Just finished it. I give it a 7/10. Good enough I want to see more and would recommend to people, but not sure how much I will remember of it in a year. Will probably check the books out.

Lowered expectations for this after seeing how they've changed the Wallfacers, removed key characters - and specifically replaced what was probably the best character in the books, Luo Ji.

Overall I enjoyed it. The first 2-3 episodes where we didn't know what was going on were excellent, the latter episodes felt rushed. I would have liked a 12-13 episode season, with 1 episode doing a flashback of Jonathan Pryce's character. I mean you have Jonathan Pryce in your show, use him. I felt like we could have used some more time with you know who before the big bad wolf story. The project planning felt rushed, maybe bc the last space show I watched was For All Mankind and they love to sit on stuff for awhile and let it develop. Overall i did enjoy it and look forward to more.

Watched the 30 episode subtitled version. It was a bit slow, but mostly true to the story. Not a fan of this new one, stopped watching somewhere in episode two. That's as polite as I can put it.

Overall I liked it, but didn't love it. The way this thing was hyped as the next big show was wrong. It belongs no where in the discussion of a great show.

The visuals were nice at times and bad at others. Specifically the video game parts. The horse floating up was one of the most laughably bad things I've seen in a while.

I hope it gets another season, as it has kept me interesting. It's a fun show, just not the juggernaut of excellence it was hyped to be. The writing is indeed quite bad at times.

The ship scene was nuts!

I'm 3 episodes in and it's really disappointing. Is/are the books better? Does it get better?

The CGI is bad, and the acting is equally or worse bad.

Eta humans bad, must teach them to appreciate the earth. So overdone.

The books are much better.

I watched it but it took me a long time because I kept falling asleep. They better fast forward a couple centuries in the next season otherwise I am out. 400 years gives no sense of urgency.

I love sci-fi.

I love alien invasion stories.

And I'm not the least bit afraid of a narrative delving into heady science.

But I just don't get the appeal of this particular sci-fi alien invasion story, seeing as the inherent tension in a 400-years-from-now threat renders damn near every dramatic facet of a traditional television series moot.

Aside from the obvious lack of a tangible, soon-to-expire ticking clock, in order to keep the cast intact, the story can only put a decade-or-so dent in that 400-year timeline. And in order to reach the end of the 400-year timeline, the show would require a new cast - and leaping decades in time - every season. Unless the main players all use the cryo freeze thing? Otherwise, I have next to no desire to watch a cat-and-mouse cold war between two factions who will never physically meet.

I'm a non-book-reader, I finally finished season one tonight, and needless to say, I was definitely underwhelmed. It just features so much corner-cutting, the cinematography looks like flat, gray, digital, ass, the special effects are terrible, there are a couple huge gaps in logic (outlined below in spoiler tags), the scope feels way too claustrophobic, and related/most importantly, the central, 30-something cast of characters are boring as hell. In that regard, this tweet nailed it...

I think these images from the promotion of 3 Body Problem shows off what put me off loving the series quite as much as I wanted to. I'm completely into the subject matter, I respect the TV series creators from Game of Thrones... but...

I think these images from the promotion… pic.twitter.com/UeNxjycNMF

— Point of Contact (@hollywoodufos) March 28, 2024

Quote:

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I think these images from the promotion of 3 Body Problem shows off what put me off loving the series quite as much as I wanted to. I'm completely into the subject matter, I respect the TV series creators from Game of Thrones... but...

I think these images from the promotion make the point that the show feels at more than a few times like a Friends reboot where all the series regulars just happen to be brilliant scientists who alone can save the planet, particularly the hot lead physicist Auggie Salazar (Eiza Gonzlez, presumably in the Jennifer Aniston role).

Maybe I'm just turning into a cranky old guy, but it just struck me as odd that there don't appear to be any other capable scientists except for these guys who appear to be working it all out from the cozy comfort of Central Perk.

