3 Body Problem Creators Alexander Woo, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss Explain How They Brought That Brutal Ship Scene to Life (Er, Death) — Watch

Kimberly Roots
·2 min read
3 Body Problem Creators Alexander Woo, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss Explain How They Brought That Brutal Ship Scene to Life (Er, Death) — Watch
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Episode 5 of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem.

Any way you slice it, the complete destruction of a gigantic ship in 3 Body Problem‘s Episode 5 is a thing of brutal beauty.

More from TVLine

If you’ve already binged Netflix’s sci-fi series, which was released Thursday, allow us to refresh your memory regarding the scene in question: Rich weirdo Mike Evans had been communicating regularly with alien beings known as the San-Ti for quite some time, and he’d recorded all of those conversations on a drive. Evans and his fellow San-Ti worshippers had been living on a large ship that circled the globe. Thomas Wade knew that in order to grab Evans’ drive and maybe learn about why the San-Ti were targeting Earth, he (with the help of Auggie, Raj and others) would have to figure out a way to take command of the ship without giving Evans time or opportunity to destroy the data.

Every possibility was bloody and involved a lot of collateral damage, and most of them also carried a significant risk of harming the drive, too. Until… Enter Auggie’s nanofibers, which we’d seen julienne a block of matter in an earlier episode!

These strings of particles were strong as anything and invisible to the naked eye. So when Evan’s ship, Judgment Day, exited the Panama Canal, it ran straight into Wade’s trap: an array of nanofibers, strung across the waterway, that cut Judgment Day and everyone/everything on it like a hot knife sliding through butter.

Cool (and gross), right? We thought so, too. So when TVLine had the chance to chat with series creators Alexander Woo, D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, we asked them to tell us everything about how the gripping sequence came to be.

“A lot of the challenge was, this is a sequence that everyone remembers in the books,” Woo says in the video above, referencing Liu Cixin’s Chinese novels on which the series is based. “But because it’s a novel, everyone has staged it in their minds in their own way, and how are you going to realize it on screen in a way that can top even that? So, you know, that’s a pretty high bar to want to scale and luckily we have the best of the best taking care of the effects and the production design and the practical special effects.”

Press PLAY on the video above to hear Woo, Benioff and Weiss discuss the ins and outs of cutting a giant ship to shreds, then hit the comments with your thoughts!

Best of TVLine

Get more from TVLine.com: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Newsletter