Ready player? Let’s get chaotic.  

After diving into China’s Cultural Revolution in 3 Body Problem’s first two episodes, Episode 3 focuses on the increasingly weird interstellar intrigue of the present. We also dig into the science behind this science-fiction mystery, helmed by Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and True Blood writer Alexander Woo. 

“One of the really fun things about [Cixin Liu’s] books is that it combines a whole bunch of different genres before really getting into the hard science fiction,” says Woo. “I think that appealed to us in adapting the show: You’re not automatically along those science fiction rails from the beginning.”

Episode 3 is even called “Destroyer of Worlds,” a nod to theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s famous quote from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The third episode finds the Oxford Five in an age of uncertainty. After the universe blinked, more strange phenomena — and stranger people — have begun to appear around them. “We dive even deeper into the weirdness,” says Woo.

Jin (Jess Hong) meets her boyfriend Raj’s (Saamer Usmani) family and wins them over. Will (Alex Sharp) is getting sicker and starts hallucinating, but still can’t tell Jin his feelings. Saul (Jovan Adepo) is sleeping around ’cause, you know, it’s the end of the world or whatever. Auggie’s (Eiza González) boss is bullying her for shutting down her work, but when she starts it back up, the countdown immediately restarts. She promptly aborts. And Jack (John Bradley)? He’s still wisecracking and snack-attacking. Until... he isn’t. 

Read on to discover more from 3 Body Problem, Episode 3.

Take a closer look at the VFX behind the transition from the real world to the VR world.

Are scientists really committing suicide?

The episode opens with investigator Clarence “Da” Shi (Benedict Wong) looking into the death of another scientist — this one was found drowned in a bathtub. Da Shi mentions that Oppenheimer’s mistress was found dead the same way. ��When we first shot the scene where Da Shi references Oppenheimer’s mistress’s suicide, I thought, ‘Are people going to know this reference?’ ” Thanks to Christopher Nolan’s film, says Weiss, it’s now become “a very big, very well-made explanation of this moment. You’re meant to wonder, ‘How did this happen to this guy? And are things what they seem?’ ”

Da Shi finds a VR headset in the dead scientist’s safe and brings it back to Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham) at their headquarters at the Black Palace. Da Shi explains the game and reveals that the headset collects a lot of biometric data. “While you’re playing the game, someone at the other end is playing you,” Wade surmises. “It’s a recruitment tool. They’re going after our best and brightest.” 

Benioff says Wade’s reaction to the headset was one of his favorite shots in Episode 3, despite the tricky nature of capturing scenes that included the device’s reflective surface. “Every single time you see the headset on-screen — or virtually every time — they had to digitally replace the actual reflections with the reflection we wanted people to see.” Adds Weiss: “You’d need a 360-degree picture of the entire room you’re sitting in, and it needs to be painstakingly mapped onto this object to create the mirror image that you’re seeing.”

What’s going on with the Oxford Five?

Back at Jack’s house, the Oxford Five commiserate over the death of another physicist, while sampling the snack titan’s signature vodka cranberry canned cocktail and some cheddar swirlies. Will and his unrequited love interest, Jin, share a moment, but he can’t quite muster the courage to tell her about his terminal cancer. 

Auggie wanders into Jack’s bedroom and finds a treasure trove of movie memorabilia only a junk-food zillionaire would buy. Weiss says Bradley, like his sarcastic character, is “just one of the funniest, smartest, sharpest people, just on a purely verbal, comedic level.”

Having worked with Bradley before, Benioff and Weiss wanted to see the actor try something completely different. “Both of us thought it could be really fun to have a character who is not Samwell [from Game of Thrones], but more like the John Bradley that we’re watching,” says Benioff. Bradley was intrigued. “They said, ‘We are going to write a character for you that’s more like yourself than any character you’ve ever played,’ ” says the actor.  

What movie memorabilia does Jack have in his bedroom?

All the hallowed icons of nerdom are there: Star Wars stormtrooper helmets, Marty McFly’s futuristic Nikes from Back to the Future Part II, a full-sized Gremlin, and both Thor’s hammer and Captain America’s shield. 

Then Auggie finds something more sinister: a VR headset (next to a Ghostbusters proton pack, of course). When she puts it on, she’s whisked away to Tudor England, and immediately decapitated by the avatar in the game. Auggie confronts Jack about it, and Jin confesses that she’s been using Vera’s headset. Auggie, Saul, and Will are freaked out by the game’s capabilities, but Jin and Jack are both too intrigued by the mysterious nature of the otherworldly tech to stop playing.

Then Saul connects the dots: “The stars, Auggie’s countdown, this video game: They’re all virtual realities, indistinguishable from actual reality,” he says. “It’s controlling all sensory inputs and outputs, everything that goes into your brain, everything that goes out.” He wonders if that’s what caused Vera to kill herself. 

What happens in Level 2 of the VR game?

