystery woman, “they” have also extended an invitation to Jin to work with them. “You can help us catch the bastards who murdered him,” Wade says. In other words, she can be their eyes and ears on the inside, even though they already have eyes and ears everywhere as a strategic intelligence organization. Jin agrees to be monitored while she follows the numbers and lengths of the invitation she received, which has a three-body logo printed on it. She’s a scientist, not a spy or alien fighter. But as Auggie says, “the people who work for ‘them’ are not aliens.”
In 2024, the floating headquarters of Mike Evans’ operation is a self-sustaining colony with families and children. The indoctrination to the “Lord” of him is total: this is the kind of generations-deep operation where someone like the mystery woman would be homeschooled (on the boat?) from his birth. Evans locks himself in his office and turns on the alien speaker, and through his reading of Little Red Riding Hood He comes to understand that the San Ti don’t really understand the whole concept of metaphor. The voice wants to know why the Big Bad Wolf was lying. (“Is he still at Grandma’s house? We would like to talk to him.”) The voice wants to know what lying It even is. As a species that appears to communicate directly through thought, the San Ti do not have the capacity for obfuscation and do not tolerate it in those they work with. You know, like Mike Evans. “You can’t trust a liar,†the voice says. “We cannot coexist with liars.”
When Jin arrives at the coordinates they gave him, it’s just an empty warehouse in the dark. But when you open a protective door, the meeting inside looks like a members-only chat event at a technology conference. As the video screens flash around him, Jin listens to the “Our Lord” thing from the mystery woman, aka Tatiana (Marlo Kelly). “He makes us look like religious crazy people,” says Tatiana. “Except our lord is real. The gods are an alien race that has developed a human-run Earth-based support system powered by impossible future technology and Mike Evans’ money. And they assume that it will be his ancestors who make the first tours of the ship. But this current event is not about Evans. When Da Shi and Wade hear that the founder of the organization is in the room, they are confused, because surveillance shows that he is still in the room. Doomsday. But the founder’s big reveal is alarming for all of them. “Welcome,” Ye Wenjie says to Jin as the converts shout, clap and cheer, whether like company worshipers at a corporate party or like members of a cult. “I knew you would come.”
Disillusionment with Ye’s experience in the Cultural Revolution has reached this point. “We cannot save ourselves,” he preaches to his followers, echoing his original text to the aliens. “But we are not alone. Ye, Evans and their group believe that the San Ti will share even more knowledge with humanity than they already have, and help people “survive and thrive.” (Even the language used here sounds like a tech conference event.) The spaceships will take 400 years to arrive, so it is a multi-generational thing, our children’s children, to help them. But these people are committed.
Wade seems to know that they know that he and his group know. It’s like the voice told Evans on the ship: “We will protect you.” But the intelligence chief still sends a tactical team to arrest Ye Wenjie and his followers. Jin is slightly injured in the hand-to-hand combat and Da Shi shoots Tatiana in the foot, although she is seen crawling away from capturing her. And as Jin shares with Will what he’s learned about the connection between Jack’s murder, Ye Wenjie, Mike Evans, and all the strange things that have been happening, Ye appears before a shadowy international panel of officials. . Of course, she’s in custody. But why does Wade think this is so? He speaks calmly, with a cold gleam in his eyes. “You have me because they you let. They are coming. And when they arrive, you will be so grateful.”
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.
