Posted in: Netflix, TV | Tagged: 3 Body Problem, Alexander Woo, Benedict Wong, D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, Liu Cixin, netflix

3 Body Problem: Character Changes Hint at Netflix Series' Future

Netflix's adaptation of 3 Body Problem splits the heroes into multiple archetypes that could hint at where the series goes in future seasons.

Warning: All discussions of 3 Body Problem from here will have spoilers, for the night is dark and full of spoilers.

The most controversial changes in the Netflix adaptation of Liu Cixin's Science Fiction saga 3 Body Problem is probably the way showrunners David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo changed the main characters of the book into not only Westerners but also split them into more than one character. The changes set up the future seasons of the series in a way that's more emotionally unified than the books that Hollywood series demand, as they said in an interview with The Verge.

3 Body Problem Heroes Split into Multiple Archetypes

There's a good reason for the heroes of the 3 Body Problem trilogy to become an ensemble of friends who became close as Physics students at Oxford University. The main characters of the three books didn't know each other and never meet other than cop Da Shi teaming up with Wang Miao in the first book and then Luo Ji in the second book, "The Dark Forest," which takes place years later. The books also take years apart, with the second and third books even leaping centuries and millennia. Having a regular cast of friends through several seasons is a Hollywood TV dynamic designed to give audiences characters and relationships to follow rather than trot out new characters every season. The showrunners also make sure the characters' emotional ties evolve to create a more emotional story than the books did. That's why the Oxford Five was created.

The Prototype

The hero of the first book is Wang Miao, a research scientist heading the nanofiber research project who gets drafted by the government and detective Da Shi to help investigate the deaths of scientists across the world. He's an earnest family man with a wife and kid and is the reader's point of entry into the story. He's the one who goes around meeting the key characters and asking them questions, and then trying to figure out the science behind it all with Da Shi. He doesn't appear in the second or third books, leaving the story at the end of book one to presumably live out the rest of his life with his family, still doing research and probably passing away long before the time a century passes in the middle of "The Dark Forest." In the Netflix version of 3 Body Problem, Wang Miao isn't just changed into a woman, but split into two, possibly three characters.

The Oxford Five are united by being former students of Ye Wenjie's genius physicist daughter Vera Ye (Vedette Lim), who was named Ye Yang Dong in the book. They're still close friends because of the intense bond they formed as a study group pondering and debating complex scientific theories, and so know each other very well. Two of them, Cheng Jin and Saul, are still close to Vera and her mother, Ye Wenjie, because they became Physicists after graduation.

And every major character in the series is an archetype.

The Moral Centre

Augustina "Auggie" Salazar (Eiza Gonzalez) is the 3 Body Problem's stand-in for Wang Miao. Here, she has given up Physics to become an inventor of nanofiber that she wants to give the world to help the poor and Third World countries. She's the one who starts seeing the ominous countdown in her eyes and suffers the terror of not knowing what could happen to her when the countdown ends, especially when every other scientist who saw it died violently. Auggie is the Captain Sensible of the series. She has the most human and relatable responses. She stops her nanotech project out of fear when she's told by Tatiana Haas (Marlo Kelly) that the countdown would stop. It's an intimidation tactic that works on most normal people. Auggie reacts with horror when she finds out Jack and Cheng Jin are playing the VR game and begs them to stop. Auggie is also the most idealistic and moral of the characters, reacting with disgust when she becomes complicit in a massacre and suffering guilt and PTSD. She despises Thomas Wade and calls him a murderous fascist, a response to accusations from some readers that the story endorses authoritarianism. Auggie might come off brittle, prickly, and a scold, but Gonzalez plays her as someone who's been under constant stress and pressure all her life and has trouble keeping her cool long before she even sees the countdown, so it feels right. Her entire backstory is revealed in one line: "I've been fighting all my life." Her moral certainty also has elements of Ai AA, a character from the third book.

Auggie might make the occasional joke, but she's the most humourless of the friends, which also makes viewers dislike her. It's to Gonzalez's credit that she doesn't try to play Auggie as warm or likable to pander to the viewers.

The Seeker

Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) isn't only the other half of Wang Miao but also a combination of Ding Yi, Yang Dong's physicist boyfriend in the books, and Cheng Xin, the heroine of the third book, "Death's End." Instead of Auggie, it's Jin Cheng who has a familial relationship with Vivian Ye and Ye Wenjie, possibly because they bonded over being Chinese immigrants in the academic world with personal tragedies in their pasts. Instead of Auggie, she's the one who plays the 3 Body Problem VR game to solve its unsolvable puzzle. While Cheng Jin is empathetic and compassionate like Cheng Xi, she is also the most driven and determined of the Cambridge Five and is the main protagonist of the Netflix series. Like Cheng Xi, she designs The Staircase Project, the first moonshot strategy for combating the aliens, whose seeming failure will have major consequences for the story if there are more seasons. Jin Cheng's earnestness also has elements of Ai AA from the third book.

