If the universe winks at you and no satellite is around to capture it, did it really happen? That’s the question on everyone’s mind in “Red Coast,” with the world reeling from widespread sightings of the blinking night sky. Saul maintains that it was a deepfake, which seems like the best theory we have since thousands of stars actually going in and out of existence is impossible. It must be some kind of scam by very, very powerful people — if they’re even people at all.
But aliens probably aren’t entirely behind this one. In this episode, we learn more about Mike Evans, a man with seemingly deep enough pockets to get whatever he wants done, thanks to his massive privately owned oil company. At one time, he was a dedicated environmentalist, living a solitary existence re-planting trees in Northwestern China to protect an endangered species of brown swallow. But whatever happened after he met Ye Wenjie out there — perhaps the construction of a radio astronomy lab on his land — led him to become the very thing he disdained. Now he has a vested interest in halting scientific progress: funding anti-science politicians, propping up anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists, etc.
That means there’s a good chance Evans played a role in Auggie’s countdown hallucinations, which finally end when Auggie caves and shuts down her nanotech project only moments after proving it’s a groundbreaking success. Stepping out in a daze, she runs into a waiting Clarence Shi, who asks her what she knows about Evans. The woman who threatened Auggie — Tatiana (Marlo Kelly), according to the credits — has been completely scrubbed from the security cam footage of their meeting in the alley, and Evans might be connected.
Bringing Clarence into the Oxford Five’s orbit is a good move for the show, especially for getting everyone on the same page: Auggie learns about the prevalence of countdown hallucinations among the other dead scientists, making the threat even more serious than it already was. The relief of losing the countdown doesn’t come close to outweighing the pain of losing her passion and likely risking her livelihood.
Could Evans and Tatiana both also be involved in the creation of the VR game that Jin keeps getting sucked into? “Red Coast” spends a lot of time in this imaginary world, where Jin picks the name “Copernicus” and meets a pair of AI characters: the Count of the West and his child, Follower. On their journey to the pyramid to meet Emperor Zhou, Jin learns more about the basics of the game. The goal is to figure out how the environment works on this planet. If the player understands the patterns determining the erratic weather events of “chaotic eras,” they can also predict the “stable eras” when it’s safe to live without the fear of suddenly being engulfed by flames. In this land, people can dehydrate themselves into flattened husks and be rehydrated when it’s most convenient. We see that play out in vivid, disturbing fashion with Follower.
Jin opens up to Jack about the game since Auggie is otherwise indisposed, and he’s fascinated, though he can’t use her helmet for more than a second without being decapitated by a woman with a sword. There’s some very welcome comic relief here with Jack’s reactions to the game, especially his repeated failed attempts to play. (The third, when we don’t even enter the game with him, is the funniest.) That continues when he finally gets an official invite and spends a few minutes punching Sir Thomas More in the face because, well, it’s a game, and why not?
Jin does make some real progress at the pyramid, where she points out that the Count’s invention of the I Ching isn’t enough to actually make accurate predictions about the sun’s movements. Sure enough, his divinations fail to account for the wave of extreme cold that obliterates civilization not long after the masses just got done rehydrating. But by speaking up about the superiority of science over mysticism, she completed the first level.
Your level of investment in these VR scenes might depend on how willing you are to indulge in thought experiments. This stuff will matter in a more significant way down the line, but for now, it’s less plotty than vibey. Luckily, the imagery is still pretty cool, and the idea of a game about puzzling out how science works in another world is appealing to me. But if you’re craving more character development and more tangible progress in the non-game story, this stuff might feel like a waste of time, especially this early on.
Wenjie’s story is the most tense and interesting of the episode. Not long after beginning her time at Red Coast Base, she has a brilliant idea, confirmed by data from an American scientist: Instead of relying on their own weak signal to send regular transmissions to outer space, they could amplify the message by shooting it at the sun. The sun would act as a super-antenna.
Yang Weining takes the idea to Commissar Lei Zhicheng, who immediately rejects it — shooting at the sun has dangerous political symbolism (Mao = Red Sun), and they could all get executed for it. But Wenjie can’t get the idea out of her head, and one day she discreetly goes through with it anyway. It’s not until almost a decade later that she gets her reply: “I am a pacifist in this world. You are lucky that I am the first to receive your message. I am warning you: Do not answer. If you respond, we will come. Your world will be conquered. Do not answer.”
Director Derek Tsang shoots this scene with the intensity it deserves. What’s happening here is historic: The first ever definitive proof of extraterrestrial life, and it’s in the form of an actual decipherable message. Wenjie ultimately chooses to send another message back despite the warnings, essentially inviting this alien race to invade. “We cannot save ourselves,” she says. “I will help you conquer this world.”
The best part of this huge moment is how the script also makes it an important character moment. Psychologically, there’s a lot going on. For one, meeting Mike Evans forced Wenjie to reckon with the corruption, greed, and endless bureaucratic red tape she has encountered over the past decade. She thought meeting the young woman who dealt the killing blow to her father would offer some satisfaction and closure, but there is no catharsis to be found. The Cultural Revolution may be over, but the damage has been done. That Red Guard was just a girl when she got caught up in the fever and struck a professor dead, and the past decade has treated her to traumas and losses even worse than Wenjie has experienced. There’s no pleasure in that.
This whole story is rooted in the immediate post–Cultural Revolution moment, which gives it a real texture that’s missing from many of the more generic present-day character stories. I crave a sense of Jin, Auggie, and Clarence’s deeper philosophies about the world since we now understand why Ye Wenjie would be willing to let the world burn. The problem isn’t individual sadists; it’s something core to all of us: some willingness to choose selfishness and tell lies as readily as we believe them. From Wenjie’s perspective, those essential impulses can’t be overcome with protests or even a revolution; we require outside assistance. Throw the whole Earth away.
Subatomic Particles
• I have to say, I rolled my eyes a little at Will explaining the many worlds theory to his students. I’ve already seen it in 500 other sci-fi movies, and it feels a little too rudimentary for this show.
• I get Auggie’s frustration with Saul in theory, but I’m still not totally feeling it as a narrative conflict. He’s just a typical case of arrested development, albeit one who works (worked?) at a particle accelerator.
• Without knowing who he’s talking to, Clarence meets Tatiana during a birthday visit to his late wife’s grave, and Tatiana claims her dad was shot in the head.
• Also, Will finds out he has stage four pancreatic cancer and has only two to six months to live. I appreciate the effort to give these people some shading, though I’m still not quite invested in Will specifically.
