What Netflix’s <em>3 Body Problem</em> Can’t Solve

This story contains mild spoilers for Netflix’s 3 Body Problem.

In Cixin Liu’s novel The Three-Body Problem, a scientist being manipulated by an extraterrestrial force is told to look up at the sky one night and watch the universe “wink” at him. The effect—akin to stars blinking on and off in unison—won’t be visible to Miao Wang’s naked eye; he has to use special glasses to observe the cosmic microwave background radiation. When the universe does indeed wink, Wang collapses into a near-catatonic daze. There’s no logical explanation he can turn to, and no one he thinks will believe that something—someone?—otherworldly is altering his reality. “The possibilities would torture him cruelly, like demons,” Liu writes of Wang, “until he suffered a complete mental breakdown.”

The universe also winks in 3 Body Problem, Netflix’s adaptation of Liu’s story, which is the first in the science-fiction trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past—except the message’s intended recipient isn’t alone. The series’s creators—the Game of Thrones duo David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, and The Terror: Infamy showrunner Alexander Woo—have stripped the scene of its hard-science jargon while piling on the theatrics. In the show, the universe winks for everyone on Earth in a climactic sequence that ends the premiere. Characters race onto rooftops, open-mouthed, their necks craned toward the cosmos. The next morning, people breathlessly theorize at work about what may have happened. The BBC broadcasts a special report.

Making what’s internal on the page much more external—and much more dramatic—is a trick the show uses often. Liu’s reams of text explaining the nuances of astrophysics have been distilled into compact conversations and easy-to-follow diagrams. Disturbing plot developments have been transformed into eye-popping spectacles. Many of these alterations are not unwelcome. They make Liu’s speculative scenarios accessible and thrilling without losing the broad strokes of the plot: Around the world, some top scientists have been inexplicably dying after seeing visions of a countdown clock. Others have been lured into playing a virtual-reality game in which they must try to solve the titular orbital-mechanics riddle.

[Read: The human fear of total knowledge]

The culprit behind these moves is revealed to be an alien race fleeing their doomed home, traveling toward Earth to make the planet theirs, and working during their journey—one that will take roughly 400 years—to stop humanity’s rapid technological advancement. In other words, The Three-Body Problem is a cerebral epic about human ingenuity in the face of an existential crisis.

The books, as a result, feature a wide array of characters, most of them strangers to one another; their ideas, Liu suggests, are more important than their relationships. But the Netflix series has turned many of the trilogy’s various protagonists into a collection of friends, all scientific prodigies in their 30s who studied under the same mentor at Oxford University. They’re dubbed the “Oxford Five,” and they include Auggie (played by Eiza González), a nanotech expert and the show’s version of Wang; Jin (Jess Hong), a brilliant theoretical physicist who gets sucked into playing the VR game; Saul (Jovan Adepo), an aimless researcher and Auggie’s on-again, off-again love interest; Will (Alex Sharp), a selfless teacher who has long harbored a crush on Jin; and Jack (John Bradley), a wealthy entrepreneur who left academia to run a snack company. All are rather well-adjusted versions of their written counterparts. (Wang, for instance, is a middle-aged workaholic who neglects his wife and child as he searches for solutions.)

The result is a story that certainly feels more conventionally TV-worthy—but it essentially abandons one of the books’ most interesting themes: that of the loneliness and terror that can come with the pursuit of knowledge and progress. Part of the pleasure of reading Liu’s dense story is in observing how he shuffles characters in and out, discarding protagonists in favor of new ones from one book to the next. Given a conflict that won’t manifest for centuries, the story becomes about which theories last—and how so many of the figures who come up with ingenious plans must learn to share them and convince others of their worldview.

That kind of exchange simply can’t happen with characters who already know one another deeply—and as the first season goes on to adapt material beyond the first novel, the harder it becomes to believe that humanity’s future hinges on five best friends who all live in London. Remembrance of Earth’s Past is a saga of an impending close encounter that affects the globe, eventually taking place far beyond our solar system. Liu anchored that dizzying scale with individual characters whose journeys mirror one another’s—many of them have the heavy burden of accomplishing a mission solo—but the Netflix show establishes an overcrowded web of relationships that leaves several subplots noticeably thin. Take the researcher Saul, for example: He’s a version of a character who’s tremendously important in the second book, but because he’s a member of the Oxford Five, he’s introduced early on and spends most of the season on the show’s margins. With too many characters involved, the story flattens most of them into archetypes: Jack is the comic relief. Will is the martyr. Saul is—well, he’s a blank slate, waiting on the sidelines until he has something to do.

[Read: How to write science fiction that isn’t ‘useful’]

Liu’s characters have been accused of being flat, too, but I like the detached coolness of his approach. His style suggests that anyone is capable of genius; the real challenge is to not be consumed by the weight of discovery, to wield an idea responsibly. In the show, a character explains that humanity’s greatest weapon is “the solitude of the mind,” but what Liu’s writing underscored was how solitude could also be humanity’s greatest downfall. A lone figure determining whether to push a button can seal a population’s fate. A person given too much power to implement any plan could inadvertently turn against his own species. Many of his protagonists learn to depend on others; they don’t start out with total faith in humanity.

The show’s use of a tight-knit ensemble undercuts this idea. When Auggie starts seeing the countdown, she leans on Jin for help. When she’s told to look for the universe’s wink, she takes Saul with her as a fellow witness. The countdown does not seem so terrifying with such a support system in place—and having a network of friends doesn’t help delineate what separates humans from the aliens. The invading species, both the books and the show make clear, operates via groupthink; they cannot lie, because they communicate thoughts instantaneously. Humans can lie, of course, yet the show’s characters have such deep bonds that they begin from a place of trust, leaving little room to illustrate deception. It’s as if the majority of the show is made of members of House Stark, the honorable family at the heart of Game of Thrones.

To be clear, there is much about the adaptation I enjoy. I get a kick out of realizing which portions of the trilogy the show’s creators have chopped up and rearranged, delighted to be shown parallels among characters I had not previously noticed, and still find Benioff and Weiss to be great at writing memorable, economical dialogue. The visuals are also cool, the aliens appropriately enigmatic, and the performances excellent. Hong is a standout as Jin, as are Zine Tseng and Rosalind Chao, the actors playing, at different ages, Wenjie Ye, the woman who establishes first contact after losing faith in humanity amid China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.

Ye serves as the show’s antagonist, having built a following of zealots convinced that the aliens will save humanity from itself and therefore aiding them in shutting down Earth’s scientific progress. Yet the show fast-forwards through so much plot, it ends up treating Ye and her cohort as little more than a nuisance, presenting humanity as a fairly united front instead. Through the Oxford Five, the show emphasizes how humans deserve to endure because they have built deep bonds. That’s a sweet, sentimental conclusion, but it’s not one the books ever cared to reach. What made the trilogy so stunning and atypical as a sci-fi story was the fact that Liu wasn’t interested in interrogating whether humans deserved to survive. Instead, the novels explored the danger of connection, of the way a thought, once shared, can expand into an unstoppable force—a radical, terrifying ideology or a shrewd solution to a seemingly insurmountable crisis. Knowing we are not alone in the universe shouldn’t inspire comfort, his writing posits. It should instill fear.

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