Based on the Hugo Award-winning 2008 novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, and created for television by writers and executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (Game of Thrones) and Alexander Woo (True Blood), 3 Body Problem brings some serious science fiction pedigree to Netflix, which beams us directly into all of the action and mystery afoot with an absolutely dynamite debut episode. What happens to humanity when the scientific tools we developed that explain our world and the universe totally crap out? When the models we rely on to deliver empirical results instead return data that resemble Alice in Wonderland written in chaotic numerical code? What answers there are to these questions will reveal decades-old secret programs, and present day conspiracies; they will plunge us into mysterious virtual reality landscapes, and force us to face what a fair-minded reading of theoretical physics allows: that science acknowledges space for something like God to exist, or at least the space for something our puny brains can’t conceive outside of a divine context. And if none of that does it for you, just hang with a chain-smoking Benedict Wong as his gruff intelligence operative tries to solve the case.
Beijing’s Tsinghua University, 1966. During a rabid struggle session in Maoist China, physics professor Ye Zhetai (Perry Yung) is humiliated on a dais before a surging crowd. Is it true he taught the theory of relativity, and counter revolutionary ideas about the Big Bang? Didn’t Albert Einstein aid in American imperialism’s construction of the atomic bomb? Teenage Red Guards hurl questions as insults at the professor as his daughter Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) is restrained, helpless to intervene, and the session culminates when they publicly beat him to death. Wenjie was once her father’s most brilliant student. Now, she’s banished to a rehabilitation work camp far in the Mongolian interior.
In 2024 London, at Oxford University’s particle accelerator, researcher Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo) stares at his test results, confounded. “According to the experiments, all of our theories are wrong,” Saul frets to his boss, Vera Ye (Vedette Lim). “All of the physics of the past 60 years is wrong.” And while she’s frustrated, too, none of her colleagues expect it when Doctor Ye commits suicide by walking calmly into the facility’s massive Cherenkov tank. The scientist’s death is added to a growing list kept by Clarence “Da” Shi (Wong), who we first meet at a London murder scene tinged with ominous horror movie music. Another scientist has gouged out his own eyes after scrawling a cascading number sequence across the walls of his home. “I still see it!” he wrote in blood.
To Da Shi and Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham), his black bag intelligence agency boss, 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 across the world are now generating nonsense results. It doesn’t make any sense. But what makes even less sense is the mysterious numeric countdown that begins to appear to Auggie, like a constant overlay in her vision.
“How far has it got? Your countdown? You don’t want it to get to zero.” The unnamed woman who approaches Auggie doesn’t elaborate, but what she said is frightening enough, especially when she suggests that the innovative nanotechnology Auggie’s developing needs to end immediately.
Back in 1967 Mongolia, Wenjie works to clearcut forest land until she’s recruited by the Chinese military to work at their top secret Red Coast Base project, defined by its enormous radio telescope that fries flocks of birds whenever it’s switched on. It’s gotta be something to do with destroying enemy missiles or satellites, right? Nah. Wenjie’s physics background becomes key to what’s really up at Red Coast, which is the generation of powerful transmissions aimed at communicating with aliens. Yes, aliens. Extra terrestrials, who as of the late 1960s have yet to answer humanity’s texts.
In 2024, Wenjie (played in the present by Rosalind Chao) tells Jin that her work at Red Coast is long forgotten, another life. But the sudden suicide of Wenjie’s daughter Vera does not jibe with a family who always upheld the facts of science and research over stuff like God and prayer. What caused Vera to do it? Maybe it was a gold helmet. Wenjie gives Jin the elegant but strangely off-putting device, which she says her daughter was using to play a video game. And when Jin herself tries it on, she’s suddenly immersed into weird augmented reality. A featureless plain, traditional clothing, a tall stepped pyramid, and an enormous, horizon-swallowing sun that awakens desiccated human forms in the sand all around her. Jin rips the unit from her head. “What the fuck?”
“No confirmation bias. Watch, and let me know what you observe, if you observe anything.” Auggie and Saul have a romantic history together, but this midnight meetup isn’t about any physical hanky-panky. Instead, it relates back to that Red Coast radio telescope and something else the woman on the street told her. “Look up at the sky, and the universe will wink.” Auggie has brought Saul along as both an observer and for moral support, because she doesn’t know if the visual countdown is maybe an indication that she’s going bananas. But when the brilliant starscape above them begins to literally blink, the same phenomenon is witnessed separately by Da Shin and Thomas Wade. What is it, the intelligence operative, wonders. And Liam Cunningham as Wade just gives a frowning harrumph worthy of Davos Seaworth. “That, Clarence, is our enemy.”
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.