Television

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

Fans of spooky technology will have much to enjoy in this episode.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.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