'3 Body Problem' Recap, Episode One: Netflix's Sci-Fi Series

3 Body Problem, the new Netflix series adapted from the Chinese writer Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, begins with a scene that’s anything but science fiction. We’re in 1966 Beijing at the height of the cultural revolution, when academics perceived as class enemies were brought out onstage by Mao Zedong’s violently loyal Red Guards to be publicly humiliated and tortured in mass struggle sessions. The show quickly introduces us to one of those victims: Ye Zhetai, a physics professor at Tsinghua University who gets brutally punished for his supposedly counterrevolutionary teachings (like lecturing about the big bang theory). Not even the man’s wife is on his side anymore; brought out onstage herself to denounce him, she has no choice but to placate the young Red Guards.

Our entry point into this story is the professor’s daughter, a young woman named Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), who can only watch helplessly from the crowd as her father is beaten to death. A year later, she’s part of the Construction Corps, deforesting a region of Inner Mongolia. She strikes up a brief romance with a reporter named Bai Mulin, which gets her in trouble when she’s caught with his gift: the influential environmentalist book Silent Spring. Wenjie refuses to say where she got it, so she’s whisked off to jail, where a woman pressures her to sign something testifying that she saw her father meeting with other counterrevolutionaries.

Wenjie could get out of this and return to work by cooperating and completing a course, but she refuses, even when faced with prosecution. But it’s her lucky day (sort of): The military wants to use her scientific knowledge up at Red Coast Base, home of the massive, mysterious satellite dish at the mountain’s peak near the logging camp. Wenjie has heard stories about how the base affects animals, not to mention the humans who work there. But she immediately accepts a lifetime dedicated to high-security research, agreeing never to leave that summit.

But how does this all connect to 2024 London, where most of the series will take place? It’s not clear at first, and the end of the episode suggests there’s a lot more story to be told in the earlier timeline. (For one, we later learn that Wenjie will eventually leave the base.) But puzzling over those questions is the key to enjoying this strange, ambitious show.

In the present day, one of our audience surrogates is Clarence Shi (Benedict Wong), a detective investigating a string of gruesome suicides — all brilliant, often award-winning scientists. Clarence has been fired by several different police forces and counterintelligence groups, but he could really redeem himself if he pulls this one off for his hard-ass boss, Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham, a.k.a. Game of Thrones’ Davos Seaworth), at the Strategic Intelligence Agency.

The third cluster of characters in this three-pronged story — this three-body problem, if you will (boo tomato) — is a group of scientists Clarence calls “the Oxford Five.” They’ve mostly gone their separate ways since studying together under Vera Ye, but some stayed close, like best friends Auggie Salazar (Eiza González) and Jin Cheng (Jess Hong). While Auggie switched to applied sciences and started a nanotechnology company, Jin became an astrophysicist analyzing experiments from particle accelerators around the world. Then there’s Will Downing (Alex Sharp), a teacher who has never confessed his longtime feelings for Jin; Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo), who became Vera’s lab assistant; and Jack Rooney (John Bradley, a.k.a. Game of Thrones’ Samwell Tarly), who quit the field entirely and got rich selling potato chips.

When Vera becomes the latest scientist to end her life, her funeral brings the five back together. They speculate about the recent crisis in physics that may have personally contributed to their old mentor’s depression: A month ago, all the major particle accelerators started generating nonsensical, science-breaking results, and as a result, they were shut down. This particularly affects Saul, who was already worried about his wasted potential as a scientist.

None of the Oxford Five are particularly captivating to me yet as characters, but there’s a solid foundation here, and I do enjoy the sense of familiarity and easy conversation among the old friends. Jin and Auggie are really the focus so far, each getting their own intriguing subplot, and Hong’s performance is a standout in this cast.

