Game of Thrones masterminds D.B. Weiss and David Benioff have unleashed their super trippy sci-fi series 3 Body Problem on Netflix and man, do we have questions! The pilot, “Countdown,” will have you talking for a while! Let’s dive in and if you’re confused, don’t worry, that’s normal.
The Revolution | In Beijing circa 1966, a physics professor named Ye Zhetai is put up in front of the people of Beijing as a counterrevolutionary for teaching the Big Bang Theory in his lectures as his daughter, Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), watches in the crowd. The people on stage brutally beat him to death as the crowd cheers and his daughter sinks to the ground in tears. London 2024, and Detective Clarence Sin (Benedict Wong) arrives to the home of a physicist to find his corpse and a series of numbers scrawled across the wall in blood, along with the words, “I still see it.” Clarence examines the corpse and sees that he carved his own eyeballs out with a knife.
At Oxford’s particle accelerator, Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo) is moping about something that disproves all quantum physics theories from the last 60 years as his superior, Vera Ye (Vidette Lim), leaps into the the accelerator’s pool of water thousands of feet below. Auggie Salazar (Eiza Gonzalez) is at a karaoke bar discussing the readings of all the accelerators in the world with her friend Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), who compares the collective readings to Alice in Wonderland. Saul calls Auggie, but she refuses to pick up, so he calls Jin, but as she is answering, Auggie sees gold lights waving through the air and forming some kind of countdown. Jin interrupts her to inform her that Vera has killed herself.
Nothing Good Happens At Zero | Sometime later, art Vera’s funeral, Jin, her new boyfriend Rah Varma (Saamer Usmani) and Saul reunite with their old pals, Jack Rooney (John Bradley), an Oxford dropout who is now a snack food mogul, and Will Downing (Alex Sharp), who seems to have a crush on Jin. Auggie arrives to the funeral late and privately tells Jin that she’s seeing the countdown all the time, as a man (Jonathan Pryce) enters the funeral and leaves moments later. Clarence watches the man leave the funeral from across the street and follows him to a field where he leaves in a helicopter. Auggie is smoking outside when a woman (Marlo Kelly) approaches her and asks about the countdown. She orders Auggie to shut down her nanotech lab and look up at the sky at exactly midnight tomorrow night. She also hands her a code breaking device from cereal box and says that Auggie doesn’t want the countdown to hit zero.
A flashback to China in 1967 shows Ye Wenjie chopping down trees in the forest with others when one of the others, named Bai (Yang Hewen), hands her a book called Silent Spring. She reads it and the next day, she and Bai sneak off to a tent and kiss. The next day, she is interrogated by her commander who found the book and demands to know where she got it. When she refuses to say, she is imprisoned, until a lawyer arrives to offer her a pardon as long as she agrees testify against those who are spreading her late father’s propaganda. When Wenjie refuses, the lawyer pours ice cold water over her and her bed and she is taken away to a mountaintop research lab, where she is offered a position at the base on the condition that she never leaves, which she shockingly agrees to immediately.
The Code | At London’s “Black Palace,” the headquarters of British intelligence, Clarence speaks to Thomas Wade about the connections between the man from the funeral, named Mike Evans, and the “Oxford Five” as Wade calls Vera’s friends. Wade tells Clarence that he’s on thin ice as they discuss a dead body found with a VR headset on. As Jin is speaking to Vera’s mother, she asks if Vera was doing anything strange before her suicide and she shows her a similar headset, which Jin takes. On their way out, we see an old picture of Vera’s mother- a picture of Wenjie.
Speaking of whom, another flashback shows Wenjie being taken to the satellite dish where they transmit something that causes all the birds to drop dead. Wenjie realizes that they are transmitting a signal to the birds and that they are planning on doing it again. Jin tries on the headset in present day and appears in a VR desert, where a sandstorm reveals a dead shriveled up body that opens its eyes before Jin removes the headset immediately. Auggie and Saul go to the Oxford campus in the dead of night to see what the woman wants her to see. When the clock strikes midnight, all the stars in the sky freeze in place and flicker out in Morse Code, which Saul uses the breaker to decipher and it lines up exactly with the countdown in Auggie’s head.
3 Body Problem is now streaming on Netflix.