Television

The show’s first season ended with unwanted appointments, buzzing cicadas and flying brains.Season 1, Episode 8: ‘Wallfacer’“3 Body Problem” started out as the television equivalent of a Hans Zimmer composition: a steady crescendo, growing ever more menacing and spectacular. By the time of its bloody, brilliant fifth episode, with its repulsive boat massacre and staggering eye in the sky, it felt like a show capable of going anywhere, doing anything.Then things simmered down. People spent their time reacting to the crisis. They worked or played hooky, they hid or revealed their feelings, they participated or declined to participate in the war to come. Will spent an episode dying, his friends grieving. (Also inserting his brain into a jar to be fired at an alien fleet, but definitely grieving.) Even so, given the relentless ante-raising of the show’s first five hours, the whole thing screamed “the calm before the storm.”Well, the season finale has come and gone, and there’s no storm in sight. It wasn’t the calm before the storm. It was all just … calm.Not that the characters would necessarily recognize it as such. They keep plenty busy, primarily in unpleasant ways; the one exception there is Auggie, who’s begun distributing free nanofiber water filters to poor areas in Mexico. That’s one way of saving the world a bit at a time. A young Mike Evans, determined to dedicate his life to saving a single species of bird, would approve.Jin’s life is comparatively disastrous. Will’s deathbed confession of his feelings for Jin have given rise to passionate feelings of her own. Whether or not she reciprocates his romantic interest is unclear, but I used the present tense of “reciprocate” there on purpose: To Jin, Will is very much alive, even if he’s a disembodied brain in a space capsule.Things end between her and Raj over his failure to grasp this. “You loved him,” he says, bitterly.“I love him,” she insists. “He’s still alive.” And it’s her job to keep him that way for two centuries, until a hostile alien fleet can find him and revive him to do god knows what, at which point he’s supposed to relay intel on them back to Earth god knows how.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

After five escalating episodes, the series took its foot off the gas for its sixth.Season 1, Episode 6: ‘The Stars Our Destination’It had to let up at some point. After five escalating episodes in which each ending was more spectacularly grim than the last, “3 Body Problem” took its foot off the gas for its sixth outing. It’s hard to begrudge an eight-episode literary adaptation a bit of breathing room.This installment launches the bulk of its fireworks in its opening minutes, a montage reactions to the so-called “the Eye in the Sky Incident,” when the San-Ti revealed their intention to conquer the planet. Global chaos. Worldwide rioting. Doomsday cults. Food shortages. Alien worshipers. Bad comedy. Sloganeering politicians. A tasteless fund-raising effort called The Stars Our Destination, in which everyday people can pitch in to help billionaires purchase other solar systems, which will help … someone, somehow, supposedly.In short, it is an all too plausible nightmare world. Contrary to the argument made in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s classic graphic novel “Watchmen,” the existence of an alien threat does nothing to bring humanity together.To the extent that anyone has their eyes on the prize, it’s Wade. On a show that keeps its heroes’ clay feet firmly on the ground, he strides around like Nick Fury, recruiting a Nobel-laureate Avengers and building bases on the moon. He gives Jin license to devise a mind-bogglingly complex and expensive “staircase” of nuclear bombs in space to propel a probe into the heart of the alien fleet. He then reveals that the probe will be a human being; dollars to doughnuts he’s referring to Jin’s boyfriend, Raj. Seriously, the guy is spy-fi movie mastermind stranded in a prestige TV drama.For now, however, even the almighty Wade isn’t capable of ginning up some bogus charge by which to keep the San-Ti cult leader Ye Wenjie under lock and key. She goes free, and immediately begins attempting to communicate with her Lord, saying she holds the key to thwarting humanity’s attempt to fight back, which might well be successful otherwise. Her desire for a global tabula rasa outstrips that of even the most fanatical Red Guards, who still dominate her mental landscape.Elsewhere, Will’s concerns remain down to earth, at first. He is convinced by his friends to profess his feelings for Jin, Raj be damned. But he chickens out at the last minute, not realizing their relationship is strained and it is the best shot he’d ever have.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Wanted: One intelligent human brain, body not required.Season 1, Episode 7: ‘Only Advance’Wanted: One intelligent human brain. Dying donors preferred. Serious consideration of whether or not aliens should just go ahead and take over a plus. Must survive 300 nuclear explosions in outer space. Estimated travel time: 200 years. Return transportation not provided. Full human bodies not allowed.This is the tempting offer at the center of the penultimate episode of the first season of “3 Body Problem.” Reuniting the “Game of Thrones” team of the director Jeremy Podeswa and the writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, it is another low-key affair compared to the mounting menace and chaos of the first five episodes. Granted, it is about a scheme to remove Will’s brain, freeze it, and blast it into space at unprecedented speeds so it can be intercepted and studied by the San-Ti. Will’s doubts about the project, says boss Thomas Wade, are what make him so valuable: If he were a true believer in the fight to the death against the aliens, they might simply let him drift past.Some people’s doubts are stronger than others’. Though she designs the nanofiber sail required to accelerate the probe through space, she walks away from it all when the idea of sacrificing Will as a glorified space monkey is brought to the table. She also takes her nanofibers off the market and out of the realm of exclusivity permanently, by uploading all the data she has on them to the internet and making them accessible to everyone for free.The problem is that compared to a Cyclopean eye in the sky or a boat getting sliced to pieces by an invisible web out of Stephen King’s “The Mist,” none of this is all that interesting. From the very first episode, it was apparent that ideas and images, not compelling characters and a novel plot, were the strength of “3 Body Problem.” Leaning into the characters makes the whole thing lopsided.Look at Wade, for example. At first just a gray eminence working behind the scenes while Clarence pounded the pavement, he gradually grew in prominence, reaching a fun spy-movie throwback sweet spot last episode. Now, however, it feels like Benioff and Weiss have overshot the mark with him into cliché.There’s only so much even an actor like Liam Cunningham can do with dialogue like “The Doomsday Express just pulled into the station — you can all queue up behind me” or “The future’s not as far as it used to be.” The man is talking about having himself cryogenically frozen like a C.G.I. chimpanzee and revived annually so he can personally oversee humanity’s defenses for 400 years. He’s a bit too “a Jerry Bruckheimer production” to fit in with the show’s more psychologically realistic characters, i.e. all the rest of them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