---

As for more spoiler specifics…

It makes zero sense that the filmmakers went out of their way to let us know that the aliens can see everything humanity is doing, yet it's not until Mike Evans (I laughed every single time his name was said) reads Little Red Riding Hood to them that they're like, "Wait, you lie?" Huh? How does a species capable of interstellar travel, who has essentially mastered quantum technology, and can spy on every square inch of Earth from lightyears away, NOT understand the concept of lying, and NOT observe that we lie our asses off?

Also, in episode five, as cool as the Panama Canal scene is, what, exactly was the plan in turning the ship into a heap of scraps? Because, in the process, they could have EASILY destroyed whatever evidence/hard drive they were after, and it was by pure luck/plot contrivance that they even found it. Never mind the fact that they gained no real advantage from the hard drive, seeing as the aliens revealed themselves - and their intentions - at the end of the very same episode.

Also, where were the Panama authorities? Literally no on else saw this happen? Not even on satellite? And there were no legal/criminal consequences whatsoever?

Speaking of, I had NO CLUE what Wade's role was until finally, after episode five, I found it on the official site…

"The world's intelligence agencies aren't too keen on the notion of science being broken, so they enlist Thomas Wade to get to the bottom of it. Wade's the shadowy, charismatic leader of the world's most elite intelligence operation…"

When was ANY of that info conveyed? Did I just completely miss it somehow?

All that said, there were admittedly moments/threads here and there that I liked, I'd maybe give a second season a chance (if only out of morbid curiosity), and I at least appreciate that Netflix/the filmmakers took such a big swing on something so audacious. It wasn't a complete whiff for me, but man did the ball go foul fast.

It's looking like they changed things up to attract non sci-fi fans but are failing. And in the process have alienated (no pun intended) sci-fans especially fans of hard sci-fi.

If you haven't read the books this season was probably discombobulated at best.

The books are great. Took me two attempts but once you power thru the first chapter or two the story really takes off and you don't want to put it down. Very well planned and engaging. All those plot holes and other headscratchers you mentioned are explained in the books and fit the story well.

As I admitted above I couldn't finish the first book when I tried to read it a few years ago. As I recall, part of the problem I had with the book was that I wanted to read some hard core science fiction and all the Chinese Revolution stuff just turned me off. Even the abbreviated showing of it in the show really didn't add enough to the plot to make it necessary in my opinion.
That said, maybe I read enough of the book that I was able to make sense out of some of the stuff that they brushed over in the show. I enjoyed it and look forward to season two! I might try to tackle the book again sometime in the future. but not anytime soon as I am currently enjoying a reread of the Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series.

Wish they had one or two more episodes to fully flesh out some of the problems identified here.

Another body problem (SIAP):

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/world/asia/china-three-body-problem-murder.html

The last bit about seizing intellectual property with our superpower strength is pretty funny given Netflix paid for the rights to the show and China is notorious for piracy.

Quote:

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. . .
Lin Qi was a billionaire with a dream. The video game tycoon had wanted to turn one of China's most famous science-fiction novels, "The Three-Body Problem," into a global hit. He had started working with Netflix and the creators of the HBO series "Game of Thrones" to bring the alien invasion saga to international audiences.

But Mr. Lin did not live to see "3 Body Problem" premiere on Netflix last month, drawing millions of viewers.

He was poisoned to death in Shanghai in 2020, at age 39, by a disgruntled colleague, in a killing that riveted the country's tech and video-gaming circles where he had been a prominent rising star. That colleague, Xu Yao, a 43-year-old former executive in Mr. Lin's company, was last month sentenced to death for murder by a court in Shanghai, which called his actions "extremely despicable."

The court has made few specific details public, but Mr. Lin's killing was, as a Chinese news outlet put it, "as bizarre as a Hollywood blockbuster." Chinese media reports, citing sources in his company and court documents, have described a tale of deadly corporate ambition and rivalry with a macabre edge. Sidelined at work, Mr. Xu reportedly exacted vengeance with meticulous planning, including by testing poisons on small animals in a makeshift lab. (He not only killed Mr. Lin, but also poisoned his own replacement.)

