Netflix’s 3 Body Problem continues with another powerful and super trippy episode that answers some questions, but brings tons more to the table. In “Red Coast,” we learn about the true nature of Ye Wenjie’s work in the 60s, while Auggie makes a difficult decision. Will gets bad news, while Jin and Jack discover a dangerous game.
Shut It Down | The morning after the blinking stars incident, Auggie (Eiza Gonzalez) goes to her nanotech lab for a demonstration, but is understandably distracted by her countdown, which is now under ten minutes. The demonstration of her nanotech destroys a small cube of glass, but with seven minutes to go till zero, Auggie orders her team to stop all development on the project, much to their shock. After leaving, Auggie’s countdown vanishes with ninety seconds to spare and she is met by Clarence (Benedict Wong) who takes her away.
Back in 1968 at the Chinese lab that Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) is working at with Bai (Yang Hewen), she shows him her calculations that the transmissions their satellites picked up were not only from Jupiter, but they were amplified by the Sun’s energy. She asks him to talk to their superior about aiming their own transmissions at the Sun, but he goes behind her back and takes credit for her idea. Regardless, the idea is shut down by their commanding officer, but Ye Wenjie secretly does it anyway.
Get In the Game | In present day, Clarence shows Auggie security camera footage of her speaking to the mysterious woman in the alley, which shows her talking to no one, but her cigarette lights up from an invisible lighter from the woman. Clarence explains that dozens of other brilliant minds in their field saw the countdown and either quit their work or committed suicide. Meanwhile, Jin (Jess Hong) once again tries on the VR headset and is met in a snowy wasteland by an Asian Count and a young girl. They try to lead her to a pyramid, but the sun rises and dries up the snow in moments. The three of them hide behind the shade of a rock, but the Count orders the girl to lay down in the sunlight, which shrivels up her body into a husk of skin. He makes Jin carry the body and tells her that if one of them survives, they all do. Jin shows the headset to Jack (John Bradley), who tries it on, but he is immediately killed by a women with a sword in the “game.”
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We Cannot Save Ourselves | After listening in on Jin and Jack’s conversation via a bugged phone, Clarence visits his wife’s grave, where the mysterious woman (Marlo Kelly) appears and tells him that her father was shot in the head, which she describes as “a good way to go.” After they both leave, we see the headstone of a young girl named Edith. Jack receives a package containing another headset, but his experience shows two British men in place of the Asian ones that Jin saw. As Jack is telling Will (Alex Sharp) all about the game, Will interrupts him to say that he has stage four cancer and there’s nothing the doctors can do. Jack encourages Will not to give up and fight, while in Jin’s game, the Count uses an equation to predict that the lethal sun will go away in eight days and Jin somehow makes time go by faster just by touching the ground.
The people then throw the husks of all those who have died into the water outside, which restores them to life, but a blizzard arrives which kills everyone save for Jin. Then, a women appears and tells Jin that she has completed level one. Clarence meets his boss, Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham) and tells him that Mike Evans, the man who appeared at Vera’s funeral, has been funding anti-vax and anti-science propaganda and that he happened to live in China in 1977 when they detected a signal known as the “Wow Signal,” named because it made scientists go “Wow.” In 1977, Ye Wenjie and Bai meet a young Mike Evans on a mission to save a bird species from extinction, since they want his land to build a new site on. She tries to convince Bai to move the site, but he refuses. He also for some reason introduces her to the woman that murdered her father, who refuses to repent for killing him and says that she would do it again.
The next morning, Ye Wenjie decodes the Wow Signal, which tells her not to answer and that if she does, her world will be conquered. Ye repositions the satellite to point at the sun so she can reply with the message, “Come. We cannot save ourselves.” After a hesitation, she transmits it.
3 Body Problem is now streaming on Netflix.