The Friends Who Are One

Auggie and Cheng Jin both share elements of Ai AA, an astronomer in the third book who becomes Cheng Xi's best friend and travel companion in the far reaches of Time and Space. In setting up Auggie and Cheng Jin as best friends from the beginning, the showrunners are keeping their relationship a constant throughout the story for the audience to hold onto. Wang Miao disappears from the books after the first one. This change will keep Auggie and Gonzalez in future seasons, possibly right to the end.

The Reluctant Hero

Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo) is the Netflix series version of Luo Ji, the main character of the second book, "The Dark Forest." In the book, Luo Ji is a smart underachiever and former classmate of Ye Wenjie's daughter who couldn't figure out his niche and is encouraged by Ye Wenjie to specialize in a new field called Cosmic Sociology (invented by Ye at that moment – because she's a genius). Years later, Luo Ji is a slacker who does the barest minimum in his academic job and is picked to become one of the Wallfacers, tasked with creating a strategy to protect humanity from the aliens. Luo Ji is a loner with hardly any friends, while Saul is there for all his friends. Saul is a former student of Vivian Ye and worked as her lab assistant because he never got around to publishing papers or finding his niche. Saul is an underachiever and slacker who spends his spare time getting high and hooking up with girls he meets in clubs as an expression of his aimlessness, but he's also the smartest of the Cambridge Five, the one who thinks of alternate ideas and theories and debating them with his friends like they must have done all the time when they were students. He's the one who correctly theorises that the night the universe "blinked" could only be a "deepfake" on an epic scale, chooses not to play the VR game because he agrees with Auggie that it's dangerous, and tries to debate Will out of sacrificing his life for The Staircase Project. This is why Ye Wenjie decides he's the outlier who's going to give humanity a fighting chance against the aliens.

In the book, Luo Ji is single and writes a blog fantasizing about what his perfect girlfriend would be like. The showrunners of the Netflix version wisely change that creepy trope into a failed love story between Auggie and Saul. Auggie has been repeatedly disappointed by his immaturity and unreliability in the past and won't commit to him. Future seasons will probably feature an arc about whether the two of them get together again. The showrunners might keep this as a way to have Saul in the story up to the end rather than leave the story like Luo Ji does in the middle of "Death's End."

The Funny Friend

Jack Rooney (John Bradley) is a third partial split of Wang Miao. As the one member of the Cambridge Five who abandoned Physics altogether to use his smarts to become a multimillionaire snack tycoon, Jack's personality is a new creation for the Netflix series. He's the most British of the lot, a snarky skeptic with a big heart who would do anything for his friends, especially Will Downing. He's also a big gamer, so he can play the 3 Body Problem VR game with Cheng Jin and act as her foil as she puzzles through the game. The two of them become a comedy duo spoofing obsessive gamers in the story – after all, those VR headsets look like silver underwear. Jack is the comic relief of the series and says the snarky things out loud that the viewers might be thinking. Jack is also a version of Hu Wen from the third book, Yun Tianming's best friend and a drunk millionaire, just like Jack is Will's best friend.

The Romantic

Will Downing (Alex Sharp) is the Netflix version of Yun Tianming from the third book "Death's End." Yun Tianming is an engineer with terminal cancer who had been quietly in love with Cheng Xi and gifts her with literal ownership of a star that he spends his savings buying her as a final romantic gesture. The latter will become significant in the story when the star system turns out to be a source of precious minerals, and Cheng Xi becomes incredibly wealthy from leasing the mining rights. The star system also becomes a place for her to flee when, well, things go horribly wrong. In the Netflix series, Will is living a quiet life as a high school teacher, thinking his life was a failure and unable to declare his unrequited love for Cheng Jin even after he's diagnosed with terminal cancer. Alex Sharp plays every scene he's in with an aching tenderness that turns out to be the heart of the series. As in the book, Will sacrifices what's left of his life to volunteer in The Staircase Project, not for humanity, but for Cheng Jin, and is seemingly lost forever, but there's more to come in the next seasons if Netflix greenlights them.

The Soldier

Raj Varma (Saamer Usmani), Cheng Jin's boyfriend, is the character that's being banked for future series. While delirious on painkillers, Will declares that Raj is "death and chaos," which is Screenwriting 101 for foreshadowing a character's future deeds in the story. A Royal Navy officer, Raj is a soldier driven by his sense of duty and isn't bothered by killing because it's war, which turns Auggie and Cheng Jin against him. Raj gets recruited into the secret organization to fight the aliens and is likely to become one of the captains of one of Earth's two starships in the future who aren't in the first book. Yes, the story becomes crazy space opera later, and it gets crazier and nastier than anything in Star Trek. Raj looks like the Netflix series of Zhang Beihai, the Chinese Space Force commander from the second book who projects confidence but turns traitor because he comes to believe there's no way to defeat the aliens. Raj's story might take a dark turn.

