Netflix Gave Game of Thrones ’ Creators a Second Shot. They Used It to Ruin Another Beloved Book Series.

What do you do when science just … breaks? The five physicists at the center of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem have devoted themselves to unraveling the mysteries of the universe—well, except for the one who ditched physics to become a potato-chip mogul—but all of a sudden, the universe doesn’t seem too keen on being unraveled. Particle accelerators worldwide have suddenly started spitting out results that don’t jibe with the preceding millennia of scientific inquiry, so either everything they thought they knew is wrong, or else the laws that govern the fabric of existence have been suddenly and radically amended.

The question of what rushes in to fill the space when a previously stable worldview collapses is at the heart of the new series, which was adapted by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo from Liu Cixin’s Chinese novel The Three-Body Problem. In the first scene, set in 1966, a Beijing physicist is beaten to death by eager young Maoists for his counterrevolutionary belief in the Big Bang—a theory considered unacceptable because to posit an emptiness that precedes the existence of the universe leaves open a void that could be filled by God. In the present day, scientists start killing themselves, unable to face a world in which their prized knowledge no longer makes any sense.

Filling a void is also the problem facing Benioff and Weiss, as they launch their first new show since the end of Game of Thrones. The intervening years contained several false starts, including an ill-conceived alternate-history series in which the South won the Civil War and a canceled trilogy of Star Wars movies, which, combined with the backlash to the Thrones finale, would be enough to give any showrunning duo a case of performance anxiety. 3 Body Problem isn’t a timid adaptation; in a sense, it’s downright transformative, jettisoning most of the novel’s characters and plucking scenes from all three books in Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. But that radical reshaping is all in the name of making the trilogy’s expansive and philosophical story into something much more pedestrian and digestible. It’s the equivalent of a cheap house flip, gutting a beautiful midcentury structure and redoing every room in shades of millennial gray.

Game of Thrones started out as a superlative translation of George R.R. Martin’s books, so faithful that readers lay in wait for the show to reach the infamous Red Wedding so they could film their unsuspecting friends’ reaction to the carnage. But Thrones went off the rails once Benioff and Weiss no longer had books to adapt. Once their task shifted from condensing to creation, the misjudgments started to spiral, and although you could still see the bones of a solid story underneath, they botched the execution so badly that even Martin seemed to lose faith in his own ending. (Thank goodness Liu finished writing his series first.)

With 3 Body Problem, Benioff and Weiss—along with Woo, who served as showrunner on the Japanese internment camp season of AMC’s anthology series The Terror—go off-book from the beginning. The novel’s largely Chinese cast and setting is transposed to Oxford, England, where former classmates gather for the funeral of a friend who has just leaped to her death from the observation platform of a particle accelerator. There’s Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), a brilliant particle physicist, Auggie Salazar (Eiza González), who’s on the cusp of a breakthrough in developing nanofibers as unbreakably strong as they are invisibly thin, and their less-accomplished peers Saul (Jovan Adepo) and Will (Alex Sharp), as well as the aforementioned snack billionaire, Jack (John Bradley). Revamping the cast of characters was an inevitability for an American adaptation produced by a global tech giant (and besides, there’s already a Chinese TV version, apparently faithful to the books, called Three-Body). But it’s hard to think of a less imaginative replacement than a group of uniformly attractive university pals in their late 20s and early 30s, especially once the series starts ginning up YA-level drama over which of them might sleep with whom. It’s as if, at every point when a decision had to be made, the showrunners chose the least interesting one.

The novels’ big ideas, about the relationship between faith and science, individualism and collectivity, are present in 3 Body Problem the way Martin’s plot was in the late seasons of Game of Thrones—as the outline of something that never quite materializes. You get the sense the writers aren’t so much engaged by those ideas so much as they know they need them to season the plot. There’s a hint of something interesting in the way the series draws its cast from across the Asian diaspora—Hong speaks with a New Zealand lilt; Benedict Wong, as a detective investigating the scientists’ deaths, with a Mancunian drawl; and Rosalind Chao, as the present-day expatriate physicist Ye Wenjie, speaks the soft-accented English of someone who hasn’t seen her homeland in decades—especially as later episodes address the issue of a much larger and lengthier migration. It turns out that while there’s nothing wrong with the laws of physics, the scientific disruptions are the herald of a planned incursion by the San-Ti, an alien race from some four light-years hence who have left their unstable planet with a plan to resettle on Earth. But where Liu’s books repeatedly deepen and complicate our understanding of the aliens’ motives—and even whether, if they do plan to annihilate humanity to make room for themselves, that would be such a bad thing—the series is unequivocal in its depiction of them as an invasive threat, which makes the analogy to real-life migrants incoherent at best. Good thing the show seems to forget about it as soon as it’s established.

3 Body Problem acts as if it’s asking the big questions, but the ones it poses are much smaller. Questions like: Would a scientist, driven mad by messages sent to them by an alien race, actually possess enough blood to cover several walls with cryptic writing, and would they continue to write legibly even after they’ve gouged out their own eyes? More importantly, how did the seemingly winning combination of the creators of the most successful TV show of the past 15 years, coupled with a provocative and dense series of novels, produce a series this dull and forgettable? Perhaps the aliens can tell us.