The 3-body problem

What do you do when science just … breaks? The five physicists at the middle of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem have devoted themselves to unraveling the mysteries of the universe—well, apart from the one who ditched physics to grow to be a potato-chip mogul—but swiftly, the universe doesn’t seem too keen on being unraveled. Particle accelerators worldwide have suddenly began spitting out results that don’t jibe with the preceding millennia of scientific inquiry, so either every little thing they thought they knew is mistaken, or else the laws that govern the material of existence have been suddenly and radically amended.

The query of what rushes in to fill the space when a previously stable worldview collapses is at the center of the brand new series, which was adapted by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo from Liu Cixin’s Chinese novel The Three-Body Problem. In the primary scene, set in 1966, a Beijing physicist is beaten to death by eager young Maoists for his counterrevolutionary belief within the Big Bang—a theory considered unacceptable because to posit an emptiness that precedes the existence of the universe leaves open a void that may very well be filled by God. In the current day, scientists start killing themselves, unable to face a world by which their prized knowledge not makes any sense.

Filling a void can be the problem facing Benioff and Weiss, as they launch their first recent show because the end of Game of Thrones. The intervening years contained several false starts, including an ill-conceived alternate-history series by which the South won the Civil War and a canceled trilogy of Star Wars movies, which, combined with the backlash to the Thrones finale, could be enough to provide any showrunning duo a case of performance anxiety. 3 Body Problem isn’t a timid adaptation; in a way, it’s downright transformative, jettisoning a lot of the novel’s characters and plucking scenes from all three books in Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. But that radical reshaping is all within the name of creating the trilogy’s expansive and philosophical story into something way more pedestrian and digestible. It’s the equivalent of an affordable house flip, gutting a fantastic midcentury structure and redoing every room in shades of millennial gray.

Game of Thrones started off as a superlative translation of George R.R. Martin’s books, so faithful that readers lay in wait for the show to achieve the infamous Red Wedding in order that they could film their unsuspecting friends’ response to the carnage. But Thrones went off the rails once Benioff and Weiss not had books to adapt. Once their task shifted from condensing to creation, the misjudgments began to spiral, and although you might still see the bones of a solid story underneath, they botched the execution so badly that even Martin appeared to lose faith in his own ending. (Thank goodness Liu finished writing his series first.)

With 3 Body Problem, Benioff and Weiss—together with Woo, who served as showrunner on the second season of AMC’s anthology series The Terror, in regards to the incarceration of Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals during World War II—go off-book from the start. The novel’s largely Chinese solid and setting is transposed to Oxford, England, where former classmates gather for the funeral of a friend who has just leaped to her death from the statement platform of a particle accelerator. There’s Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), a superb particle physicist, Auggie Salazar (Eiza González), who’s on the cusp of a breakthrough in developing nanofibers as unbreakably strong as they’re invisibly thin, and their less-accomplished peers Saul (Jovan Adepo) and Will (Alex Sharp), in addition to the aforementioned snack billionaire, Jack (John Bradley). Revamping the solid of characters was an inevitability for an American adaptation produced by a world tech giant (and besides, there’s already a Chinese TV version, apparently faithful to the books, called Three-Body). But it’s hard to think about a less imaginative substitute than a bunch of uniformly attractive university pals of their late 20s and early 30s, especially once the series starts ginning up YA-level drama over which ones might sleep with whom. It’s as if, at every point when a choice needed to be made, the showrunners selected the least interesting one.

The novels’ big ideas, in regards to the relationship between faith and science, individualism and collectivity, are present in 3 Body Problem the way in which Martin’s plot was within the late seasons of Game of Thrones—because the outline of something that never quite materializes. You get the sense the writers aren’t a lot engaged by those ideas a lot as they know they need them to season the plot. There’s a touch of something interesting in the way in which the series draws its solid from across the Asian diaspora—Hong speaks with a New Zealand lilt; Benedict Wong, as a detective investigating the scientists’ deaths, with a Mancunian drawl; and Rosalind Chao, because the present-day expatriate physicist Ye Wenjie, speaks the soft-accented English of somebody who hasn’t seen her homeland in many years—especially as later episodes address the difficulty of a much larger and lengthier migration. It seems that while there’s nothing mistaken with the laws of physics, the scientific disruptions are the herald of a planned incursion by the San-Ti, an alien race from some 4 light-years hence who’ve left their unstable planet with a plan to resettle on Earth. But where Liu’s books repeatedly deepen and complicate our understanding of the aliens’ motives—and even whether, in the event that they do plan to annihilate humanity to make room for themselves, that may be such a foul thing—the series is unequivocal in its depiction of them as an invasive threat, which makes the analogy to real-life migrants incoherent at best. Good thing the show seems to ignore it as soon because it’s established.

3 Body Problem acts as if it’s asking the massive questions, however the ones it poses are much smaller. Questions like: Would a scientist, driven mad by messages sent to them by an alien race, actually possess enough blood to cover several partitions with cryptic writing, and would they proceed to jot down legibly even after they’ve gouged out their very own eyes? More importantly, how did the seemingly winning combination of the creators of essentially the most successful TV show of the past 15 years, coupled with a provocative and dense series of novels, produce a series this dull and forgettable? Perhaps the aliens can tell us.