Ye Wenjie has been reflecting a lot lately, thinking about the daughter who never truly took priority over the real mission she cared about. There’s an air of finality to her melancholy conversation with Saul at the late Vera’s gravestone. Wenjie delivers a coded warning disguised as an odd joke about Einstein’s violin getting smashed by God in heaven because he was told to “never play with God.” After all, the San-Ti can’t understand humor, so maybe speaking in metaphor is humanity’s only hope of getting around constant surveillance.
More than ever, it seems like Wenjie understands that her time is up, whether because of a directive from an unlistening God or because of her own personal loss of faith and purpose. It’s only fitting that she would return to the abandoned Red Coast Base, the site of the most significant years of her life — the decade that changed everything, for her and the world. On the verge of jumping off the cliff, she runs into Tatiana, waiting like a contract killer on behalf of the San-Ti. Before Tatiana presumably euthanizes her, they take some time to sit, watch the sunset, and discuss their overlords. The San-Ti never communicated why Wenjie’s time is up, but Tatiana suggests it’s because she fulfilled her purpose.
Because Mike Evans and most of his followers were either arrested or massacred, we never really got the chance to explore the nuances of their worship of the San-Ti. So Tatiana has an interesting value in the narrative now — a kind of lone-wolf believer who could also hold special value for the aliens. That closing image of Tatiana resting her head on Wenjie’s shoulder is sad, eerie, and yet strangely beautiful. The violence of her mission doesn’t at all conflict with her affection for her target.
Most of “Only Advance” is dedicated to prepping for the execution of the Staircase Project, which requires a human subject. Auggie’s complex nanofiber weave should work, and apparently the technology for suspended animation is there, based on the chimp who manages to retain impressive brain function after hibernating for a month. (The vomiting is a normal side effect, don’t worry.) Wade himself even plans to go under — not for the probe but to be alive on Earth to oversee his plan and eventually greet the San-Ti.
The problem is that they’re low on bombs, and the most weight the probe can carry to reach the correct speed is two kilograms. Wade has a literal galaxy-brain idea: Send the brain of a scientist out into the galaxy. If the San-Ti snatch it up, maybe they can reconstruct a body around it, and maybe that person could even communicate information back to Earth that could save humanity. It would work best with someone who’s already dying, and Wade clearly already has Will in mind.
I applaud Wade’s creative thinking here, even if it’s bat-shit insane. There are just so many variables at play here and so many years for everything to get messed up that it feels foolish to think there’s even a slim chance this long-term plan could actually work. But I love the idea of Wade popping up periodically each year, fixing his agency’s fuck-ups, checking in with his mum, and going back under. I would never actually want to be immortal and stick around for centuries, but there’s a certain fantasy to finding out what happens, isn’t there? If he’s only spending one week out of suspended animation per year, a healthy guy around Wade’s age could probably make it another millennium and a half. (I’m no Jin, but I can do basic multiplication.) That would be a fascinating case study.
Here’s where Auggie disappears from the episode, leaving the project and abruptly uploading all the copyrighted research and specs from her nanotech company to open-source platforms like WikiLeaks for her competitors. She’s torching her career to the ground, and, hey, power to her if it means she’ll get to help everyday people like she always wanted. Auggie has always been a bit of a mouthpiece in this show, judgmental when it comes to a lot of subjects — not just the serious stuff like the ethics of mass-murdering a colony of alien worshippers, but infractions as minor as Saul’s womanizing and weed smoking. But I hope she finds peace.
By the end of the episode, Will has taken his own plunge into the unknown. Jin is very resistant to the idea of him agreeing to do what Wade wants him to do at first, but she knows as well as he that his sacrifice really could change everything. That’s a big change for a character whose purpose in this narrative was unclear for so long. Now he’s potentially saving the human race. Of course, Will doesn’t think of it that way. To him, this is about his love for Jin. He won’t sign a loyalty oath to humanity, but he’d sign one for her. And that very quality might make him attractive to the San-Ti, who are already undoubtedly observing him with their Sophons.
Some of the drama surrounding Will getting euthanized is a tad corny, honestly, with Jin belatedly finding out he bought her the star and rushing to say good-bye (and probably that she loves him back?), only to just miss him. But his actual final conversation with Saul is really touching, with Saul making one last doomed effort to change Will’s mind — and then tearfully accepting his decision, holding his hand and taking advantage of this rare opportunity to say good-bye.
There’s actually a lot of validity to Saul’s paranoid ramblings about what could happen to Will. In its most successfully unnerving moments, 3 Body Problem has stressed the sheer unpredictability of how an ultra-advanced extraterrestrial race might think or behave. Will could get stuck in some unimaginably complex alien Saw trap for a thousand years just to test humans’ capacity for suffering. As Saul says, “Bugs don’t know why terrible things happen to them. They’re bugs.”
This show’s blend of cerebral thrills and more traditional sci-fi drama hasn’t always totally worked, and I’m still not quite sure where I’ll land on this season when it’s over. But on an episode-by-episode basis, these last few installments have been solidly entertaining and interesting, and they’ve at least made an effort to tell character-driven stories even when the war itself is the main focus. The character fates at the conclusion of “Only Advances” aren’t fully devastating in the way of the best sci-fi deaths, but this is still a well-balanced, emotionally resonant episode that sets us up well for the finale.
Subatomic Particles
• “Dude, how the fuck would I know which one is DX3906?”
• Wade seems to have some new idea of how to fight back against the San-Ti, using another blind spot: They can watch and listen, but they can’t tell what humans are thinking. On the phone with someone, he mentions something called “Wallfacer.”
• It turns out the Follower from the VR game is based on a young Vera! I suppose that’s why Jin instinctively wanted to protect her.
• I almost have to laugh at how terribly Will’s previously unmentioned sister and brother-in-law come across in the scene when they visit him in his hospital room and request whatever money his mum left him. I know sibling relationships can be rough, but it’s a little cartoony. And I’m not even totally clear on why this scene even exists. It makes me think of all the money Will already spent on Jin’s star, but they didn’t know about the money he inherited from Jack anyway.
• The subplot of Clarence and his son’s strained relationship also remains pretty underdeveloped, but I still felt the gut punch of him saying Reg’s idea was “bollocks.” That said, though … a business for escaping to other habitable planets? It kind of does sound like bollocks.
• The guy Reg is meeting with is Denys Porlock, the same man from the board who fires Auggie. That feels like a notable choice, but is it just a throwaway connection?
