'3 Body Problem' Episode 1 Recap: The Final Countdown

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

March 21, 2024, 5:05 a.m. ET

The plot of “3 Body Problem” is not going to be the thing that grabs you about “3 Body Problem.”

Perhaps because of the actions of a rogue scientist at a Chinese installation in the 1970s, an alien intelligence has instituted some kind of countdown. The decreasing numbers appear in the minds of the world’s bleeding-edge scientists, who are driven by the countdowns to end either their life’s work or their lives. According to a secret code blinked out by the stars in the sky in a phenomenon that spans the globe, all of humanity may be headed for the same result. Also, a possibly evil virtual-reality video game is involved.

See? It doesn’t take long to sum up what happens in “Countdown,” the premiere of the new series from the “Game of Thrones” impresarios David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and their collaborator, Alexander Woo (“The Terror: Infamy”), adapted from a trilogy of books by the Chinese novelist Liu Cixin. Nor is it hard to run down the characters, who at this point are primarily pieces moved from place to place to advance the aforementioned plot.

Half the episode is set in Mao’s China during the 1960s and 1970s. Our viewpoint character here is Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng). She’s the brilliant daughter of a scientist whose adherence to concepts like relativity and the Big Bang puts him at odds with the values of the Cultural Revolution. As Wenjie watches, he is accidentally beaten to death by keyed-up teenagers during a struggle session, in which his own wife, Wenjie’s mother, denounces him.

At first condemned to hard labor, Wenjie catches the eye of the architects of a nearby scientific project run by the government. They offer her a job working alongside them, but given her checkered political past, the job is a life sentence: Once she goes to work at the secret installation, she can never leave it. Wenjie is already on thin ice after taking the fall for a heterodox journalist who passed her a copy of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” and at risk of being physically forced to incriminate other innocent scientists if she stays in prison. She takes the deal.

At the installation — a cliff-side redoubt overlooking vast deforested areas and topped with a gigantic transmitter — Wenjie quickly learns the truth. This isn’t a test site for some experimental weapon. It’s an attempt to communicate with worlds beyond our own.

Decades later, in 2024, all of science is in sudden turmoil. Particle accelerators around the globe have spent weeks returning results that are either a complete contradiction of 60 years of physics or complete gibberish. The scientific establishment, and more important its financial backers, have to use Occam’s razor and assume the latter — that the particle-accelerator game has somehow become rigged, and is therefore useless. One by one, they’re shut down for failure to justify further funding.

The latest victim is Oxford University. Its picturesque particle accelerator, a vast chamber seemingly walled with giant bubbles made of gold, is minutes from shutdown, to the great chagrin of the project boss, Vera Ye (Vedette Lim), and her brightest protégé, Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo). After uncharacteristically asking Saul if he believes in God, Vera takes her own life by diving hundreds of feet into the pool of water at the base of the accelerator. It’s a hell of a way to go.

It’s also far from unique. Clarence Shi (Benedict Wong), an investigator with the Strategic Intelligence Agency, is on the hunt for suicides like Vera’s. Turns out there’s been a rash of them around the world — all involving brilliant scientists, all involving strange countdowns, and at least two connected by a strange virtual-reality gaming headset.

The next victim appears to be Auggie Salazar (Eiza González), a former classmate and lover of Saul’s currently helming her own nanofiber startup. She and Saul belong to a small, still close-knit group of Vera’s former students, including Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), still doing advanced research at the university; Jack Rooney (John Bradley), the private-sector class clown of the group; and Will Downing (Alex Sharp), a comparatively nebbishy educator.

Jin is the one who has given one of the mysterious headsets by Vera’s mother (Rosalind Chao), and uses it to enter a frighteningly convincing virtual world. But it’s Auggie who is experiencing the constant hallucination of a fiery golden countdown hovering in the air before her. (It’s unclear if she hears the sound as well, but the repetitive metallic alarm sound that accompanies the countdown is incredibly unnerving.)

And it’s Auggie who receives a visit from a mysterious woman (Marlo Kelly) who seems familiar with her plight. Though she at first comes across as a Christian proselytizer looking to recruit lost souls in need of a light for their smoke, this woman brings up the countdown without prompting. There’s only one way to stop it from reaching zero, she says, and that’s to shut down her experimental nanofiber project, permanently.

The woman offers a demonstration by way of proof. Look up at the sky at midnight tomorrow, she says. “Has a universe ever winked at you?”

The universe winks, all right — not just at Auggie and her friend Saul, who comes along as an independent observer, but at everyone on the entire planet. The stars in the night sky literally start blinking on and off en masse, flashing out some kind of Morse-style code.

Auggie and Saul are baffled, as is most of the world, one presumes. But Clarence’s reclusive boss, Wade (Liam Cunningham), has it figured out. “That, Clarence,” he says, referring to the force behind the blinking lights, “is our enemy.” Wade’s men have cracked the code, too. It is, of course, a countdown.

The blinking lights in the sky make the episode, and not just because they’re the cliffhanger leading you to the next. While the characters seem prepared to take this event in stride, I sure wouldn’t! For something so contradictory of every scientific principle we have to take place, at that large a scale … it virtually demands the existence of a force beyond human comprehension, and thus beyond humanity’s power to defend itself. It’s like God flicking the switch for the basement lights, telling you it’s time to stop playing Xbox and go to bed, on a global scale.

Plus, if you’re the type of person who’s ever looked up at the clouds or the stars and suffered the irrational fear that you might somehow defy gravity and fall up, the image is a vertiginous nightmare. Speaking as a sufferer of this particular fear myself, this is the second time a show this year has forced me to endure it, after Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s wondrously excruciating “The Curse.” I humbly request that future showrunners refrain from exploiting my specific phobias from this point forward.

We’re in the early going yet, but it would be a tough sell to say the plot and the characters are strong suits of “3 Body Problem.” The actors are entertaining, but so far they’re playing not much more than broad personality types engaged in a mildly interesting sci-fi mystery. Chao has the more dramatic backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, depicted here as a full-on “1984” meets “The Crucible” dystopian nightmare, to play against — not to mention the more dramatic setting of that satellite installation. But it’s a low bar to clear.

No, it’s the imagery that lingers more than anything else. The colossal transmitter, roosting at the cliff’s edge like an enormous bird of prey. The gradual way the countdown clock emerges into Auggie’s consciousness, from a blur on a karaoke video to a full-on superimposition over the face of anyone she tries to talk to. The uncanny sight of the stars flickering as one. Can the story and the characters rise to that level?

I’m a great admirer of the final season of “Game of Thrones,” in which the characters’ and audience’s long-held hope for heroic violence was revealed as disastrous folly. So I’m excited to see what the co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have in store for this latest venture. (Their former “Thrones” collaborator, the novelist George R.R. Martin, is a vocal admirer of the Liu books that inspired “3 Body Problem.”) Their co-creator and co-writer Alexander Woo’s tenure on the second season of the anthology series “The Terror,” meanwhile, left me cold.

But it pays to go into new shows with an open mind if getting maximum enjoyment out of the work is your ultimate goal. So I’m inclined to give “3 Body Problem” time to develop into something more than a few interesting images with just enough story to connect them.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT