Just when you thought you had a grip on the boundaries of the observable universe, Netflix drops a cosmically perplexing new science fiction mind-scrambler to pull the rug out from under you. ‘3 Body Problem,’ the hotly anticipated adaptation of Liu Cixin’s bestselling novel trilogy, isn’t just unexplained aerial phenomena – it’s unexplained every-phenomena.
The eight-maddeningly-enigmatic-episode first season, which just crashed onto the streaming platform in an inexplicably bursty temporal singularity, is a turbulent voyage bouncing between space, time, and virtual realities more disorienting than the most brain-melting Christopher Nolan film.
Based on the first book in Cixin’s ‘Remembrance of Earth’s Past’ trilogy yet also cribbing perplexingly from its two psyche-fracturing sequels, the show’s non-linear narrative whiplashes the hapless viewer from 1960s China to the present-day English countryside to a VR cosmic horror hellscape.
At its core, or rather its infinitely regressing fractal paradoxicality, is the mindboggling first-encounter prospect of humans making contact with a civilization of incomprehensibly advanced alien beings who…wish us well? Or ill? Or are simply so hyper-intelligent that their motives transcend our plebian three-pound neural clusters?
An Ominous Merging of Worlds
As the creepy trailer portends, “Someone or something is targeting the world’s top scientists.” But who? Or what? And why? And how can a cadre of big-brained astonomy/physics prodigies and one renegade gumshoe unravel the imminent threat before it…imminently threatens?!
The show’s co-creator David Benioff (ofGame of Thrones fame) has teased that while the ominous opening and closing scenes hew faithfully to Cixin’s novels, the deliriously zigzagging narrative intermission is a barmitzva’d mashup of all three books, plus some added gasps from the creators’ own frenzied recognizers.
“We brought in some stuff from book two, we brought in some stuff from book three, there’s some stuff we invented,” Benioff divulged with a Kubrickian glint. Their aim? To capture the existential awe of contemplating a cosmos where “the universe is a lot bigger than we thought about before – we’re almost certainly not alone. And that might not be a good thing.”
A Dizzying Dance of Space and Time
Burrowing down its rabbit-hole of bewilderments, the show’s own dizzying journey begins with a pebble tossed in 1960s China, whose ripples bend the laws of physics across the decades. A young woman’s mysterious decision then sets off an intergalactic reaction that crescendos into the jarring unspooling of the very fabric of reality itself in the present day.
Cue ace scientific minds played by the likes of Game of Thrones alumni John Bradley, Liam Cunningham, Jonathan Pryce and more, joining a scruffy gumshoe (or is he more than that?) to probe the deepening crisis. Their quest bends through esoteric mathematics, shadowy virtual realms, and cosmic visions of civilizations sublimely advanced beyond our primate comprehensions.
Some humans, it seems, are primed to resist the implacable alien agenda. While others bizarrely opt to embrace its ineffable arrival. But whomever, whatever, and whyever lurks behind this burgeoning interplanetary perplexity, one groks swiftly that wielding the series’ titular “Three Body Problem” is to grasp the deepest mysteries of existence itself.
Mindmelting Mysteries Await
Hustled by an acclaimed creative ensemble that fused these dazzlingly cerebral yet emotionally grounded book-to-screen fireworks, ‘3 Body Problem’ emerges as the spring’s most scintillatingly disquieting new TV obsession.
For the sci-fi metaphysicians, theoretical cosmologists, and Code Ev’rissians starved for a reality-cracking mystery with the gravitas to reduce even Hawking himself to dormant processor mode on his Porsche wheelchair – the call has come. Engage head-fry mode, recalibrate your realities, and let the Three Body Problem..problematicize!
