As we all know, crime drama is a broad church. Mixing my metaphors a bit here, but crime TV drama is also a robust vehicle that ably assists and carries different sorts of stories, genres and ideas. On the surface, Netflix’s vaunted 3 Body Problem is a straight-up, sprawling science fiction tale that jumps between past decades and the present, and different dimensions and realities.
But it’s not just an interesting science fiction story – on equal footing are elements of thriller and police procedural. But to say any of these elements take centre stage is a futile exercise in trying to categorise this eight-part series because it’s stuffed full of different genres and ideas.
First, it’s worth noting that 3 Body Problem is based on a much-loved and critically acclaimed trilogy of novels by Chinese novelist, Liu Cixin, and has been adapted for the small screen by Game Of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (as well as Alexander Wong).
They said it was a novel that couldn’t be adapted, but many said that about the Game Of Thrones books. It seems messrs Benioff and Weiss like a challenge.
Like millions of others I greatly enjoyed Game Of Thrones (GOT), so I wanted to give this a go. I was pleasantly surprised – both from a crime content point of view and with the overall story.
It begins in China during the Cultural Revolution, where a young Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) witnesses the public execution of her astrophysicist father (a bit like Ned Stark’s beheading in GOT). From there, because she is also brilliant she is taken to work (against her will) at a hi-tech communication station. During her decades of service there, she makes one single decision that affects everything in the future: while on a nightshift, she receives a message from an alien race, who asks her whether they should come to Earth or not. After much deliberation, and using her own disgust of the human race and the harsh treatment she and her family have received to inform her decision, she invited this race to come forth and ‘save’ the planet and everything that lived here.
Fast-forward to the present day, and we meet a group of five friends from the same graduating class at Oxford. They’re all super-bright and super-successful – Auggie Salazar (Eiza González), John Bradley (Jack Rooney), Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), Will Downing (Alex Sharp) and Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo) – but are rocked when a series of high-profile scientists and contemporaries begin to get bumped off.
And here it is… the crime element: a for-hire detective Da Shi (Benedict Wong), a modern-age Philip Marlowe with his smart mouth and his cynicism, is on the case. But this is like no case he’s worked on before. Each of the deceased has been playing with a remarkably sophisticated virtual-reality headset that transports them into a game, which presents them with tough ethical and scientific challenges all set in alien-looking landscapes and different eras of human history.
Jin and John get hold of a headset each and begin to play and excel in the game. Their reward? They get to find out about an alien race called the San-Ti – the same alien race Ye Wenjie made contact with half a century ago. And that alien race is in trouble (because of a three-body problem… go google it) and is on its way to Earth because their survival depends on it.
These days an elderly Ye Wenjie leads a cult of people who are eagerly awaiting the San-Ti ‘s arrival. But as much as they stay in contact with them on the down-low, there’s a problem: the San-Ti will take a further 400 years as we know it to get to Earth. Towards the end of that time, they expect the human race’s technology to have caught up with their own, and be able to resist any invasion, infiltration or cohabitation. They also expect the human race’s reaction to their offer of cohabitation to be less than welcoming, so they set about making sure they put the kybosh on any human scientific development in the here and now, with help from Ye Wenjie’s cult and, in particular, a spectral hitwoman called Tatiana (Marlo Kelly).
As the humans cotton on to the fact that the groundwork for an invasion is underway, important people begin to fight back, too, concocting various plans with their limited technology in the present day. And this is one of the moral questions this story poses: should the human race enter into a war that won’t be fought 400 years down the line?
Naturally, our five graduates are all involved heavily (and rather conveniently, it has to be said) and each has a huge say in the strategy to keep the San-Ti at bay, some with tragic consequences.
So really, it’s all going on. As I mentioned earlier, there are several different genres at play here. And lots of different threads and elements and tonal shades. It’s like Peter’s Friends meets V meets a police procedural.
But for all its technical skill at producing a compelling, original, interesting story about the future of the world from a large number of disparate threads, something felt missing here. And I’m not sure what because they really tried to imbue it with as heart and humanity as sci-fi stuff, and all of the characters were pleasingly flawed and ambiguous.
As a genre, sci-fi is well known for producing hugely allegorical work. Important allegorical work that asks questions about our past, present and future. Here I couldn’t quite put my finger on what they were trying to say – or achieve – and this is perhaps what was missing. For me at least.
With all that being said, 3 Body Problem is not really a crime show (but certainly had elements of crime drama) but is worth a watch if you’re after something a little bit different, interesting, and occasionally challenging.
Paul Hirons
3 Body Problem is shown in the UK on Netflix
The Killing Times 
Not knowing much about the original novels, I was pleased to see that a Netflix adaptation of The Three Body Problem was on the way. I gather, though, that it departs massively from the original books, and maybe not for the better (there was a Chinese TV version, Three Body, which may be available online, perhaps worth searching out).
I think my main problem with the Netflix version is that all the main characters are such dicks – you want them to get on with fighting the aliens, but they’re all more worried about unrequited love and whether their careers are in the dumper.
Overall it’s much too slow and self-involved. Great science ficiton writing is often hard to adapt for the screen, as it’s very cerebral and unconcerned with character – but this Netflix series manages to be both slow and uninvolving.
It does have flashes of brilliance though, and raises several intriguing questions – like, is Tatiana human? If the Sophons are so powerful, why don’t they just detonate a few nukes and finish off the human race? And why does everybody smoke so much?
There are a few nods to science fiction fandom – the programme The Stars Our Destination may be a reference to Alfred Bester’s novel The Stars My Destination, Clarence’s colleague reads a copy of Samuel Delany’s post-apocalyptic novel Dhalgren, and so on – so the writers clearly know their audience.
But where’s it all going to go? If the remaining two books in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series are adapted faithfully, it will have to be enormously wide-ranging in time and space. I suspect what we’ll actually be offered is more of the same, with the Oxford group continuing to struggle against an Earth-based threat.
3 Body Problem could have been astounding, but it’s been turned into a sort of mish-mash of ideas from The X-Files, The Matrix and The Invaders. I don’t think we’re going to see a realy excellent TV adaptation of a science fiction classic until someone has the guts to tackle Iain M Banks’ Culture novels.
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..and of course, speaking of the detective aspects of 3 Body Problem, it’s notable that lawyer Xu Yao, who was involved in selling the rights to Netflix, has been convicted of murdering his employer Lin Qi, whose company Yoozoo Games owns the rights for film adaptations. They fell out over money and Xu Yao poisoned him and four more of his colleagues. Zhēnshi gè húndàn, as they say.
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