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This month marks the 25th anniversary of The Matrix, and whatever else the film is – do not consult Twitter about this; discourse is broken – Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski’s 1999 film marked the first time humanity learned that we’re actually just batteries. The revelation that the machines won and shunted all of us into a holding pen simulation remains one of the hugest science fiction things ever. So maybe it’s even more huge that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, as writers of episode five of 3 Body Problem, pull off a civilization-level reveal like that here on the small screen. In Liu Cixin’s original novel, the San-Ti grand plan felt almost abstract in its magnitude. Like in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, when Ender finally learns that the battles he thought were simulations actually caused destruction on a planetary scale. To see it realized on screen is not only a wild sci-fi thrill, but an even more stark indicator of the aliens’ core message. Us, humanity, our civilization, all of our little petty bickerings: we are infinitesima specks of dust. Or as the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-controlling “sophon” sent by Trisolaris puts it as it envelops Earth’s atmosphere and stares down at us with its quantum-powered Eye of Sauron: we’re bugs, not batteries.
This revelation makes it a whammy three times over for the Oxford friends’ nice Will Downing. First his pancreatic cancer is diagnosed as terminal. Next he inherits 20 million pounds because his best friend Jack was murdered by an alien sympathizer (3 Body Problem Episode 3, “Destroyer of Worlds”). Now, not only can he not spend it because he’s said to have only a few months left to live, he can’t even just get super zooted and stare blissfully at the blue sky because a space brain so all-encompassing it is impossible to comprehend blotted that shit out. Alien jerks! It’s not like 3 Bod P didn’t tell us this was coming. Way back in Episode 1 (“Countdown”), the Cultural Revolution-frenzied crowd that persecuted Ye Wenjie’s physics professor father Ye Zhetai shouted “Root out the bugs!” Wenjie sent her message to space because she believed we could not save ourselves, that our societies would destroy themselves in the name of progress. But as she stares at the “You’re bugs” statement as it appears on every single screen in the entire world, Ye seems to finally understand that the aliens she invited are persecuting humanity in the name of their own progress.
Mike Evans certainly fucked around and found out. Before “Judgement Day” even gets to its grand world-scale reveal, 3 Body Problem renders another pivotal sequence from Liu’s novel with a terrifying amplification of the gore factor. They’re out here slicing up steel and bodies. After Da Shi convinces a reluctant Auggie, and after Thomas Wade taps Jin’s Royal Navy commander boyfriend Prithviraj Varma (Saamer Usmani) to run the op, their shadowy intelligence agency targets Judgement Day the boat with a nanofiber clothesline stretched across the Panama Canal. Auggie’s revolutionary tech can eviscerate a diamond like it was made of cotton candy, so the hull of a converted oil freighter is no less malleable. Sure, there is an entire colony aboard, not just Evans and his hot mic to the aliens. Families, children. But by Wade’s metric, they’re all sleeping with the space enemy. Sellouts to human civilization. And besides, it was the San-Ti who sold out Evans and his people first. In their omniscience, they knew the nanofiber operation would transform the inhabitants of Judgement Day into soft tissue fodder for a giant-scale mandoline slicer. And they did nothing to stop it.
Wade’s invitation to the game is on the hard drive he literally pries from a dismembered Evans’s cold dead hands, and with Jin along as an expert on dimensional theory – she says it’s almost all theory and beyond comprehension, since our brains evolved in three dimensions, not ten – they enter an in-game landscape defined by the ruins of an urban civilization. This is where the swordswoman and representative AI (Sea Shimooka) is on hand with an explainer from the San-Ti. “We used all our resources to make four sophons,” she says. “Two pairs of two. Each pair is entangled, connected on the quantum level. Two remain with us, the other two we’ve sent to you. Everything they see and hear, we see and hear at the same time. Even when they are light-years apart.” When scientists started dying, that was the sophons targeting them and their work. The San-Ti wish to kill our science, to impede our progress, so that by the time 400 years rolls by and their interstellar fleet arrives in planetary takeover mode, humanity will not have the means to retaliate. Instead of our inexorable rate of progress up to this point, instead of taking the next steps on a 10,000-year journey from cracking the code of agriculture to making nanofibers in the information age, we’ll be manacled. “The universe will remain a mystery to you forever. In place of truth, we give you miracles. We wrap your world in illusions.”
It’s a satisfying feeling to be confounded by science-fiction television. The visuals of 3 Body Problem explore a different aesthetic than the rapturous grandeur of Foundation. But thematically, both series work so effectively at a Big Questions level, and that’s a nice reward for us as bug-brained tube viewers. Constellation on Apple TV+ has Noomi Rapace and Jonathan Banks chasing around alternate dimension versions of themselves in a twisty season-long plot that causes as many headaches as it does gratifying viewing experiences. This is all really good for us, and with the awe-inspiring scale it has established, 3 Body Problem is taking the kind of big swings that not only pay off the mysteries it’s been teasing, but inspire us to consider our society, our very existence, at the granular level. To make impactful speculative fiction, sometimes you gotta slice some people in half.
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.
