Share and Follow
“In nature, nothing exists alone.” If the way Chinese physicist Ye Wenjie and Mike Evans the hot rich hermit shared that line in 3 Body Problem Episode 2 (“Red Coast”) felt to you like it had more than one meaning, your payoff arrives in 1982. Mao is dead, the Cultural Revolution is over, and Ye Wenjie is now an astrophysics professor at Tsinghua University, where her late father taught. While in London for a conference, she contacts Evans, and their fingers linger near each other over the restaurant’s linen. She tells him what she did. The message she sent. Who she contacted. And the next time we see them, they’re kissing passionately in the transmission center Evans built on Judgement Day, the Panamax oil tanker he converted into a gigantic floating base. Evans has plopped his own humongous satellite dish onto the ship’s superstructure. He’s filled the ship with true believers. And he’s maintained the extra terrestrial hotline that Ye first established at Red Coast.
So, Ye Wenjie wasn’t a passive observer in her daughter Vera’s involvement with the three-body game and its gleaming gold helmet delivery system. She knew exactly what it was when she gave the unit to Jin, after Vera’s suicide. But Jin doesn’t know that yet as she mourns Jack Rooney with Auggie. At a meeting with Da Shi and Thomas Wade in Wade’s Dave Allen at Large-like office chamber, the black bag types show them the security footage from inside Jack’s pad, where he is murdered by an invisible hand. “They” killed Rooney when he wouldn’t play the game, and “they” forced Auggie to pull the plug on her nanofiber technology. But via the mystery woman, “they” have also extended an invite to Jin to work with them. “You can help us catch the cunts who murdered him,” Wade says. In other words, she can be their eyes and ears on the inside, even though they already have eyes and ears everywhere as a strategic intelligence organization. Jin agrees to be monitored as she follows the lats and longs on the invitation she received, the one printed with a three-body logo. She’s a scientist, not a spy or a fighter of aliens. But as Auggie says, “the people who work for ‘them’ aren’t aliens.”
In 2024, the floating headquarters of Mike Evans’s operation is a self-sufficient colony complete with families and children. Indoctrination to their “Lord” is total – this is the kind of generations-deep op where somebody like the mystery woman would be homeschooled (shipschooled?) since birth. Evans locks himself in his office and fires up the alien speakerbox, and through his reading of Little Red Riding Hood comes to learn that the San Ti don’t really get the whole concept of metaphor. The voice wants to know why the Big Bad Wolf was lying. (“Is he still in the grandmother’s house? We would like to speak to him.”) The voice wants to know what lying even is. As a species which seems to communicate directly by thought, the San Ti don’t have the capacity for obfuscation, and won’t tolerate it in those they work with. You know, like Mike Evans. “A liar,” the voice says, “cannot be trusted. We cannot coexist with liars.”
When Jin arrives at the coordinates she was given, it’s just an empty warehouse sitting in the dark. But slide open a crash door and the gathering inside looks like a members-only schmooze event at a tech conference. As video screens shimmer around them, Jin hears the “Our Lord” business from the mystery woman, aka Tatiana (Marlo Kelly). “It makes us sound like religious loons,” Tatiana says. “Except our lord is real.” Their gods are an alien race who have developed a human-run, Earth-based support system powered by impossible future tech and Mike Evans’s money. And they’re assuming it’ll be their ancestors who get the first tours of the ship. But this current event isn’t about Evans. When Da Shi and Wade overhear that the organization’s founder is in the room, they’re confused, because surveillance proves he’s still on Judgement Day. But the founder’s big reveal is alarming to all of them. “Welcome,” Ye Wenjie says to Jin as the converted scream and clap and cheer, either like the company faithful at a corporate party or members of a cult. “I knew you’d come.”
The disillusionment of Ye’s Cultural Revolution experience has come to this. “We cannot save ourselves,” she preaches to her followers, echoing her original text to the aliens. “But we are not alone. Ye, Evans, and their group believe that the San Ti will share even more knowledge with humanity than they already have, and help people “survive and thrive.” (Even the language being used here sounds like a tech conference event.) The spaceships will take 400 years to arrive, so it’s a multi-generational, children of our children kind of thing to help them out. But these people are committed.
Wade seems to know that they know he and his group knows. It’s like the voice told Evans on the boat – “We will protect you.” But the intelligence chief still sends in a tactical team to apprehend Ye Wenjie and her followers. Jin is slightly injured in the melee, and Da Shi shoots Tatiana in the foot, though she is seen crawling away from capture. And while Jin shares with Will what she’s learned about the connection between Jack’s murder, Ye Wenjie, Mike Evans, and all of the strange things that’ve been happening, Ye appears before a shadowy international panel of officials. Sure, she’s in custody. But why does Wade think that is? She speaks calmly, with a cold gleam in her eye. “You’ve got me because they let you. They’re coming. And when they arrive, you’ll be so grateful.”
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.
