Oscar winner Andrew Stanton directs 3 Body Problem‘s best episode yet, “Destroyer of Worlds,” which answers the question of the show’s title in a crazy fashion! Jack and Jin progress in the game, leading to a startling revelation, as Auggie tests her theory about the countdown. Clarence and Wade discover the potential cause of the deaths of the physicists.
Suicide or Murder? | At CERN in Switzerland, Clarence (Benedict Wong) arrives to find a dead physicist having drowned himself in his bathtub after shutting down his lab, which Clarence notes is exactly how Oppenheimer’s mistress died. He also finds another VR headset stashed in the man’s vault. At Jack’s (John Bradley) mansion, the group discusses the epidemic of suicides, while Will (Alex Sharp) confesses to Jin (Jess Hong) that he’s quitting teaching. As Auggie (Eiza Gonzalez) snoops around Jack’s bedroom, she finds his headset and puts it on, only to be killed in the game immediately. Auggie demands to know what the game is about and Jack reveals that he checked the security cameras of his house when the headset was dropped off and saw no one. Saul (Jovan Adepo) theorizes that the interface of the headset could’ve influenced Vera to killing herself. Auggie demands that Jack and Jin stop playing, which they promise to do, but of course, they both play later that night.
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As they launch level two, with Clarence watching their FaceTime feed, Jin and Jack end up both sharing the same game. This time, they are in medieval England presenting a solution to the Pope and Jin proposes that Earth is caught in the gravity of three different bodies of stars that is causing chaos. Sure enough, moments later, the three suns align and incinerate everything save for them. The mystery lady arrives and announces that they’ve entered level three.
Countdown’s Return | Clarence presents the headset he found to Wade (Liam Cunningham), who theorizes that the headsets are a recruiting tool for the brightest minds on Earth, but they don’t know what they’re being recruited for. Jin logs off and sees Raj (Saamer Usmani) waiting for her looking concerned. Sometime later, they go to dinner at Raj’s family’s house, where Raj’s father tells a story about him killing an enemy camp during a war in India and stealing their supplies to survive. Auggie meets her boss at the lab, who threatens to pull her work visa in England if she refuses to carry on with her nano fiber project. Later that night, Auggie turns the machine that makes the fiber back on, but as soon as she does, the countdown comes back, picking up where it left off. She shuts it down again, making the countdown go away and calls Saul, but hears that he’s with someone and hangs up.
Jin and Jack once again log into the game, this time in a desert filled with 13 million soldiers. They meet two other people in the game, who use the soldiers as human binary computers as they hold up black and white signs to signal the code to predict the next chaotic era, which seems to work as someone watches them play on monitors. Jin manages to advance time again and when she does the suns align again and everyone is sucked into the sky by the suns’ gravity. Jin realizes that the object of the game is to save the people in the game, as they advance to level four.
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The 3 Body Problem | The man watching them play prints out papers and shows them to Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce), who orders him to invite Jin and Jack to the summit. After the man leaves, he reads the tale of Hansel and Gretel through a speaker phone to a voice he calls “My Lord,” who tells him that mankind must learn to fear again. Jin and Jack receive invitations to a warehouse and when they arrive, the mystery woman (Marlo Kelly) is there and tells them to put the headsets back on. When they do, they see the woman from the game who tells them there is no solution to the 3 Body Problem and that soon Earth will be destroyed by the three suns. The only way for humanity to survive is to flee the planet and that they are sending spaceships from lightyears away to transport mankind to a new planet.
Jack doesn’t buy any of it and storms out, but Jin stays as the woman invites her to the summit with the other level four champions. Jack heads back to his mansion as Clarence watches from his car outside. The wifi in Jack’s house goes down and then Jack sees the woman in his bedroom who stabs him in the throat, but Clarence doesn’t see anything or anyone from the window outside.
3 Body Problem is now streaming on Netflix.