The Detective

Clarence "Da Shi" Shi (Benedict Wong) is Shi Qiang from the first two books. Instead of a city cop and anti-terrorism expert from the Chinese version, Da Shi here is a Manchester-born former cop now working as an investigator for a shadowy organisation headed by Thomas Wade. His personality is largely unchanged from the book, though he's written as more solemn, and Wong fits the physical description of the character in the books. Yu Hewei played Da Shi in the Chinese TV version with a more sardonic lust for life and hilariously pragmatic exasperation at Wang Miao's high-mindedness. What I miss most in the Netflix version is the mismatched buddy comedy duo of Da Shi and Wang Miao. Like the book, Da Shi has a son, who in the Netflix version is gay and sets up a business selling real estate settlements on other planets (as in the books), an element that might become important in later series. Yu and Wong's performances as Da Shi are different, but both are excellent, and the character is such a fan favourite that Yu will be starring in a spinoff miniseries in China starring Da Shi as the main character. In the books, Da Shi gets cancer after shooting at an atomic bomb to prevent a cultist from detonating it and gets exposed to radiation in the first book, and presumably dies off-stage by the time the third book comes along, but his future fate in the Netflix series is unknown.

The Spymaster

Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham) is a character from book three, an amalgamation of Thomas Wade and General Chang Weisi from the books. In the book, Wade is American and ex-intelligence, almost certainly former CIA. In the Netflix series, he heads a secret international organization that seems to have been formed to investigate global terror threats and somehow has the power to order any government around. He's ruthless, Machiavellian, and an "ends justify the means" character who will do absolutely anything to preserve humanity, including killing people. He's the type who's willing to kill everyone to win. He has a cold logic in all his decisions and comes off like a villain in the book. The Netflix series makes Wade Irish to fit Cunningham's own accent and demeanour and gives him a sardonic bone-dry wit not in the book. He and Wong's Da Shi form the mismatched duo in the series with the funniest, nastiest lines. The most fun part of the series is watching Wade be an absolute dick to almost everyone, especially Raj. By the series finale, there are hints Wade might have a heart after all, and he's not totally in control – he's as vulnerable to attacks by the aliens as anyone else on the planet and is likely doomed in the long run.

The Cult Leader

Mike Evans, played by Jonathan Pryce in the present day and Ben Schnetzer in his younger days, is largely unchanged from the books, though he's more likable and warmer in the Netflix series. You must be if you're going to be a charismatic and beloved environmental activist-turned-cult leader and terrorist. He gets more scenes in the Netflix series as the foil to reveal what the aliens are like and is the one who says the wrong thing that makes them decide humanity needs to be wiped out when they invade.

The Zealot

Tatiana Haas (Marlo Kelley) appears to be a completely new character created for the Netflix series to give the story a major human antagonist, but she's a combination of senior cultist Shen Yufei from the first book and an assassin character created for the Chinese TV series adaptation. Shen Yufei is a senior member of the Earth Trisolarian Organisation who believes the aliens will save humanity and comes into conflict with fellow cult member Ding Yi, an extremist who thinks humanity deserves extinction and actively encourages acts of murder and terrorism by the members. The assassin character is a nameless woman in the book who threatens to detonate a nuclear device when Da Shi and Army Special Forces raid the ETO meeting but was expanded into Ye Wenjie's niece in the Chinese TV series.

Ye Wen Xue is an unstoppable killer who uses martial arts and MMA to beat her targets to death, and despite being a tiny Chinese woman, evokes dread whenever she shows up because that means she is going to murder someone. Tatiana is every bit as menacing as she is, a zealot who believes in the aliens and will kill anyone for the cause, even someone she cares about. Her joy when the aliens contact her after the destruction of the cult is from the start of the second book. Tatiana survives the series and will return in future seasons as a continuing threat to the main characters, growing the cult into a network of saboteurs and assassins. She's probably going to become a Wallbreaker in the next seasons, tasked with thwarting the Wallfacers.

Unlike Game of Thrones, the showrunners have a completed story to work from, so their creative changes suggest they know how they want this version of 3 Body Problem to end. The Cambridge Five (or what's left of them) are the viewer's surrogate friend group, though they're a lot better-looking than most of our real-life friend groups, designed to keep us watching. These types of changes take a lot of time and energy to work out, and that's how Hollywood adaptations tend to work.

3 Body Problem is streaming on Netflix.

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