Stream It Or Skip It: ‘3 Body Problem’ On Netflix, Where A Group Of Scientists And A Cop Fight An Extraterrestrial Threat To Humanity

We have been really frustrated lately with shows that think the idea of presenting a mystery is to hold obvious information from viewers in order to drop a “twist” in later episodes. To us, that’s not a mystery; that’s just missing information. In the highly-anticipated Netflix series 3 Body Problem, the mystery at the center of the series truly is a mystery. How do we know? Because the characters themselves don’t even know what’s going on.

3 BODY PROBLEM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “BEIJING, TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY, 1966.” A massive rally is in progress.

The Gist: The rally is to make an example of a physics professor named Ye Zhetai (Perry Yung); his teachings about the Big Bang Theory and Einstein’s theory of relatively leave space for the existence of God, something that’s severely frowned upon in communist China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. His wife denounces him to the crowd, and his daughter, Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), watches as the soldiers on stage, many of whom used to be his students, kick and beat him until he dies.

In 2024 London, Clarence Da Shi (Benedict Wong), a police detective, is called to the scene where a scientist has seemingly killed himself; on his walls, he writes numbers from a countdown clock in blood, and the words “I STILL SEE IT.” His eyes are gouged out. This isn’t the first death of this sort that Shi has investigated of late; in his office are multiple bulletin boards filled with pictures of the dead and the people that are associated with them.

At the Oxford University particle accelerator, the scientists there are facing the fact that the experiment has been shut down due to results that aren’t making any sense. It’s something that is happening at particle accelerators all over the world. The director of the experiment, Vera Ye (Vedette Lim), checks in with Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo), one of the lead scientists, and assures him he’ll figure out why this is happening. She then asks him if he believes in God. She then jumps to her death in the facility’s Cherenkov tank.

Two former research assistants at the accelerator are at a bar when they get the news about Vera. Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) has been studying results from accelerators around the world, and they’re all reporting these strange results. Augustina “Auggie” Salazar (Eiza González), who started a company that manufactures synthetic polymer nanofibers, starts seeing a vision of lines, which then turns into a clock that counts down.

At Vera’s funeral, we’re introduced to two more former research assistants: Will Downing (Alex Sharp), who used to be in a relationship with Jin, and Jack Rooney (John Bradley), a brash sort who left the field to start a snack food business. At a pub after the funeral, as they try to figure out why Vera killed herself, all Auggie can concentrate on is the countdown clock in her vision. She goes outside for a smoke, and a mysterious woman (Marlo Kelly), who knows about the clock, tells her to not let it get to zero, and to stop her work with nanofibers. On order to get Auggie to believe what she’s saying, she tells her to look outside at midnight the next day. “Has the universe ever winked at you?” she asks Auggie.

Back in 1960s China, Ye Wenjie is working at a logging camp, when she meets Bai Mulin (Yang Hewen), who decries the environmental destruction they’re perpetrating, and has tried to see what the military has been doing at the base at the top of the hill. He gives her a copy of the book Silent Spring and tells her to keep it hidden. The two of them fall in love, but Wenjie eventually is arrested when the book is discovered and she refuses to tell the military authorities who gave it to her. In prison, she refuses to sign papers that would lead to associates of her father to be arrested. But Wenjie’s skills as a physicist are wanted by the military, and she’s taken to that installation at the top of the hill, to work there indefinitely.

The next day, Jin tries to get some more insight into Vera’s last days from Vera’s mother (Rosalind Chao). She gives Jin a shiny chrome VR visor that Vera was using; it’s the same visor that we see on the heads of some of the suicide victims Da Shi is studying. Then we see a picture on Vera’s mother’s wall and see that Vera’s mother is Ye Wenjie.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Alexander Woo (The Terror: Infamy), David Benioff and D. B. Weiss (Game Of Thrones), 3 Body Problem is based on Liu Cixin’s novel The Three-Body Problem. The novel was adapted into the Chinese series Three-Body in 2023. It has the same vibe as other sci fi mystery series like The Peripheral.

Our Take: There’s a lot going on in the first episode of 3 Body Problem, but Woo, Benioff and Weiss do a good job of linking everything together and not deliberately holding back information in order to deepen the mystery. Given how many shows we’ve seen recently that have infuriated us by deliberately holding back information, that’s saying something.

The biggest example of this is that Chao’s character is Wenjie, almost sixty years after she participated in that Chinese experiment. We know that she’s linked to this anomaly that’s become an existential threat in the current day, but we’re not even sure Wenjie knows the extent of what her actions in the 1960s mean in today’s world. If the characters themselves don’t know, we’re OK not knowing, either. It’s when they know and we don’t that things get frustrating.

The countdown that’s driving all of these scientists to suicide (we think), as well as the chrome visor that seems to give its users terrifying visions are still mysteries, but they’re the types of mysteries that we’re curious to see what path the show’s characters take to figure out what they are. Will Auggie fall victim to the countdown like the rest of the scientists have, or will she somehow defeat it? Just what will Jin figure out while using the visor she got from Vera?

What we liked is that the group that will try to figure this out will be the scientists — not all of whom are even in the field anymore — as well as the detective, Da Shi. They all have their backstories, and we suspect some of them will be explored more than others, but there’s just enough information about all of them to make their actions and motivations make sense in context.

But because this mystery involves both an existential threat to the human race as well as the reason why all of these people are seemingly killing themselves in brutal ways, there’s the potential for multiple levels of mythology to develop. Yes, developing a mythology can be dangerous — ask any X-Files fan who started rolling their eyes every time a mythology episode dropped during the show’s later seasons or its revival. But the first episode shows that the story can go into multiple directions, depending on how closely the creators follow the original novel.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: As the universe “winks” at midnight, Da Shi’s boss, Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham) tells him that the entity “winking” is their enemy. Auggie and Saul try to figure out the code it’s winking in; Saul figures out it’s the same countdown that Auggie is seeing in her mind’s eye.

Sleeper Star: John Bradley’s character Jack Rooney provides the snarky, boorish comedic relief that this show needs. We have yet to see Jonathan Pryce, who plays Mike Evans.

Most Pilot-y Line: Wade tells Da Shi, who has “failed upwards” out of every intelligence agency in the UK, that this case is his “last chance saloon.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. 3 Body Problem works because the characters are set up well in the first episode, and the mystery at its center is truly a mystery, not just pieces of missing information that the writers are keeping from frustrated viewers.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.