Mr. Lin had spent millions of dollars in 2014 buying up copyrights and licenses connected to the original Chinese science-fiction book, "The Three-Body Problem," and two others in a trilogy written by the Chinese author Liu Cixin.
. . .
Mr. Lin's fate would change when he hired Mr. Xu, a lawyer, in 2017 to head a subsidiary of Yoozoo called The Three-Body Universe that held the rights to Mr. Liu's novels. But not long afterward, Mr. Xu was demoted and his pay was cut, apparently because of poor performance. He became furious, according to the Chinese business magazine Caixin.

As Mr. Xu plotted his revenge, Caixin reported, he built a lab in an outlying district of Shanghai where he experimented with hundreds of poisons he bought off the dark web by testing them on dogs and cats and other pets. Caixin said Mr. Xu was both fascinated and inspired by the American hit TV series "Breaking Bad," about a cancer-stricken chemistry teacher who teaches himself to make and sell methamphetamine, eventually becoming a drug lord.

Between September and December 2020, Mr. Xu began spiking beverages such as coffee, whiskey and drinking water with methylmercury chloride and bringing them into the office, Caixin reported, citing court documents.
. . .
According to a story by The Hollywood Reporter in January, Mr. Benioff said the killing was "certainly disconcerting." "When you work in this business, you're expecting all sorts of issues to arise. Somebody poisoning the boss is not generally one of them," he was quoted as saying.
. . .
Before his untimely death, Mr. Lin was something of a celebrity in the world of young Chinese entrepreneurs. He had built his fortune in the early 2010s, riding a wave of popularity for mobile games. His bid to popularize Mr. Liu's novels was a rare attempt to export Chinese popular culture something that has eluded China as its government yearns to wield the same soft power the United States commands with its movies, music and sports stars.
. . .
While Netflix is not available in China, "3 Body Problem" has still set off a backlash among Chinese viewers who have been able to access the platform by using virtual private networks, or who have seen pirated versions of the show. Users on Chinese social media expressed anger that the Netflix adaptation Westernized aspects of the story, and said the show sought to demonize some of the Chinese characters.

Even the People's Liberation Army's propaganda wing has weighed in on the series. In an editorial published on Saturday on its website, China Military Online, it called the Netflix series an example of American "cultural hegemony."

"It can be clearly seen that after the United States seized this popular intellectual property with its superpower strength, it wanted to transform and remake it," the editorial said. "The purpose was to eliminate as much as possible the reputation of modern China."

---

FtWorthHorn said:

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I guess I'm in the minority, but I have really liked it (one episode to go).

As to the "plot holes" above, the comment that it's explained in the books is correct but unsatisfying. The answer to "couldn't they destroy what they need?" is that that's why you need the nanofibers - even a hard drive cut that finely could be re-assembled. This one could have used a more explicit description in the show (and, IMO, less crashing of the ship when it hit the shore).

But some of them are just...irrelevant? Where are the Panamanian authorities! Who cares? It doesn't affect the story at all. Would the show have been improved by the equivalent of the Star Trek technobabble? "Oh we talked to the government and they're staying away for 48 hours." Great...doesn't really matter. IMO if you're complaining about this it's because you've gone looking for a rationale for disliking it. Doesn't mean the original source of disapproval is wrong, but that's just unimportant in my view.

The best thing they've done, IMO, is mix up the book timelines and characters to bring in the cohesive character element that would, clearly, be missing otherwise. The "Oxford Five" are a combination of main characters from the three books, and were clearly put together in order to introduce you to people you will see (and who will be important) throughout the series, if they get more seasons.

Second, and spoilers here:

In the books, nearly the entire first book is a mystery. You don't know about the San-Ti for most of it, so it's really mostly a detective story. They, smartly in my view, moved that along much faster in the show. They set up the actual conflict (the aliens are coming, how are we going to defend ourselves) much earlier, and that will hopefully make it more cohesive. In the books, it's a big shift from the first book (a detective story) to the second and third, which are grand, philisophical works in addition to the plot. I'll say it also doesn't bother me that the threat is 400 years out. Yes, it's the opposite of 24, but that doesn't mean it's not compelling. It also leaves a lot more room for exploring the effects of a known-but-far-off apocalyptic event. You can't do that with a ticking clock.