An elaborate plan is disturbingly effective and once again, an episode closes on a horrific high note.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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

An infiltration, a detainment and a fairy tale that takes a dark turn.Season 1, Episode 4: ‘Our Lord’“3 Body Problem” knows how to end an episode, that’s for sure. The premiere closed with spectacular blinking stars, the second episode with an ominous alien transmission, the third with a brutal murder of a character played by John Bradley, one of the show’s best known actors. (The irony that he earned his reputation on “Game of Thrones,” itself a show famous for killing off one of its best known actors early on, has not escaped me, and likely did not escape the showrunners.)By rights, Episode 4 ought to end with the feeling that humanity is firmly in control. Using Jin as an undercover informant, Clarence and Wade infiltrate a summit held for followers of the San-Ti, the alien race headed our way. Slowly, it should be noted: Ye Wenjie, the secret leader of the group, says they are 400 years away. The organization-slash-cult run by Wenjie and her partner in crime Mike Evans is playing a very long game.As far as Clarence and Wade are concerned, it’s game over. They send in a strike team to round up the members, especially Wenjie. But the mystery woman who’s been dogging our heroes’ every step realizes Jin is a narc and opens fire, leading to a bloody shootout. Clarence rescues Jin, but the woman escapes.Wenjie, however, does not. Even as a wounded Jin finally comes clean to her friend Will about what’s been happening, Wenjie is brought before a panel of what look like high-ranking military and intelligence officials to answer questions about the cult and the force it serves. Not only do they have her and the people who came to the summit, Wade says, they also have a lock on the ship Mike uses as a mobile headquarters. Wenjie is unfazed.“You’ve got me because they let you,” she tells Wade and his colleagues. “They are coming, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them. And when they arrive” — here she smiles — “you’ll be so grateful.”Once again, “3 Body Problem” leans hard on the inevitability of the invasion in the eyes of all who learn about it. Just as Episode 3 emphasized how relocating to Earth is the only possible solution for the titular problem faced by the San-Ti, this one drives home the fact that now that their mind has made up, it’s all over but the shooting. (No pun intended.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

With its subtly stunning third episode, “3 Body Problem” reveals the double meaning of its title.Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Destroyer of Worlds’Anyone else feel like a deer in the headlights? Anyone agree that this is a great way for an alien-invasion story to make us feel?With its subtly stunning third episode, “3 Body Problem” reveals the double meaning of its title. On one level, it refers to the physical impossibility of consistently and accurately predicting the movement of three bodies in relation to one another in space. This is the dilemma facing not just the characters in the advanced virtual-reality video game Jin and Jack have been playing, but the very real alien civilization upon which the game is based. Its three suns move and align in such a way as to create regular but random apocalyptic events, from infernal heat to sudden ice ages to gravitational vortexes, that destroy the civilization again and again.But sometimes there are stable eras that can last a long time. The aliens, known as the San Ti or Three-Body, have lived in a stable era long enough to develop interstellar communication and travel. They know their eventual fate will be the same as that of all the fallen civilizations before them, so they’re seeking a new home. Thanks to Ye Wenjie’s invitation back in 1977, they’ve found one. And a secret society of human quislings led by Wenjie’s friend Mike Evans is preparing the way, using the mysterious video game headsets to either recruit prominent scientists to the cause, or root out those who can’t be trusted.So why does the San Ti’s arrival feel both ominous and inevitable? The former feeling is easy enough to explain: The alien Lord, represented as a female voice in a loudspeaker in conversation with Evans, has decreed that humanity must be taught to fear again lest it destroy itself. (She is voices by Sea Shimooka, who also plays the formidable recurring character in the game.)But the feeling that the San Ti’s decision to take our world for their own is so irrevocable comes courtesy of that video game. Jin solves the final level and “wins” the game when she determines the real three-body problem isn’t how to save the planet torn between the three stars — that’s scientifically impossible — but how to save the people who live on it. Jin’s own logic and ethics alike point to the only solution: The people must flee, and find a new home. Through the skillful writing of the series co-creator Alexander Woo, the revelation hits the characters and the audience alike with the ironclad certainty of a mathematical equation.Humanity’s reign over Earth is not alone in having received a terminal diagnosis. Will, the humblest member of our group of five heroes, learned last episode that he is dying of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. He has only months left to live, but though he’s talked to his guy friends about this, he can’t bring himself to tell Jin, the object of his unrequited affection for years. Not even when he reveals he’s quitting his beloved job as a teacher to travel and invites her along with him does he explain his rationale. When she tells him she might be up for it some other time, just not now, he doesn’t tell her now is the only time he has.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More