Forget Game of Thrones: 3 Body Problem has given us the most brutal hour of TV in years
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Warning: spoilers follow
If, like me, you’ve just watched episode five of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, the ominously named Judgment Day, then you’ll likely need a strong drink, a nice lie down or some hastily arranged therapy. Yes, that did just happen. Yes, it was awful as you think. No, there is no justifiable reason for it to have happened. A character in DB Weiss and David Benioff’s sci-fi epic really did just describe sugar-free Alpen – king of the breakfast cereals – as “s_____ muesli”. One can only imagine how the Reddit threads are reacting.
Ah yes, there was the other thing too. The boat (the ominously named Judgment Day). Via Game of Thrones, Weiss and Benioff gave us some of the most jaw-dropping, shocking television scenes in living memory – a series of spectacular and often grotesque toast-droppers that lodge themselves inexorably in your mind. The Red Wedding. The sacrifice of Shireen. Oberyn Martell’s head. Ned Stark’s head. Bloody murder, in other words, in eye-popping HD.
With “Operation Guzheng”, the pair – along with co-writer Alexander Woo – may just have outdone the lot, bringing to life a sequence of gut-churning gore and vertigo-inducing moral uncertainty. As with so much of their work on Game of Thrones, the scene dares to go where other TV dramas won’t. You assume at some point they will pull a punch, not quite go that far. But they do go that far. And how.
By the midpoint of 3 Body Problem’s debut season, you are willing a bit of action to come along and spice things up. The invading aliens have still got a good four centuries left of their commute to Earth, leaving us in a quasi-Cold War situation. The show scratches that itch with an enormous oil tanker, the Panama Canal and a gigantic grid of invisible cheese wire. What, they’re going to put an oil tanker, filled with people, through a gigantic grid of invisible cheese wire? Yes, they’re going to put an oil tanker, filled with people, through a gigantic grid of invisible cheese wire. Really slowly.
On board the oil tanker is Jonathan Pryce’s eco-activist turned cult leader Mike Evans. He and his acolytes worship the aliens and are intent on aiding their conquest of Earth, with Evans having been in constant contact with the San Ti. However, his alien overlords have gone quiet on him – since, hilariously, he told them the story of Little Red Riding Hood and the aliens decided humanity was beyond the pale – giving the shadowy Wade (Liam Cunningham), ostensibly a goodie intent on saving Earth, an opportunity. Onboard the tanker is a load of data vital to defeating the aliens. Wade needs that data, and he needs to find a way to grab it before Evans can destroy it.
The only way to do this – and please bear in mind they have assembled a crack team of the world’s greatest scientific minds for this – is to pass the oil tanker through a gigantic grid of invisible cheese wire. At no point does anyone point out how honkingly insane this is. Or suggest alternative means. A Swat team, perhaps? A spot of espionage? No, it’s the cheese wire – sorry, nano-fibres – or nothing.
This is what makes what follows all the more shocking – it’s so fantastically gratuitous and pointless. In Cixin Liu’s novel, a grid of nano-fibres stretched across the Panama Canal is indeed what does for the Judgment Day and Evans’s followers, but Weiss and Benioff luxuriate in upsetting detail.
As the tanker steams down the canal, we see the inhabitants of the ship. And instantly we get the money shot – a packed canteen, filled with jolly families. One woman chats happily to some young children, including an adorable toddler in a high chair. We linger on the toddler. She’s a lovely little thing. Look, says the camera. Isn’t she lovely? Wouldn’t it be terrible if someone was to push her through a gigantic grid of invisible cheese wire? The book makes no mention of children or families being among Evans’s followers onboard the Judgment Day. This dollop of gratuitousness belongs to the TV show alone.
The scene is stunning (filmed by British director Minkie Spiro, known for The Plot Against America, Pieces of Her and, er, Waterloo Road). Our first taste of nano-fibre is a hapless worker hosing down the deck, wondering why the water has suddenly stopped. Then wondering why his hose is cut in half and flapping all over the deck. And then folding in half as the nano-fibres pass through his abdomen. Next, a helicopter is sliced and diced. Next – money shot number two – a playground filled with young children, who run, screaming.
We don’t see the children massacred, but we see dozens of adults eviscerated, flopping to the floor in explosions of blood, lying strewn in pieces like an untidy abattoir, crumbling like feta before our eyes. And alongside that, we see the cheese wire slicing through schoolbags and, chillingly, through a row of child-crafted paper dolls pinned to a wall. The scene is at pains to tell us: children. Children, children, children. We are, of course, watching the “bad guys” get taken down, people (children aside), who are attempting to hasten the extinction of humanity.
When one “good” scientist questions the humanity of passing an oil tanker filled with children through a tomato slicer, Wade compares it to the building of the canal itself. “Do you know how many people died building this?” he asks. “No one does. Best estimates are between five and 20,000. It was a real shit show, but those poor f____ kept digging till it was done.” A few hundred people aboard a tanker for the rest of the human population of Earth? It’s a no-brainer. But did it really have to be cheese wire? It didn’t.
Operation Guzheng is a reminder that television still has the power to shock, and to shock absolutely. In recent years, shows such as Amazon Prime Video’s superhero parody The Boys have pushed the envelope when it comes to spectacular, did-they-really-just-do-that gore. But for every exploding head or imploding body, there is a rationale behind it – a character showing you what they are really made or capable of. When The Walking Dead’s Negan butchered two of the show’s beloved heroes with a baseball bat covered in barbed wire, it was shocking, sickening and upsetting. But it had a point. Negan had to prove his absolute authority, his willingness to do what it takes to stay ahead.
Ultimately, the San Ti seem happy for Wade and his gang to have the data from the Judgment Day, even helping them to access it. Only Eiza González’s scientist, Auggie, who invented the magic cheese wire, seems to understand the horrific, gratuitous pointlessness of what they did. Later, in the wreckage of what was once an oil tanker, she finds a child’s foot, still inside a small pink shoe. Weiss and Benioff have not lost their appetite for destruction.
