THREE BODY – the first six episodes – (limited spoilers) ⁓

In 1979 a radio telescope in Northeastern China receives a message. Officially, it it decided to send no response, but young astrophysicist Ye Wenjie (Chen Jin) transmits an unauthorized answer extending both an invitation and an offer of help. “My civilization is unable to solve its own problems,” she said to whoever was on the other end of the signal. “We need your strength.”

Twenty-eight years later, another physicist, Yang Dong (He Dujuan), dies from an overdose of sleeping pills. The inquiry into her death is quickly taken over by suspended police detective Shi Qiang (Yu Hewei), who has been reactivated by the military and is now working with them. On 5th June 2007, Detective Shi visits Yang’s colleague Wang Miao (Zhang Luyi), and asks him to help with the investigation.

On the surface, Detective Shi is charming, crude, and self-centered, but there is more to him than meets the eye. When Wang Miao first visits the commandeered Natural History Museum where the investigation is headquartered, this conversation happens in the shadow of a dinosaur skeleton.

SHI: “This museum is enlightening. It tells us that all people will eventually die. After they die, they will become skeletons like these.” [gestures at dinosaur remains]
WANG: “I don’t agree. We’ll be cremated after we die, and that is a fossil.”
SHI: “Right. Do you think there will be sarira after scientists are cremated?”

Yang Dong was Ye Wenjie’s oldest daughter, and was born in 1979. She liked to listen to Bach. “I can see in the music a giant is building a large, complex house,” Yang told her mother. “Bit by bit he is building it slowly. When the music is over, the house is done.” (A recent article by Elise Cutts in Scientific American makes similar observations about Bach.) Yang’s only suicide note said “Physics has never existed and will never exist.”

The reason the three body problem has no general solution might be that the tools being used to analyze it are inadequate, or it could be because something assumed to be constant really is not. If the scientists who killed themselves found the latter to be true, they might conclude that physics as they know it never existed.

Ten months before Yang Dong’s suicide, she conducted identical experiments at different times, each of which produced different results. And the data from these experiments was inexplicably delivered to a Professor Munphy by Shen Yufei (Li Xiaoran) before the experiments were complete.

When Detective Shi first visits Wang Miao, the physicist is watching television. The TV presenter introduces a biologist named Pan Han, and asks him about the recent suicides of prominent scientists.

TV HOST: “You correctly predicted the ecological disaster caused by genetically modified crops. What do you think of the recent suicides by scientists?”
PAN: “The over-development of science and technology is a disease of human society. The explosive development of technology is like the rapid development of cancer cells.”

In Liu Cixin’s novel (on which the show is based) Ye’s 1979 plea to the stars is partly motivated by something Rachel Carson said in Silent Spring about an outside force being required to effect social change. The main focus of Carson’s book was the widespread use of carcinogenic pesticides. Carson was a marine biologist, and the biologist’s statement on TV might be an indirect reference to Silent Spring. Later, in another such reference, Ye Wenjie tells Wang that she soaks vegetables for at least two hours before cooking because so many pesticides are currently in use.

Using reverse psychology, Shi gets Wang to help investigate a group called Frontiers of Science, with which all of the recently deceased scientists have had contact. That group’s stated purpose is to investigate the limits of science and to determine what, if anything, is beyond the ken of humans.

When Wang attends one of the group’s meetings, he is confronted with two hypothetical constructs: The Shooter, and The Turkey Farmer. Both postulate conditions that render the true nature of the universe unknowable.

At Yang’s funeral, Wang notices numbers on a photo he planned to give to Ye Wenjie. It turns out that all his photos are decorated with similar numbers, and he discovers they are a countdown that will end in approximately 1,187 hours (a little over 49 days). Shortly after he reaches this conclusion, his eyes become overly sensitive to bright light, and a digital countdown is superimposed on his field of vision. (He is driving when this first happens, and it makes him put his car into an impressive power slide.)

Wang tells no one about the countdown but decides that cooperating with Shi is unavoidable. At the detective’s suggestion he contacts Shen Yufei, whom he met at the Frontiers of Science meeting. He tells her about the countdown, and she says it will stop if he shuts down his project, which is the construction of a “flying blade”, a single strand of carbon, one atom wide. He does that, and the countdown disappears.

Believing he has been tricked, Wang calls Shen and says he plans to restart the project. She tells him to watch the cosmic microwave background in the wee hours of 14 June. When he does this, he sees the background radiation flicker in a pattern that, when decoded, is the countdown again. Others around the world also observe this effect.

A cooperative global military effort seems to be happening, with the world divided into combat zones though no one in the world is at war. When General Chang Weisi (Lin Yongjian) is asked what’s going on, the General offers only this: “Humankind has been fortunate. From the stone age until now, no real crisis has occurred. We have been very lucky, but if it’s all luck, then it has to end one day. Let me tell you, it’s ended. Prepare for the worst.”

** — The Chinese version of the actors’ names are used here. For instance, Chen Jin instead of the Westernized Jin Chen; Yu Hewei instead of Hewei Yu.

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All 30 episodes of THREE BODY can be streamed on TUBI, on Plex, and on Amazon Prime Video. — THREE BODY’s soundtrack, composed and performed by Xueran Chen, is available on 2 vinyl LPs, and from Apple Music and Amazon Music.

* Last Updated 2 days ago ago