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Destroying the ship in the way that they did, in broad daylight, and murdering dozens if not hundreds of people in the process, with ZERO real world consequences, or even the threat of real world consequences, is straight up bad writing. And emblematic of the bad writing throughout show, where so much is left unexplained, unexplored, not dealt with, or just straight up confusing. I point it out only because it's an obvious/easy example to highlight, to explain why so much of the rest of the show doesn't work either. Good writing would have better-embraced the challenges of pulling off a boat "heist" of that nature, just like good writing would have better-embraced so many other issues the story presents, but instead skirts right past for the sake of brevity/squeezing as much story as they can into an arbitrary eight episodes.

All I know is that something is very wrong with your show when I'm left more confused by narrative decision after narrative decision than I am by the science/physics being explained by your dull, boring characters.

I wanted to love this series but felt it was mediocre due to all the reasons you'll more eloquently explained. I'd rather have another season of Warrior Nun or 1899 than more of this.

I finished the show this weekend. I've previously read the trilogy and watched the 30 episode Tencent series. This show was better in some ways, and worse in others.

I think you're largely spot on in your response.

The chinese show is much closer to the books. I liked Da Shi much better in Chinese show (and he has a better character arc in general in the book than this show, where his arc felt rather flat), which says something because I normally love Benedict Wong. That said, Wang Miao is so wooden in the Chinese show. I think the move to split his character (plus the other arcs) into the Oxford Five was brilliant. Especially for a western audience that usually doesn't want to sit and read subtitles the entire episode. The group dynamics added something, and I really liked a number of the characters.

The cultural revolution stuff was great, but I think they could have gone even further. Anyways, to the person who missed the point on the cultural revolution stuff: it isn't about the aliens. It's about what happened to Ye Wenjie. The fact that they rushed through Red Coast also didn't help. You get a much better sense in the book/Chinese adaptation of the utter betrayal she experiences while working there. It's about understanding the life she was forced to endure and what could drive a person to be so broken that they would turn against their species in that manner. It's been a while since I read the books, but from my recollection of them, and in the chinese TV show, she paints a much more sympathetic figure and works against the more extreme elements of the ETO.

They really humanized Evans/the ETO a lot, with the kids being a constant focus on the ship. I get why, to make that ship scene pull at more heart strings. But I don't think I really enjoyed how they eliminated the factionalism present within the ETO. Plus it makes their operatives seem more out of place, as opposed to the quasi-state actor/terrorist organization it was portrayed as in the books.

Good show, not great. Better than the average netflix fare. Hit on some beats, missed on others. Will be interested to see how they handle future seasons.

Future books spoilers below:
I think people are really making way too much out of the "400 years" notion. I imagine we'll jump past many of them and only see key events due to our main characters coming in/out of cryo. It won't seem so far off by mid-season 2.

Biggest criticisms are Da Shi, the removal of the internal ETO politics, and the modifications to Ye Wenjie's story.

Biggest criticisms

- What they did with the "Oxford Five" - some saved by the bell corny ****
- every single one of the character changes and omissions
- The bland and at times ****ty acting
- Turning Luo Ji into a black (I'll bet also gay) man
- pulling forward the timeline to such an extreme that the plot leaves so many holes and lacks any of the surprises and wow factor from the book - especially sophon
- turning the ETA into some sob story and their semi-defeat focused on killing kids - WTF
- I'm sure there are more but these are enough to wash my hands of this adaptation. Hopefully someone else comes along and does it justice.

"****y" is a word that's not used often enough

There were a lot of parts I liked, and lots I didn't. It's easy enough to suspend belief and overlook plot holes with science fiction. The last half did seem rushed, though. It took us 3-4 episodes to get our bearings and then less than 2 episodes later we have a full fledged plan in action.

One thing the show did do is make me interested in reading the books, so I have them queued up now.

So this show is just satirizing religious fanaticism, right?

I'm five episodes in, and I'll be honest, it's starting to lose me a bit. A lot of the intrigue from the first couple episodes is gone by this point, with not much else taking its place.

