Logic simplified, but original question forgotten

Season 1 of The 3 Body Problem, eight episodes of which were released on Netflix on Tuesday, has caused quite a stir on social media.

On Chinese professional film-rating website Douban.com, the show, which cost $160 million to produce, received a rating of 6.7 out of 10, far below the Tencent version which has a rating of 8.7. Many viewers are complaining that the Netflix version “changed too much from the original story”. Some attribute this to some of the leading characters in the Netflix version being nationalities other than Chinese.

But that fails to explain why the Netflix series got a score of 7.6 from professional reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes and just 6.9 from audiences. Even though non-Chinese actors are playing the parts of the leading characters, the drama is still not drawing Western audiences.

Maybe, the problem lies in the producers’ lack of deep understanding of the original story’s logic. At a time when mankind is still not sure whether extraterrestrial life exists, The Three-Body Problem novel written by Chinese writer Liu Cixin depicts a universe governed by its own moral rules.

In that universe, all physical laws are the same, but the moral laws governing different civilizations in that universe are much different from those governing mankind.

It’s on this premise that mankind tries to contact other civilizations, which ultimately leads to itself and the neighboring threebody civilization being destroyed.

In the novels it’s hard to tell which side is good and which side evil. In some sense, Liu’s novel is more like a question raised to the whole universe. But the Netflix TV series has given it a good versus evil twist. In trying to simplify the logic of the original story, the Netflix TV series has lost the original question asked.

However, there is still hope. Liu’s original story was a trilogy. Let’s hope the next two parts on Netflix will be better.