No one could accuse David Benioff and D.B. Weiss of lacking chutzpah. After wrangling George R.R. Martin’s sprawling Game of Thrones into a television-shaped epic, the duo, along with co-creator Alexander Woo, made a cosmic leap into another seemingly impossible-to-adapt project: 3 Body Problem, based on Chinese novelist Liu Cixin’s Hugo Award-winning hard science fiction trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past.
“We have a rough sense of the structure of the entire series, and we’re just hopeful that we get to tell the whole thing and don’t get canceled,” Benioff told me when I spoke to him earlier this year. Adapting a book series that’s fully written was something of a relief after conjuring the controversial final season of Thrones without a finished book to guide them. Benioff calls the final novel in Cixin’s trilogy “phenomenal—it goes to the end of the universe and the end of time, and it comes together in a beautiful way.” I haven’t read the books, so I can’t tell you if that’s a spoiler—but if so, feel free to yell at me when the final season drops.
Either way, that quote ought to give you an inkling of the grandiose scale 3 Body Problem is working with. The eight-part series zigzags between timelines and realms, grounding esoteric ideas in an epic drama. The opening episode alternates between1966 Beijing and 2024 London. In the Cultural Revolution flashback, young scientist Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) watches her physicist father get beaten to death publicly in an anti-intellectual purge. Her rage at humanity grows in the ensuing years as she watches the environmental destruction being wrought by the Chinese government, and makes a decision that will have grave—you could even say intergalactic—consequences.
In the present-day timeline, the world’s particle accelerators have started spitting out results completely out of whack with everything we know about the laws of the universe, and a spate of scientists around the world have committed suicide. One of them is Ye’s daughter, the beloved mentor to a group of Oxford grads who reunite at her funeral. There’s brilliant physicists Jin (Jess Hong) and Saul (Jovan Adepo), nanofiber entrepreneur Auggie (Eiza González), school teacher Will (Alex Sharp), and snack food billionaire Jack (John Bradley, a.k.a. the loveable Samwell Tarley from Game of Thrones).
John Bradley in 3 Body Problem.Courtesy of Netflix
In other words, it’s a Scooby gang of scientific geniuses who trade nerdy quips while they try to figure out why the fabric of reality seems to be unraveling. Auggie begins hallucinating a clock that counts down to her death; stars wink on and off in the sky, communicating in code; and Jin comes into possession of a sophisticated virtual reality headset that propels her into a chaotic universe with three suns that makes life nearly impossible. Whenever the environment on a planet gets too hot, the majority of the inhabitants simply let themselves dehydrate into husks that can be rolled up like a yoga mat and carted away for safekeeping. It is a communal mindset: as long as one individual survives, they all survive.
Jin and her friends soon realize that this is more than a game: the “three body problem” that they must solve has existential ramifications for the extraterrestrial beings who created the headset. They are searching for a new home, and there’s already a cult of followers on Earth—including Ye (played beautifully as an adult by Rosalind Chao) and Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce), an environmentalist/oil tycoon—eager to enable them, driven by a fanatical religious fervor.