Jin and Jack join forces to figure out what’s going on in the game, so they both put on the headsets and jump into Level 2. They appear before a massive gothic cathedral in 15th-century Italy. Jack takes the name Sir Francis Bacon, the 16th-century philosopher who pioneered the scientific method. They meet Follower (Eve Ridley), who tells Jin she remembers every time she’s died in the game. The duo heads to the cathedral to meet Pope Gregory XIII (Conleth Hill, who plays Varys in Game of Thrones), who allows them to present their proposal for the chaotic behavior of the sun. Aristotle (Phil Wang) and Galileo (Adrian Greensmith), other VR players somewhere in the world, have already given their theory. 

“You don’t know who the hell you’re going to meet when you go in,” says Cunningham about the game. 

So, what is the three-body problem?

Jin explains that the planet in the game resides in a three-sun solar system, and when the planet revolves around one sun, it’s a stable era. When another sun snatches the planet away, it wanders in the gravitational field between the three suns, causing a chaotic era. Three celestial bodies = one big problem. 

Pope Gregory isn’t a fan of the three-body problem theory (which is a real-life physics conundrum, by the way) and issues a verdict: Burn the heretics. The snotty Aristotle and Galileo chuckle, until flames erupt outside the cathedral. 

Follower rides in on a flaming horse, screaming that there are three suns in the sky and the world is ending. Jack and Jin take shelter and are the only ones left alive when the world melts into an ocean of lava. As the three suns coalesce, the avatar (Sea Shimooka) appears and reveals that while the planet was destroyed, they succeeded in discovering the basic structure of the solar system, and they can move to Level 3. 

What happens in Level 3 of the game?

Jack and Jin enter the barren desert of Shangdu in the 13th-century Mongol Empire, sometimes known as Xanadu, “where Kublai Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome,” Jack says, referencing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem. They walk alongside columns of placard-holding soldiers lining the way to the silver dome in the distance and chat more about the impossibility of a three-body problem. Then they discover Follower (looking extra adorable in a tiny uniform). She’s losing faith in Jin’s ability to save her. “Soon the world will end for good,” the little soldier says. 

Ed Miller

Who are the other scientists in the game?

When Jin and Jack appear before Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, two other players are waiting: pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing (Reece Shearsmith) and gravity guy — and original progenitor of the three-body problem concept — Sir Isaac Newton (Mark Gatiss). 

“One of the fun things about doing those video game sequences is that there’s no limit to how weird they can [be],” says Woo. “A video game’s a completely virtual environment — and a chance to work with some of our favorite comedic actors.” Shearsmith and Gatiss helmed the British sitcom The League of Gentlemen. 

Turing claims he can predict the sun’s movements using the 30 million soldiers standing outside the palace as a “human abacus.” The soldiers’ banners have two sides, a binary code. Pretty cool, right? Unlike the I Ching code presented in Episode 2, this code is a zillion times larger: It’s a human computer. Newton tells the army to run “solar orbit computation software Three Body 1.0,” and the mass of soldiers turn their banners back and forth. 

“We took full advantage of reality with that world,” says director Andrew Stanton, who earned Oscars for Finding Nemo and Wall-E. “We were able to build the very tip of the observation deck that would be on top of the dome, and then implied the rest of the world.” Stanton was the one director who was not scared of the game sequences, says Woo. “Given his history at Pixar, he knew exactly what to do — or at least he convinced us he knew exactly what to do. And he did.”  

Turing announces that a 10,000-year stable era is on the horizon. Khan buys it and orders the soldiers to dehydrate for the next eight months until the chaotic era ends. Jin says their calculations won’t hold up in the long run. Khan doesn’t believe her and plunges Jin and Jack into a vat of boiling water. Jin fast-forwards time (something you can do in the game), and suddenly the three suns eclipse one another. It’s syzygy!

What is syzygy? 

“Syzygy just refers to any moment where planets or stars or celestial bodies align,” says Dr. Matthew Kenzie, particle physicist and science advisor to 3 Body Problem. “All of the three suns have aligned, one behind the other. Their gravitational force is stacking up and ends up ripping the planet apart. You basically turn off or invert gravity on the planet.”   

Why does the army float up toward the suns?

The gravity of all three suns lifts the soldiers, the scientists, and Follower up into the sky. “Thirty million Mongol soldiers getting sucked up into the sky — you’ve never seen that before,” says Weiss. “It’s such a clever conceit, the Mongol setting and the Kublai Khan of it all. Mixing that very grounded historical reality with something that’s completely bonkers: gravity getting turned negative.”

Adds Woo, “It was one of the most visually memorable moments from the book.” But it presented a great opportunity when it came to making the show. 

“The pleasure dome sequence has so much visually and the way that Ramin [Djawadi] scored that entire sequence — it’s like a little opera,” says Woo. “There’s so much detail in there that you could watch a dozen times and still find something.”

