‘3 Body Problem’ May Be One of the Most Important TV Shows of the Decade
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss mark their return to television with their most far-reaching undertaking yet
Following the meteoric impact of Game of Thrones’ arrival — and the seismic disappointment of its finale — it was anyone’s best guess when and where the names of creators D.B. Weiss and David Benioff would surface next. Following the debacle of the show’s final two seasons, there were many prepared to run the infamous duo out of Hollywood completely.
What Weiss and Benioff, jeeringly referred to by many as “D and D,” brought to life with Game of Thrones was one of the most singularly ambitious shows of all time. Anything less than a masterful conclusion to the eight season spectacle was always bound to disappoint. Half of a decade later, the cries for rewrites and reshoots still have yet to fully dissipate.
When people heard it was that same notorious duo that signed on to direct 3 Body Problem, many were skeptical. Those fans scarred by D and D’s prior show-running fiasco began preparing for calamity. Based on Liu Cixin’s cosmic trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past, it’s a story that some feared couldn’t be brought to TV at all.
If their last project was ambitious, this current one in many regards feels only doubly so. Set in a disconcertingly familiar world, 3 Body Problem is a show that aims to philosophically tackle all that we are as people. And by all appearances so far, it does that adeptly. It’s grandiose, decisive, soul-stirring, and far-reaching. Being so ambitious, though, it’s difficult to properly communicate the show’s value without a few light spoilers.
Among my favorite TV shows and films are those which exhibit the truest understanding of our strange times. Mr. Robot reveals our digital lives in grating extremes. Black Mirror examines the future we’re quickly creating, one dystopian innovation at a time. Don’t Look Up is a disturbingly realistic allegory to our climate catastrophe and our stubborn refusal to act.
3 Body Problem is built on some of the most complicated realities of our era. It expertly explores the idea of a civilization with intelligence that far exceeds our own — one that interacts with the dimensions that we as humans fail to process. It’s an admittedly nebulous premise. But as science itself enters into more and more nebulous territory, it’s hard not to see something eerily authentic in the way events are depicted.
In movies, aliens are typically rendered in a fairly binary fashion. Tall green men discover us today and arrive with their saucers and weapons tomorrow. Whether Independence Day, Mars Attacks, War of the Worlds, Battle Los Angeles, or Signs, it’s rare for the outsiders to be very nuanced in their motives.
On one hand, the alien civilization in 3 Body Problem, called the San-Ti, does intend to take our home from us. Their motives aren’t completely unfamiliar. But where the story differentiates itself is in the centuries worth of lead-up time before the day of their arrival. Living entire lightyears away, the threat they pose isn’t exactly imminent.
Once their eventual appearance begins to seem inevitable, we enter into a Cold War-like period as we gradually prepare to make first contact. We try to advance our technologies in anticipation of interstellar warfare.
The approach of the conflict is treated with a profound and existential gravity that most Hollywood battles with extra-terrestrial life fail to impart. One of the show’s most impressive achievements is in crafting something that feels so real out of material that’s still so deeply entrenched in the world of sci-fi. There’s a cohesion to stories that’s often lost when they give way to the abstract. But 3 Body Problem makes something accessible out of the abstruse.
Other plots appear lazy when we see that our alien adversaries can travel at warp speed and are limitless in their fantastical abilities. And it’s all the more anti-climactic then when the façade falls and we see they’re defeated by something banal like water or the common cold.
While the San-Ti are portrayed as far more advanced than our species, their powers aren’t boundless. They can’t navigate the vastness of space in piddly button presses.
But what they have achieved feels largely believable when we look at the rate of our own progress. To consider the narrowing gaps between each of our species’ colossal leaps forward, we begin to see that very little is impossible.
To the Neanderthals that roamed the earth before us, a species that walks around with internet machines in their pockets would be utterly unthinkable. An advanced alien intelligence with supercomputers condensed into single protons hardly represents a greater vault forward than those we’ve already achieved ourselves. A few more centuries of progress might see us challenging the very limits of our three dimensional spaces.
