‘3 Body Problem’: The ‘Game of Thrones’ Creators Have Your Next Netflix Binge
Based on a blockbuster novel by Liu Cixin, and coming on the heels of a lengthy Chinese adaptation currently available on Prime Video, 3 Body Problem, out March 21, is Netflix’s attempt at a bold, bingeable “next big thing,” mixing complex physics and clandestine conspiracies with inexplicable deaths, shadowy government outfits, alternating time periods, and enigmatic agents of outer-space malevolence. Created by Game of Thrones’ David Benioff and D.B. Weiss alongside Alexander Woo, this eight-part science-fiction effort successfully strives to be a rollercoaster of a small-screen series. What that means, however, is that its solid highs are matched by quite a few wearisome lows. Feeling like multiple stories stitched together into an uneven and unwieldly whole, it’s a collection of mysteries that, while rarely boring, is too untidy to consistently grip the imagination.
3 Body Problem’s maiden season begins in 1966 Beijing at Tsinghua University, where young Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) watches helplessly as her physics professor father is beaten to death for not toeing the communist line by members of Mao’s Red Guard. The Cultural Revolution continues to be a nightmare for Ye, who after toiling at a labor camp is relocated (due to her impressive intelligence) to a top-secret Inner Mongolia base known as Red Coast, where she learns that the Chinese (like the Americans and Russians) have for years been sending transmissions via enormous satellite dishes to the cosmos in the hopes of making contact. Unfortunately, they’ve received no reply, so Ye devises a brilliant—if, given its political symbolism, controversial—idea: point the satellite directly at the sun in order to use it as an amplifier that will project their message into deeper space.
Despite being forbidden from taking such action, Ye surreptitiously does this and, lo and behold, gets a response that forces her to make a momentous choice. At the same time as she embarks upon her civilization-altering path, 3 Body Problem transitions to present-day London, where detective Da Shi (Benedict Wong)—operating on behalf of a covert group led by no-nonsense Wade (Liam Cunningham)—is investigating the latest in a string of recent suicides of global physicists. To that list is added Vera (Vedette Lim), who inexplicably kills herself at the Oxford particle accelerator where she works with Saul (Jovan Adepo). Before this tragedy, both discuss how particle accelerators around the globe are now dispensing baffling readings that suggest everything humanity thought about physics is wrong. “Science is broken,” Saul opines, and so too, apparently, are many people’s minds, including Saul’s good friend Auggie (Eiza González), who’s on the cusp of manufacturing a breakthrough nanofiber technology but who’s terrified by the fact that, like the suicidal scientists, she now constantly sees a numerical countdown projected over her line of vision.