The antigravity scene was “the biggest wire sequence in the show” with five actors flying, stunt coordinator Rowley Irlam told Netflix. Added Hong, “We spent two days on wires flying around.”

What’s the goal of the VR game?

Since the three-body problem is impossible, Jin realizes the goal of the game isn’t to solve it. Instead, they need to save the people. “The count said survival is everything. That’s the object of the game: to help them survive,” Jin says while fighting antigravity. Then the avatar returns and announces that the civilization didn’t survive, but since they have determined the true object of the game, they can proceed to Level 4.

What’s up with Mike Evans?

Meanwhile in Mike Evans’ (Jonathan Pryce) secret headquarters, a henchman who’s been monitoring the entire game tells him that Jin and Jack have succeeded. They’re invited to an in-person meeting, where they can play Level 4. Mike then picks up a fairy-tale book and addresses someone behind a speaker, whom he calls “My Lord.”

Wait, what? Who is Mike talking to?

Mike continues reading Hansel and Gretel into the microphone. The voice that responds to him via a speaker is that of the game’s avatar. He’s communicating with other beings, who are having a hard time understanding the fairy tale he’s reading and its symbolic language. The beings reveal their collective consciousness and their new mission. “Humanity must learn to fear again,” says the Lord. 

“I don’t know if we had an idea of what –– in those scenes with Evans talking to the Lord –– would be on the other end until after we cast Sea [Shimooka] and heard her voice,” Weiss says. “And it was so kind of perfect.”

While Shimooka physically commands her scene as the “sword lady,” she developed another method to give authority to the disembodied voice emanating from the speaker. “I really wanted her to sound grounded and humanistic and powerful without her having to be loud,” Shimooka says.  

Ed Miller

What happens in Level 4?

Jin and Jack get fancy invites to the summit in London, and when they show up at an empty venue, Tatiana, (the mysterious woman who’s been following members of the Oxford Five, played by Marlo Kelly) is waiting for them and tells them the answers to all of their questions are waiting for them on Level 4. They put on the headsets and enter a wasteland where they’re wearing everyday clothes. The avatar greets them with Follower, who’s wearing a sweater. “You were right, there is no solution to the three-body problem,” the avatar tells them. 

Follower speeds up time, and civilizations rise and fall in the distance. “With three suns in the sky, every civilization ends in chaos,” the avatar continues. “There will eventually be a cataclysm from which we cannot recover. Our planet will be ripped in half. Or pulled into one of the suns. Or expelled into space forever. And when you know your civilization is doomed, what is the solution?” When the inhabitants of the doomed planet received the invitation from Earth via Ye (Zine Tseng), they built an interstellar fleet, which is en route to Earth. “You’ll welcome us, won’t you?” Follower asks Jin and Jack. 

“There’s a lot happening in that scene and almost all of it pays forward into the rest of this show,” says Weiss. “Watching sword lady and cute little girl’s explanation of what’s really going on to Jin and Jack — and watching how Eve Ridley as Follower goes from cute to really menacing, but also cute at the same time, in that scene.”  

Ah! What’s going on? Who are the San-Ti?

When Jin and Jack remove their headsets, Tatiana explains that the distant civilization is called the San-Ti. The first person who made contact with them was from China and Sān tǐ-rén means three-body people in Chinese. They created the game technology to share their story, and they’re getting closer every moment. Jin wants to learn more, but Jack thinks the idea that the headsets are designed by “aliens” is a scam and leaves. Tatiana invites Jin to a summit with all the Level 4 champions to welcome her to the organization.

What is Jin’s backstory?

Tatiana mysteriously reveals that Jin was orphaned during a flood in Hubei, China. Jin says her parents saved her by tossing her onto a piece of door frame, but her parents were pulled under the waves. She never saw them again. “They’ve lived on in you,” Tatiana says. “If you survive, they’ve survived.” It’s the same mantra she heard from the count. 

“The Tatiana character didn’t really, in our original conception of it, have that many scenes,” says Woo. “And she ended up being in crucial moments of almost all of the episodes, so that’s a credit to [Kelly] as an actor.”

Ed Miller

Please tell me Jack is OK.

Apparently when Tatiana said Jack was free to go, it was a qualified release and she shows up and stabs him to death in front of all his toys. Outside, Da Shi runs surveillance from his car, listening to Radiohead’s song “Karma Police” but missing Jack’s murder. “The San-Ti want compliance,” says Bradley. “Jack’s just too much of a strong personality, so he falls afoul of them.”

Of course Tatiana disappears from the security camera footage immediately — just as she did when she lit Auggie’s cigarette in Episode 1. It’s her signature move.  

And the song’s lyrics ramble on: “This is what you get when you mess with us.”

“Dan and I worked with John Bradley for eight seasons on Game of Thrones and loved every minute of it, but we never got to kill him,” says Benioff.

Mission accomplished. But whose fate will be sealed next?

Watch 3 Body Problem for more.