Posted in: Netflix, TV | Tagged: 3 Body Problem, Jess Hong, Liu Cixin, netflix, Rosalind Chao, Zine Tseng

3 Body Problem Shortchanges The Most Important Character in The Story

Ye Wen Jie is the most important character in 3 Body Problem, but the Netflix series shortchanges her and reduces her to a plot device.

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

The Netflix adaptation of 3 Body Problem makes a lot of changes to the story and characters, mainly splitting the main character of the first book into at least three different, diverse characters in the series and rushing through the story of the first book at a pace too fast for viewers to become invested in them, before slowing down in the second half of the series and getting better. It's worth watching since no other movie or TV series this year is going to be this ambitious. However, the worst example of condensing and speeding up the story is done to the most important character, astrophysicist Ye Wen Jie.

3 Body Problem is Really Ye Wen Jie's Story

The Netflix series begins as the book does – with Ye Wen Jie (Zine Tseng) witnessing her father getting beaten to death by a mob of his former students caught up in the fervor of the Cultural Revolution. That event is the trauma that defines her for the rest of her life, along with even more betrayals and traumas that period in history will inflict on her. The next time we see her is in contemporary London, older now (played by Rosalind Chao) and grieving after her physicist daughter has committed suicide. The story, like the book, flashes back to her time in China when she was spared from prison and execution and recruited to the science team at a top-secret satellite base searching for life beyond the solar system.

She goes rogue and secretly sends a forbidden signal out into space after being the one smart enough to figure out the best way to boost Earth's signal is by shooting it through the sun. And she's the only one on duty when someone out there replies – it begs Earth not to respond because their people would just conquer Earth, proving the Fermi Paradox right. Disillusioned with humanity, Ye Wenjie invites the aliens to invade Earth, believing they must be better than us. Later, she meets Mike Evans, an oil billionaire's son and environmental activist who condemns humanity's greed in causing the despoiling of the Earth that causes the extinction of various species, with humans being the last on that list. Later, she turns out to be the revered co-founder, with Evans, of the cult conspiring to help the aliens invade Earth and causing the deaths of scientists whose work might be a threat to their mission.

The Problem with the Changes in Yie Wen Jie's Story

So far, that arc follows the original story of 3 Body Problem. However, the Netflix version rushes through Yie Wen Jie's arc, so when the twist comes that she's the Bond villain of the piece next to Evans, it's completely flat and anticlimactic. This is because the series didn't spend enough time with her to build her up as a character we might care about. She's a presence that looms large in the story, especially in the first book. Her time at the Red Cliff lab and her life after the end of the Cultural Revolution play a huge part in her story, and the Netflix series doesn't show her progress once she's been rehabilitated and enters civilian life as a mother and beloved teacher in the local village before her academic credentials are restored and she becomes a professor at one of the most prestigious universities in China. The series doesn't show how she ended up living in the UK with her daughter Vivian (Vedette Lim) growing up to become a physicist like she was.

After her daughter's death, Yie Wen Jie only shows up two or three times as a grief-stricken mother who also has a maternal relationship with Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), who had formed a family bond with her and Vivian, possibly due to all three of them being displaced Chinese immigrants, but that was in broad strokes, and the pacing of the series didn't give those moments time to breathe and settle on their relationship. The next time she shows up is when she's revealed as the co-founder of the pro-alien cult. That should have been a gut punch, and it was to Jin Cheng but the way that was rushed, it just feels like another pulp genre twist to the rest of us.

Yie Wen Jie was More Complete in the Chinese TV Series

One interesting change in the Netflix version of 3 Body Problem is the scene at Red Cliff where Yie Wenjie's male colleague steals her idea and presents it to their boss, who's in charge of ideological purity in their work. The boss shoots down the proposal because the idea of shooting their beam at the sun could be interpreted as a symbolic act of treason since Chairman Mao is considered the sun that shines over the nation. In the book and Chinese TV version, Yie's colleague takes the idea to their boss to provide cover for her since she's still considered an enemy dissident. He's a former student of her father's and cares about her, and they get married. When their boss finds out she sent the reply to the aliens and plans to not only take credit for it but make it public; she murders him and ends up killing her husband for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Leaving out that arc for the sake of time is understandable for the Netflix series, as is leaving out Yie Wen Jie's arc after the Cultural Revolution, where she finds her mother and her father's killers to try to make sense of that time, only to be left even more disillusioned, which led to her forming the alien-worshipping cult with Mike Evans after she meets him again in the West.

3 Body Problem: We Needed the Science Grandma Arc

The Chinese TV version of Three-Body Problem featured an arc in the present day where Wang Miao meets the elder Yie Wen Jie (Chen Jin) after her daughter's suicide. Yie has retired from academia and living a quiet life in the city, babysitting the neighbourhood kids and helping them with their homework. She forms a bond with Wang Miao and becomes a foil for Wang Miao, helping him puzzle out the science questions that are clues in the conspiracy, but also subtly vetting him for recruitment into the cult. There's no sense of that in the Netflix version when Jin Cheng meets up with her. We needed to see more to Ye Wenjie's character than "grieving mother", but the showrunners decided that speeding up and hitting the key points of the story was more important than character nuance. It's an understandable creative choice but not always the best one.

What Works in the Netflix Version

There are interesting changes the showrunners made to Ye Wenjie's story in the Netflix version. She never married her colleague but has a romance with Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce) and he's the father of her daughter. What's unspoken but implied is that she and Evans designed the Three Body Problem VR game, and the AI-generated little girl called Follower (Eve Ridley) that players are meant to protect is modeled after their daughter when she was a child.

The Netflix series shows Ye's shock and disillusionment more strongly when she discovers the aliens aren't benevolent and intend to wipe out humanity. This leads to a new version of a key scene from the start of the second book, "The Dark Forest". In the book, Ye runs into Luo Ji while visiting her daughter's grave. He was her daughter's former classmate, still trying to find a field to specialize in, and Ye advises him to go into the new field of Cosmic Sociology (which she invented at that moment, because she's a genius), which sets him up to get picked as a Wallfacer years later to protect humanity from the aliens. In the Netflix version, this scene occurs after she declares she's going to find a way to fight the invasion. She asks to meet Saul (Jovan Adepo), her daughter's former student, and the series' version of the underachieving Luo Ji. Her conversation with him is even more oblique when she tells him a joke with the punchline, "Don't play with God." Unlike the book, Ye has chosen Saul as the one who will save the planet in ways even he can't foresee. That leads to Saul getting picked as a Wallfacer, and for the cult to try to kill him. The series also gives Ye a death scene since the books never reveal what happened to her, but her work is done. She might have betrayed Humanity to the aliens, but also provides the best way to fight them. All of 3 Body Problem begins and ends with Ye Wen Jie.

3 Body Problem is streaming on Netflix.

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