The Problem With Netflix’s ‘Three Body Problem’

From the outset, Netflix’s Three Body Problem has had a troubled production. On paper, an adaptation of the award-winning Chinese science fiction novel series about the possible end of science and rationality was an excellent idea. In practice, the seemingly genius move of putting the Games of Thrones’s showrunners in charge backfired after the negative reception to that adaptation’s final season. A New Yorker interview with Liu Cixin revealed that despite Three Body Problem’s content about the Cultural Revolution, he supports the present day Communist Party of China. And of course, inevitably, the Netflix version had to whitewash the casting since otherwise nearly every actor would have needed to be Chinese.

But none of these are especially good reasons to attack the Netflix version of Three Body Problem, and the actual show is much weirder than these culture war factoids would suggest. Netflix has taken an introspective story about the depression and nihilism inherent in collective scientific possibility and somehow turned it into a romantic narrative about the individualist triumph of those people smart enough to drive scientific progress.

By “romantic,” I mean in the romanticist historic tradition of valuing emotional expression over observable reality, not love stories. Not coincidentally, though, the Netflix version of Three Body Problem does add multiple romantic love stories. The New Zealand born scientific entrepreneur Auggie has a situationship with Saul, a relatively low-level researcher she knows from their Oxford days. In the same friend group, Will has long had a crush on Jin. Despite all these characters being scientists of one sort or another, and coded as smart, their specialties are almost entirely irrelevant to the plot. The series prioritizes them being desirable and sympathetic at the expense of discussing any of the genuinely incomprehensible scientific mysteries that the book revolve around in-depth.

The same tone is at play with the backstory of Ye Wenjie, which marks a huge departure from the spirit of the text even if it’s much closer to the letter of the text than the present-day portions. In the original text, as well as the Asian-produced TenCent version of the story, Ye Wenjie is ambivalent about the political changes of the Cultural Revolution, which are mostly negative but also sometimes positive for her personally. Ye Wenjie’s outlook takes a turn for the worse after reading Silent Spring. The content of Silent Spring intensifies her bleak, cynical outlook about the fate of the human race. Even the friendship she forms through this book, the main bright spot of her life, has an ignominious end. This all sets her on the path to making the pivotal decision that explains all the story’s scientific mysteries.

The Netflix version of Three Body Problem greatly simplifies this story so that Ye Wenjie is little more than the victim of cruel political persecution, whose motivation is mostly righteous indignation rather than philosophically-induced depression. Instead of having complex conversations explaining her outlook, Ye Wenjie relates to people either by glaring at them as they spout obviously absurd Communist propaganda or having sex with them for making comments she finds more agreeable. The result of this is that while Ye Wenjie is a superficially strong character in the Netflix version, as she’s more assertive, she has almost no real agency or responsibility for her actions. By the end of the series, this portrayal has become quite paradoxical. The show frames her actions as reactive against obviously bad Communists, treating them sympathetically despite the disastrous outcomes.

None of this is to necessarily say the Netflix version of Three Body Problem is bad. The narrative is actually remarkably coherent as a fully Westernized version of the story, both in general style as well as overall outlook. Our heroes are implausibly rich, attractive, geniuses whose high intelligence, be it emotional, social, or rational, basically gives them superpowers. The world they live in is fundamentally a just one, with ethics defined largely by their own feelings, and not warranting deep analysis. The series even defines Benedict Wong’s detective  mostly by his own strained relationship with his son, and presents him nonplussed by the apparent end of the world.

The main villains of the Netflix version of Three Body Problem aren’t even the malevolent forces causing all the impossible phenomena. It’s just normal, stupid people who refuse to have faith in science to save the day. I cannot emphasize enough just how intensely this defies the spirit of the original story, which is principally about how actual scientists, serious, intelligent people, are drawn into a cult so complex it has multiple ideological schisms because the apparent end of science has given them a crisis of faith. The closest the Netflix version of Three Body Problem gets to this idea is the death of a little girl in a video game. None of the perspective characters in the Netflix version of Three Body Problem really believe in much of anything except the importance of their own personal attachments.

It’s hard to tell whether the showrunners are denying the story’s sense of mortality, or defying it, or just not noticing it in the first place. They may well have erased it entirely by accident because of the prevalent idea in Western culture that good television needs to be about characters, not ideas. And they weren’t wrong to believe in this either. Despite the existence of the TenCent version of Three Body Problem, plenty of English headlines have described the original story as unfilmable. Others actually complain that the Netflix version has too much science. In a lot of ways, the Netflix version of Three Body Problem is probably the only version of this story anyone can make in English, because we consider these genre conventions so innate to our understanding of art at this point that the world would see anyone who tried to make this show any other way wouldas a crank.

There’s a certain irony to this approach being taken to a story that is quite literally about scientists being forced to consider the possibility that everything we think we know about the universe may be an illusion based on matters beyond our control and comprehension. And to be fair, at six hours, the Netflix version of Three Body Problem is certainly a more manageable time commitment than the 22 required for the TenCent version of the series. For the person who really wants to delve into the show’s philosophy, both the original text as well as the logic of the adaptations, there’s a six-hour edit of the TenCent version to allow for even more direct comparisons. But if most of what I discussed here just went way above your head and you mainly want to know if you can like the Netflix version of Three Body Problem the same way you might like your favorite flavor of Star Trek then the answer is more or less. Yeah. Probably.