Jin gets another clue about Vera’s recent state of mind when she visits her mother (Rosalind Chao), who turns out to be Ye Wenjie! There’s our connection to the past, and the reveal immediately makes everything more interesting. Wenjie mentions that Vera was playing a particular video game a lot before she died, accessed through a shiny state-of-the-art helmet that she lets Jin take. When she tries it out, she discovers a stunningly realistic VR game, though she doesn’t last long. Before she can get a handle on her surroundings, a giant sun is scorching the earth all around her, and she’s stepping on a desiccated corpse whose eyes open. Jin rips the helmet off in a panic, understandably shaken.

Again, it’s totally unclear at this point how this video game could connect to, well, anything else. And the occurrences in Auggie’s story line are even more inexplicable. It begins when she’s out one night with Jin and begins seeing flickering lights in her line of vision wherever she turns her head. When the lights focus into distinct shapes, she sees a fiery countdown, like many of the scientists who eventually resorted to suicide. The neurologist is no help, and the numbers just keep going, maddening in their interminability.

There’s a delightful horror to that countdown motif, a result of the effects combined with the unnerving music combined with the mystery of what happens when the time runs out. (It’s the same principle as the 108-minute timer from the hatch in Lost, which left an extremely strong imprint on me in 2005.) Auggie only discovers a possible solution after meeting a creepy young woman in an alley who opens with religious platitudes (“the Lord has a better way”) and pivots to threats. She tells her that the countdown will stop if she shuts down her lab. She’ll even prove her power: Just look at the sky tomorrow at midnight and Auggie will see the universe wink at her.

So Auggie enlists Saul to join her the next night, and sure enough, it happens: The entire night sky blinks, with the stars turning up and down in brightness as if controlled by a simple dial. Using the old cereal-box decoder Auggie received from the woman, Saul manages to read the flashes and decipher the message in Morse code. Eerily, the same countdown Auggie experiences 24/7 is playing out in front of her on a cosmic scale for all to see. “That, Clarence, is our enemy,” muses Wade.

Indeed, if it wasn’t clear before: This is an alien show. And there’s a matching reveal in the flashback story line when, at the recommendation of chief engineer Yang Weining, Wenjie gets briefed on the true nature of the Red Coast Project. It’s not a weapons program; it’s for communication with “whomever is out there.”

The stakes still aren’t totally defined by the end of this pilot: We’re starting to get to know these people and what they’re dealing with, but the whole web of mysteries is so amorphous and free-floating at this stage that the show hasn’t quite achieved a sense of real momentum yet. But there’s more than enough to enjoy here if you can swallow the physics babble and just roll with the trippy sci-fi horror grounded by an unusual historical angle. If this show ends up prioritizing existential thrills over visceral action, that’s fine by me.

• I should probably mention that this adaptation was created by Alexander Woo (The Terror: Infamy) and Game of Thrones’ David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who have some experience adapting a difficult-to-adapt series. I’ve read the first book in Liu’s trilogy (but not the other two), and so far I’m pretty impressed with how they’ve handled it — both in terms of visualization and in terms of inventing new people to mitigate the book’s lack of focus on characterization (a choice that works fine for me in that form, but would be harder to swallow in an ongoing TV show). I still wish more of this were set in China with Chinese characters, though.

• Shout-out to Jeanne Yuan, who kills it as the military representative who plays good cop with Wenjie before immediately flipping to cold and cruel when it’s clear she won’t get what she wants. I felt that splash of cold water in that already frigid cell.

• Vera asked Saul if he believed in God before she jumped to her death, and the woman threatening Auggie also mentions the Lord. So that’s something to keep in mind.

• The love triangle with Jin’s boyfriend, Raj (Saamer Usmani), feels a little by the numbers so far, so hopefully something will liven that up.

• Ditto the weird sexual tension with Auggie and Saul, who seem to have a history.

• Clarence makes note of one of the funeral attendees: Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce, a.k.a. Game of Thrones’ High Sparrow), who took over his father’s oil company and is rarely seen in public.