‘3 Body Problem’ Episode 5 Recap: Judgment Day

Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Judgment Day’

“It’s not working,” Raj Varma says.

An officer in the Royal Navy — and the boyfriend of the cosmologist Jin Cheng, a fact one doubts is a coincidence — Raj has been handpicked by top black-ops bloke Thomas Wade to run a crucial operation. Scientists and military engineers under his command must retrieve all available data from the floating headquarters of Mike Evans’s pro-alien cult, without allowing the cultists to destroy the information or doing so themselves in the process.

To Raj, it looks like the plan has failed. Using the experimental nanofibers developed by Auggie Salazar, finally free of that maddening alien countdown, now that the Shan-Ti have cut off contact with their faithful, they’ve constructed an invisible net that seems ready to catch the ship. Given how the team is talking about casualties, sinking seems the more likely outcome.

But to all appearances, the gigantic repurposed oil tanker is cruising right through the Panama Canal, passing by the support beams across which the nano-net has been stretched. Raj, who inherited his ends-justify-the-means attitude from his war-hero father, has long suspected Auggie’s heart isn’t in the project, since she’s pretty much told him so to his face. He suspects sabotage. He leans in toward her in the command center. “Why isn’t it working?” he asks her accusingly.

The camera shifts focus from his face to hers. “It is,” she says, never taking her eyes off the monitor showing her the ship.

It was at this point that I said, out loud, “Oh, this is going to be gnarly.”

These recaps have stressed how much power “3 Body Problem” derives from its sense of inevitability: These aliens have no other choice, they are on their way, they are powerful, and one day they will arrive. In the bravura special effects sequence that follows that moment, the co-creators and writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the director Minkie Spiro and the visual effects supervisor Stefen Fangmeier boil this dread down into immediate physical form.

For the next several minutes after Auggie confirms her nanofibers are in working order — dialogue-free minutes in which our nominal heroes stare in dumbfounded horror at the carnage — these invisible blades slice through the slowly-moving ship, cutting everything and everyone aboard to ribbons. A severed hose dribbling water as it twitches to and fro is our first clue as to the effect the fibers are going to have when they make contact with human bodies. Even so, the resulting image of person after person coming apart and falling to bloody rectangular pieces is one of the most admirably disgusting things ever filmed for the small screen.