‘3 Body Problem’ Episode 2 Recap: The Warning

Season 1, Episode 2: ‘Red Coast’

For its second episode in a row, “3 Body Problem” saved the best for last.

The year, via flashback, is 1977, and we’re following the continuing adventures of young Ye Wenjie. Decades later, as an older woman played by Rosalind Chao, she’s better known to us as the mother of the late researcher Vera Ye, and thus the woman who passes along her mystery headset to her colleague Jin Cheng.

For the moment, however, she’s just a political prisoner turned valued member of a top-secret Chinese government program designed to contact extraterrestrial intelligence. “Valued,” however, is a relative term. Inspired in part by research gleaned from a verboten American source, she’s figured out how to amplify their signal exponentially by bouncing it off the sun, which will effectively turbo-boost it. But the idea is first stolen by one of her colleagues, then shot down by another as insufficiently doctrinaire. Though she takes a chance on aiming their exceedingly polite broadcast at the sun at least once, she and her team have heard nothing back.

Until now. The oceanic whoosh of interstellar signals to which she’s been listening without cease for years suddenly shifts into something sharp and deliberate. The computers make it clear that this isn’t some fluke but an actual signal. Then the message comes in:

“Do not answer. Do not answer. Do not answer. I am a pacifist in this world. You are lucky that I am the first to receive your message. I am warning you do not answer. If you respond we will come. Your world will be conquered. Do not answer.”

Speaking personally, the terror-fueled adrenaline dump that would have ensued after I read that very first “Do not answer” would have reduced me to an insensate lump. But that’s not the kind of person Ye Wenjie is. Accustomed to keeping her true feelings hidden for years, she keeps it together well enough that no one else at the sleepy installation notices anything has happened. Quietly, she aims the transmitter back at the sun for maximum range.

“Come,” she types out in reply. “We cannot save ourselves. I will help you conquer this world.”

Wenjie has her reasons for this kind of cynicism. The installation is surrounded by endless miles of recklessly cleared forest. The only person besides her who appears to care about this at all is the handsome American environmentalist Mike Evans (Ben Schnetzer), who is single-handedly trying to reforest the region. This would come as a surprise to the present-day characters: By 2024, Evans (played as an older man by Jonathan Pryce) is an oil magnate and the world’s foremost purveyor of scientific disinformation.

At any rate, the need to build a new installation will force Evans to shut down his Johnny Appleseed operation. Meanwhile, Wenjie’s attempt to find closure over her father’s murder by confronting his killer, an young former Red Guard radical (played by Lan Xiya) whom the revolution has since devoured in turn. (Almost literally: Guards forcibly severed her gangrenous arm at a labor camp.) Despite having been imprisoned and brutalized, the young woman snarls that she’d kill Wenjie’s dad all over again if she could.