Who Do Wade and Da Shi Work For in ‘3 Body Problem’? What Liam Cunningham and Benedict Wong Revealed

3 Body Problem premiered this week, introducing Netflix subscribers to the awe-inspiring and imaginative world of Liu Cixin’s books. Co-creators David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo pulled mind-blowing sequences from the pages of all three books — The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End — while also inventing new characters for a global audience to latch onto. Two characters that do make the jump from the books to the Netflix show? Da Shi (Benedict Wong) and Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham). While the hard-boiled detective and ruthless architect of humanity’s strategy for survival don’t cross paths in the novels, they are closely aligned in 3 Body Problem. In fact they both work for the same organization…an organization that 3 Body Problem bizarrely never names.

That’s right: we never find out who Wade and Da Shi, aka Clarence, work for in Netflix’s version of 3 Body Problem. From the very first episode to the finale, wherein Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo) point blank asks what organization is working hard to protect him and his friends, 3 Body Problem keeps Wade and Da Shi’s employers a total mystery. At one point, Wade shows Naval superstar Raj (Saamer Usmani) a piece of paper that gets the skeptical soldier to shut up and join the team, but we never learn what gave Raj the confidence to go with Wade.

“When I pull out my ID and show it to our beautiful naval officer, we don’t even see who he’s working for, but it has the necessary impact,” 3 Body Problem star Liam Cunningham told Decider. “And I think it’s more interesting dramatically if we don’t [know]. I mean, does he answer to anybody?”

So who do Wade and Da Shi work for in 3 Body Problem? The CIA? MI-5? Some spooky, secretly villainous organization? And come to think of it, did 3 Body Problem showrunners David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo ever clue the actors in on the secret?

“We worked on a need-to-know basis. So, I never felt the need of asking because they’re a very tight unit,” Cunningham said, before explaining Wade’s got to be working with someone very powerful.

“I mean, look who he can phone up at the drop of a hat. Look at the amount of nuclear weapons he can pull in. It’s not necessary to place him in any one particular spot.”

3 Body Problem star Benedict Wong added that Da Shi “just works in such an unorthodox way,” it’s not really necessary to know more. “He gets results,” Wong said. “The foot soldier you need; the gumshoe.”

Da Shi is also arguably one of, if not, the most beloved character from Liu Cixin’s books. (It probably helps that he’s one of the few figures to appear in more than one volume of the series.) While Wong demurred when asked about playing such a popular character — “I don’t know, you know, I mean, when people say that, that he is popular, I just tend not to get involved in public opinion” — he did explain Da Shi’s appeal simply by describing the character.

“He’s very much no-nonsense. He speaks from the heart,” Wong said. “And he’s someone who’s, I mean, in just one of those lines in the show when he’s talking to his son, it’s like, ‘I like helping people.'”

Given that breakdown, maybe we can rest assured that at least Da Shi is on the good guys’ side…even if it’s still really suspicious we don’t know who he or Wade work for.