Given the universe’s enormity, it’s a common misconception that contact with another civilization would be a fairly simple undertaking. The 400 years it takes for the San-Ti species to get here is realistic. One of the most fascinating questions this poses is: “Where will our own species be in 400 years?”
Taking into account the short intervals between the agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, and the rise of atomic energy, the aliens reason that by the time they arrive here on Earth, our technology will have long surpassed their own.
So rather than hope they can win an uphill battle, they hamper our ability to advance by systematically destroying humanity’s faith in science. They throw our entire grasp of reality into question through elaborate illusions.
The show shares common territory with a few Netflix adaptations of recent years. Leave the World Behind ventures into everything from the nature of misinformation and cyber attacks to the hijacking of electric vehicles to be used as murder machines.
Don’t Look Up delves into a crossroads similar to the one depicted in the 3 Body Problem. But how humanity faces the threat is diametrically different in the two projects. In the former, we’re cavalier about our attitudes toward collapse. In the latter, we fight the best imaginable fight in the interest of future generations. We don’t treat the crisis as a can to be kicked down the road, but as a unifying drive to act swiftly and selflessly.
I’m unsure if this sort of proactivity is anything we can reasonably expect of ourselves. But how exactly we would treat such a confounding scenario is nothing we can plainly predict. If climate change posed the same visceral sort of threat as an alien invasion, maybe it would be enough to prompt us into action — even if centuries in advance. If our perception of reality began caving in on itself, maybe it would be enough for us to set aside our borders and differences in the interest of common goals.
Another one of the most interesting philosophical premises of the show is that humans — in all likelihood — can’t be trusted with their own stewardship. It’s because of the horrible ills of war, genocide, revolution, and habitat destruction that we invite the aliens to Earth to begin with.
Ye Wenjie, portrayed by Rosalind Chao, after watching her father be murdered and enduring false imprisonment herself, concludes that humanity simply can’t be saved. She decides that the intervention of an advanced life would mark an improvement for all of us. And with one momentous button press, she sends a message that irrevocably alters our species’ future.
There’s a staggering weight to that first radio contact between humans and alien life, and their subsequent dialogues are every bit as consequential. The conversations are tense enough to elicit rapt attention from nearly any viewer. There’s a hair-raising power to each sentence exchanged between the two advanced lifes.
By allowing the aliens to remain a formless and expressionless off-screen presence, it grants viewers a launching pad for massive and macabre musings.
As with the war between humans and White Walkers that Game of Thrones spends eight seasons leading up to, Benioff and Weiss build a spectacular suspense about events to come. How our meeting with this other kind will manifest on-screen is hard to fathom, and it’s a loaded mystery that will surely provide years worth of fodder for fans as the series continues to progress.
As in Westeros, there’s an expansiveness to the story and all of its characters that are well-suited by Benioff and Weiss’ world-building techniques. They bring to life the characters on each side of the issue, quite a few of which are portrayed by actors from D and D’s prior show. John Bradley, Liam Cunningham, and Jonathan Pryce each make welcome reappearances in 3 Body Problem.
Though 3 Body Problem has only been out for mere days, I can say with certainty that its first season sets a high bar to hurdle. Watching it, I couldn’t help but to order a copy of the book on which it’s based.
Where this fateful road will ultimately lead is unpredictable. I can only pray it takes me somewhere better than where I ended up the last time I trusted D and D’s directions.
If these initial eight episodes are any indicator, I can at least be cautiously optimistic that they’ll stick the landing this time around. Whether this alien invasion will be worth the wait is something only time will tell.
What channel, or streaming service, is it on? If you mention it in this well-written article, forgive me. I’m having a scattered day.
I liked “3Body Problem” very much. I watched it 3 times.
Each time more sad.
For me Jin&young Ye Wenjie were the most compelling.
Sadness&horror of Ye Wenjie’s experiences&evolution to the point she would betray her own species.
Will’s hopeless, boundless love for Jin.
Saul evokes Saul of Tarsus vs King Saul.
Auggie’s reasonable questions about how to spend the 400 year grace period. Tatiana’s voracious cult adoration, hope for salvation.
I guess the humans coping was the interesting part for me.