‘3 Body Problem’ Episode 3 Recap: “Destroyer Of Worlds”

In retrospect, and based on horror movie rules, it does seem natural for John Bradley’s Jack Rooney to be the first of the chickens, the Oxford Five, to buy it. A loyal friend, but also an inveterate loudmouth and the guy where the conventional wisdom from the group is like “we tolerate him.” It’s also interesting that it was the creator of Cheddar Swirlies who was murdered in his own home by the mystery woman. While he certainly applied his university physics smarts to the million dollar growth of Jack’s Snacks, Rooney was the only one of the group to not be actively working in science. Which is more than you can say for the deaths of the 32 scientists on Da Shi’s list. In 3 Body Problem Episode 3, the stakes are further defined for our friends, who are now down to being the Oxford Four.

“What the fuck is wrong with you? We don’t have this technology. Where did this come from?” When Auggie discovered that Jin and Jack had been engaging with the video game that contributed to their mentor Vera Ye’s suicide, she was pretty pissed. For this bunch, rational thinkers all, what’s most daunting – and therefore the most provable, via Occam’s razor – is the technological gap between what they thought they understood about our world and its physical laws and what they’ve seen with their own eyes. (Or in Auggie’s case, imprinted on her line of sight in real time. When she briefly switches her nanotechnology equipment back on, the countdown immediately fires back up.) Even Skeptical Saul has warmed to the concept of manipulation, an unseen hand with the ability to warp our view of the heavens, scrub live images from surveillance cameras, torture brilliant thinkers with devil numbers, and insert gold gaming helmets into peoples’ lives. So they’re on the same page with all of that. But Jin and Jack were never gonna stop playing the game just because Auggie asked them to. 

Welcome to Level Three. As Copernicus and Francis Bacon, Jin and Jack take on Sir Isaac Newton (Mark Gattis) and Professor Alan Turing (Reece Shearsmith) in an in-game civilization that resembles Kublai Khan’s Xanadu. (It’s funny when 3 Body inserts these competing scientific personalities into the gameplay – are there different versions of this series playing out in alternate dimensions, with alternate protagonists and actors?) Turing and Newton are pretty proud of their human abacus, a 30 million-soldier strong biological computer system that’s supposed to predict stable and chaotic eras, complete with horsemen to act as the computer system’s fast data movers. The whole thing is a very impressive rendering of another scene in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem that felt like it outmatched a small screen’s scale. But when Jin uses the old left hand on the ground trick to advance time, she reveals their fate: syzygy. The straight-line configuration of three suns makes gravity go wonky and transforms the Khan’s army into a doomed Hieronymus Bosch painting.

The true challenge of the game is not to design scientific flourishes that will preserve the planet. As the swordswoman confirms to Jin and Jack in the game, cataclysm is inevitable. Instead, it’s about the people. And while that realization unlocks Level Four, it also leads directly to Jack’s demise. When the mystery woman beckons the players to a meeting spot in Shoreditch, she makes hay about Jin’s remarkable cingulate cortex activity before revealing why solving for P (= people) is so imperative: the San Ti are desperate for a new home, and Ye Winjie’s message (Episode 2: “Red Coast”) has sent them Earth’s way. San Ti, after the Chinese, San Ti ren, or “Three body people.” They were named by Winjie, after all. The mysterious gold helmets, the crazy advanced tech, the coerced deaths of scientists the world over, the in-game challenges: all of it is part of the preparation for the San Ti’s arrival on Earth. Their spaceships are four light years away and steaming hard.

“Come on. This is fucking mental. She’s talking about aliens.” While Jin is inclined to believe the mystery woman – again, Occam’s razor – Rooney bugs out and goes home, which is where she’s waiting for him in the dark. Da Shi is even staking out Jack’s flat, but his look in on the glass house reveals nothing. Inside, she grabs Jack’s neck and shatters the glass. “All you had to do was keep playing.” And he gets a knife in the neck from the aliens’ mysterious enabler on Earth. Cue “Karma Police” by Radiohead. “This is what you get when you mess with us…” 

Throughout 3 Body Problem, we’ve also caught glimpses of the gold helmet gameplay being watched, another example of the all-knowing, all-seeing technology that got extremely smart people like Auggie, Saul, Will, Jin and Jack (RIP) scratching their heads and watching their backs. As it turns out, that watcher works for Mike Evans. The reclusive energy tycoon’s office space is spare. But it does feature one pretty significant amenity, an analog two-way radio setup that allows live communication with a San Ti representative. “You contacted another planet,” the voice from the box says. “Is this the act of a timid species?” We get the sense that Evans has been reading his fairy tales and nursery rhymes into this void for some time, educating the voice; he and his followers refer to it as their “Lord.” Evans says it wasn’t an entire species who was brave, just one fearless woman in China, so many years ago. And if humanity must learn to fear again, “then we will teach them.”    

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.