Netflix’s New Sci-Fi Epic Finds a Clever Way to Adapt the “Unadaptable”

Much has been made of the supposed “unadaptability” of The Three-Body Problem. I understand where those apprehensions come from. Liu Cixin’s mega-popular 2008 Chinese sci-fi novel—which has just been imported to Netflix by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the same creative team that managed to interpret George R.R. Martin’s dense legendarium with HBO’s Game of Thrones—is famously knotty. The story itself is a saga of a highly advanced alien race coming to rob Earth of its milk and honey, but Liu, a former computer engineer, stuffs his plot with a fetishistic appreciation for highly speculative futuristic technology: transdimensional supercomputers, austere particle colliders, suspended animation for sub-light speed travel, the whole shebang. Netflix’s 3 Body Problem—the second TV adaptation of Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, following a Chinese series released last year—faced the challenge, from the outset, of having to provide a ropes course on theoretical physics, while at the same time painting a rich narrative about humans uncovering the intergalactic conspiracy threatening life itself.

That sounds like a tall task, considering how there might be, I don’t know, 50 people on the planet who have a firm grip on the nuances of quantum entanglement. But Benioff, Weiss, and co-creator Alexander Woo solve this problem with one deft storytelling trick: by allowing everyone on screen to be both astonishing analytical geniuses and the most credulous people alive. Our ensemble contains a cadre of physicists, detectives, and would-be revolutionaries, and when things get weird in 3 Body Problem—and they do, very quickly—our heroes entertain the most outlandish explanations for the glitches in reality with an eagerness akin to that of the mildly stoned devouring History Channel theories about the universe at 3 a.m. There’s very little trademark skepticism here, few signs of the scientific method’s empirical questioning and testing. It’s all wide-eyed wonder and terror—ironic, considering how the aliens’ hostile takeover is accelerated by their discovery that humans are duplicitous, but praise be, because the supreme suspension of disbelief gives us viewers a much more entertaining watch compared to the alternative.

Here’s what I mean: One of the first dramatic vectors we encounter in 3 Body Problem involves a young astrophysicist named Auggie Salazar (who, played by Eiza González, is one of the many characters that have been freshly Westernized in contrast to her Chinese counterpart in the novel). A rash of suicides has recently stricken the scientific community, and after learning about the death of her former colleague, Auggie begins to hallucinate a foreboding timer, invisible to everyone else, steadily counting down. As someone who is familiar with the usual B-level narrative tropes, I was certain that Auggie would spend the rest of the episode haplessly attempting to convince her friends that perhaps some sort of interloping alien force was directly interfering with her cognition, rather than any of the (if we’re being honest) far more reasonable explanations for her derangement: a psychotic break, a desperate need for attention, a morning psilocybin microdose gone horribly wrong, and so on.

But no, that’s not what happens. Like, at all. Everyone is basically on board with Auggie’s working suspicion from the jump. They accept that some unseen force has warped her vision—kicking off what will soon become a race against time on a cosmic scale—and it’s great. Our crack team of humanists is assembled immediately, no questions asked, so we can instead focus on the real reason we’ve tuned into 3 Body Problem: to feel enthralled and insignificant against the backdrop of the unknowable expanse of the universe, where all of the tingly, NOVA-on-PBS ideas about the inky blackness beyond the sky have proved to be spectacularly true. I didn’t realize, until that moment of relief, just how much I find myself dreading the agonizing decoding process, followed by a lengthy persuasion period, that blights so many other mysteries. (Remember how long it takes for the general public to realize that, maybe, the superheroes from The Boys’ corporate empire Vought might not be on the up-and-up? Jesus.) A version of 3 Body Problem in which we’re forced to wait until Episode 5 to sufficiently justify everyone’s reason for believing that aliens might be afoot would be downright unwatchable.

3 Body Problem extends that same credulity to the characters who are not nearly as well-versed in particle physics, and therefore might ostensibly be less willing to accept these extremely esoteric postulations out of hand. Benedict Wong, who plays the beleaguered detective Da Shi, has no problem taking Auggie at her word when, during his investigation of the deaths of all these scientists, she tells him that a mysterious woman approached her after dark and informed her that the literal stars will transmit a secret message to her at the stroke of midnight. Shi attempts to corroborate Auggie’s story, but the mysterious woman doesn’t appear on the CCTV footage—which is usually the sort of thing that would render the teller of that tale a person of interest in an active investigation. And yet, Shi is convinced that the missing figure must be a result of the sabotage of a cabal of time-and-space-subverting interlopers. Frankly, this oversight makes him one of the least discerning police officers on television, but it keeps things moving along.

I find these moments, when ordinary civilians engage in Ancient Aliens thought, to be some of the more contrived scenes in 3 Body Problem. Of all the theories tossed out in the series, shouldn’t someone subscribe to the good old-fashioned principle of Occam’s razor? But I suppose that’s the cost of doing business when one sets out to adapt the unadaptable. Every one of us should be happy to let those weaker leaps of faith pass, so long as the momentum continues to churn. 3 Body Problem is a show about big ideas. Thank God its characters, as sweetly gullible as they are, are allowed to affirm them.