This month marks the 25th anniversary of Matrix, and whatever else the movie is, don’t check Twitter about it; The discourse is broken: Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski’s 1999 film marked the first time humanity learned that we’re really just batteries. The reveal that the machines won and took us all into a barnyard simulation remains one of the greatest sci-fi things ever. So perhaps it’s even more important that David Benioff and DB Weiss, as writers of episode five of 3 Body problem, make a civilization-level revelation like this here on the small screen. In Liu Cixin’s original novel, San-Ti’s grand plan seemed almost abstract in its magnitude. As in Orson Scott Card Ender’s Game, when Ender finally discovers that the battles he thought were simulations actually caused planetary-scale destruction. Seeing it realized on screen is not only a wild sci-fi thrill, but an even clearer indicator of the aliens’ central message. We, humanity, our civilization, all our little disputes: we are infinite specks of dust. Or as the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-controlling “sophon” sent by Trisolaris puts it as he envelops Earth’s atmosphere and stares down at us with his quantum-powered Eye of Sauron: we are insects. , not batteries.
This revelation is a triple blow for the friendly Will Downing of the Oxford friends. First it is diagnosed that his pancreatic cancer is terminal. He then inherits 20 million pounds because his best friend Jack was murdered by an alien sympathizer (3 Body problem Episode 3, “Destroyer of Worlds.” Now, not only can’t he spend it because he’s said to only have a few months to live, but he can’t even just get super zootized and happily stare at the blue sky because an all-encompassing space brain is impossible to fathom being erased. that shit Alien idiots! it’s not like 3P body He didn’t tell us this was going to happen. Back in episode 1 (“Countdown”), the frenzied Cultural Revolution crowd chasing Ye Wenjie’s physics teacher father Ye Zhetai shouted “Eradicate the insects!” Wenjie sent his message into space because he believed that we could not save ourselves, that our societies would destroy themselves in the name of progress. But as he stares at the phrase “You are insects” as it appears on every screen in the entire world, Ye seems to finally understand that the aliens he invited are persecuting humanity in the name of their own progress.
Mike Evans certainly fucked around and figured it out. Even before “Judgment Day” reaches its big global reveal, 3 Body problem features another pivotal sequence from Liu’s novel with a terrifying amplification of the gore factor. They are here cutting steel and bodies. After Da Shi convinces a reluctant Auggie, and after Thomas Wade turns to the boyfriend of Jin’s Royal Navy commander, Prithviraj Varma (Saamer Usmani), to lead the operation, his intelligence agency’s dark objectives Doomsday The ship with a nanofiber clothesline stretched across the Panama Canal. Auggie’s revolutionary technology can gut a diamond like it’s made of cotton candy, making the hull of a converted oil freighter no less malleable. Sure, there’s an entire colony on board, not just Evans and his hot mic for the aliens. Families, children. But by Wade’s metric, everyone is sleeping with the space enemy. Sales to human civilization. And besides, it was San-Ti who first sold to Evans and his people. In their omniscience, they knew that the nanofiber operation would transform the inhabitants of Doomsday into soft tissue fodder for a giant-scale mandolin slicer. And they did nothing to stop it.
Wade’s invitation to the game is on the hard drive he literally rips from the cold, dead hands of a dismembered Evans, and with Jin as an expert in dimensional theory; She says it’s almost all theory and beyond comprehension, since our brains evolved in three dimensions, not ten: they enter a game landscape defined by the ruins of an urban civilization. This is where the swordswoman and AI representative (Sea Shimooka) is available with a San-Ti explainer. “We used all our resources to make four sophons,” she says. “Two pairs of two. Each pair is entangled, connected at a quantum level. Two remain with us, the other two we have sent to you. Everything they see and hear, we see and hear at the same time. Even when they are light years away.” When scientists began to die, it was the sophonies that targeted them and their work. The San-Ti wish to end our science, to impede our progress, so that when 400 years pass and their interstellar fleet reaches planetary takeover mode, humanity will not have the means to retaliate. Instead of our inexorable pace of progress to this point, instead of taking the next steps in a 10,000-year journey from cracking the code of agriculture to manufacturing nanofibers in the information age, we will be handcuffed. “The universe will remain a mystery to you forever. Instead of truth, we give you miracles. We wrap your world in illusions.”
It’s a satisfying feeling to be confused by sci-fi television. The images of 3 Body problem explore an aesthetic different from the ecstatic grandeur of Base. But thematically, both series work very effectively on the Big Questions level, and that’s a nice reward for us as bug-brained tube viewers. Constellation on Apple TV+ has Noomi Rapace and Jonathan Banks chasing versions of themselves in alternate dimensions in a meandering, season-long plot that causes as many headaches as it does rewarding viewing experiences. This is all really good for us and, with the impressive scale it has reached, 3 Body problem is making the kind of big changes that not only offset the mysteries it’s been stirring up, but also inspire us to consider our society, our very existence, at a granular level. To make impactful speculative fiction, sometimes you have to split some people in half.
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.ÂÂÂÂ