But I'm trying to stick with it.

rednecked said:

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As I admitted above I couldn't finish the first book when I tried to read it a few years ago. As I recall, part of the problem I had with the book was that I wanted to read some hard core science fiction and all the Chinese Revolution stuff just turned me off. Even the abbreviated showing of it in the show really didn't add enough to the plot to make it necessary in my opinion.
That said, maybe I read enough of the book that I was able to make sense out of some of the stuff that they brushed over in the show. I enjoyed it and look forward to season two! I might try to tackle the book again sometime in the future. but not anytime soon as I am currently enjoying a reread of the Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series.

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I'm halfway through the first book, but my understanding is that Cixin Liu placed the Cultural Revolution backstory in the middle of the book in the original Chinese version, both to "hide" it from casual Chinese censors and to put the revelation of Ye Wenjie's betrayal of humanity in context. I think it would have worked better that way in the English translation too. Cixin Liu's criticism of the anti-science focus in the Cultural Revolution is crucial for understanding Ye's motivations. It's also an ironic counterpoint to the alien attack on our scientists. Putting all of that up front in the English translation just makes it harder for English readers to "get hooked" in the early going, IMO.

G Martin 87 said:

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rednecked said:

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As I admitted above I couldn't finish the first book when I tried to read it a few years ago. As I recall, part of the problem I had with the book was that I wanted to read some hard core science fiction and all the Chinese Revolution stuff just turned me off. Even the abbreviated showing of it in the show really didn't add enough to the plot to make it necessary in my opinion.
That said, maybe I read enough of the book that I was able to make sense out of some of the stuff that they brushed over in the show. I enjoyed it and look forward to season two! I might try to tackle the book again sometime in the future. but not anytime soon as I am currently enjoying a reread of the Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series.

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I'm halfway through the first book, but my understanding is that Cixin Liu placed the Cultural Revolution backstory in the middle of the book in the original Chinese version, both to "hide" it from casual Chinese censors and to put the revelation of Ye Wenjie's betrayal of humanity in context. I think it would have worked better that way in the English translation too. Cixin Liu's criticism of the anti-science focus in the Cultural Revolution is crucial for understanding Ye's motivations. It's also an ironic counterpoint to the alien attack on our scientists. Putting all of that up front in the English translation just makes it harder for English readers to "get hooked" in the early going, IMO.

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interesting. part of it is just me though. I've spent most of my career working with Asians. I have a weekly Teams meeting now with a vendor in China. I've worked with almost all of the industrialized Asian countries at one time or another. And frankly I just have a visceral dislike for their history. Don't know why that is but I have absolutely no interest in it. Tried to watch the new Shogun. one and half episodes in and I haven't given it another thought.

Unless my memory is failing, the Cultural Revolution is the very first scene of the book (it's actually a scene that's not in the show, with the revolutionary getting shot and falling off the building). Then it moves right to Ye Zhetai's death.

They absolutely do spread out the Ye Wenjie's time at Red Coast in the novel, but that's part of the structure I noted above - they they set up mysteries in both time periods which they reveal toward the end. The show decided not to be a mystery box and instead reveal the San-Ti and their plan much earlier, as well as Ye Wenjie's actions.

FtWorthHorn said:

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Unless my memory is failing, the Cultural Revolution is the very first scene of the book (it's actually a scene that's not in the show, with the revolutionary getting shot and falling off the building). Then it moves right to Ye Zhetai's death.

They absolutely do spread out the Ye Wenjie's time at Red Coast in the novel, but that's part of the structure I noted above - they they set up mysteries in both time periods which they reveal toward the end. The show decided not to be a mystery box and instead reveal the San-Ti and their plan much earlier, as well as Ye Wenjie's actions.

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Very first chapter is the cultural revolution and Zhetani's death.

G Martin 87 said:

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It's the first chapter in the English translation printing, not the original Chinese.

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Yes if I could read I would have noticed you said exactly that. Apparently Liu wanted them at the beginning, but I can see either side.

That Vin Diesel joke was just disrespectful.

But solid.

So what was the point of the VR? I get they wanted the scientists to understand why they had to leave their planet, but for what purpose, other than as exposition for the viewer?

Does this come later?