John Bradley in
Netflix’s 3 Body Problem appears to be the first season of a longer series, and covers content from the first book and part of the second. The show hews to the books’ essential ideas and plot throughlines but rewrites many of the characters to transport part of the action to the West, in one case turning a Chinese character from the book into multiple British, American, and Australian ones. This makes sense, from a screenwriting and marketing point of view, but also has a diluting effect. Similarly, the show’s decision to Westernize some of the plot, while logical, is a bit of a shame, since the novel’s Chinese perspective is part of what made it a fascinating document.
As with the book, the series follows two timelines. The earlier one, set during China’s Cultural Revolution and in Chinese dialogue, takes up less of the show but is in some ways more interesting. It follows Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), a young
Chinese astrophysicist from an academic family whose scientist father is killed by his own students during a struggle session. Disgraced and deemed a class enemy of the Revolution, she suffers in a grueling labor camp near Mongolia before being recruited to take part in a topsecret program of the Chinese military, with ramifications for the present day.
3 Body Problem’s decision to open with this first timeline, which depicts the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution vividly and with an almost surprising frankness, injects the show with a nice jolt of starting energy. Sadly, some of that energy is to quickly seep away. The show is also probably wise to tell its story mostly in historical progression, like the novel’s English translation but unlike the original Chinese text, which famously placed the Cultural Revolution sequences further in, as flashbacks, to make them less conspicuous to Chinese censors.
The second timeline takes place in the present day, mostly in England. A mysterious and high-placed British intelligence official, Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham, whom some viewers will recognize from Game of Thrones, and whose character makes a joke of the fact that he’s actually Irish), assigns a detective, Clarence (an enjoyable Benedict Wong), to investigate why several prominent British scientists recently suffered odd, seemingly unprompted nervous breakdowns culminating in suicide. The detective — a straight-talking, chainsmoking maverick, of course — soon discovers more cases: other scientists, particularly physicists working on rarified and advanced research, have been dying across the world.
A group of friends in Britain who know one another from graduate research at Oxford also get sucked into
