Posted in: Netflix, TV | Tagged: 3 Body Problem, eiza gonzalez, Jess Hong, jonathan pryce, Jovan Adepo, Liam Cunningham, Liu Cixin, netflix, Sea Shimooka

3 Body Problem: Still Feeling Confused? Here's What You Need to Know

Still feeling a bit confused about certain aspects of Netflix's adaptation of 3 Body Problem? We might just have the answers you need...

Spoiler warning: you should only read the following after you've watched 3 Body Problem on Netflix, as it explains everything in the series that wasn't made clear. After all, The night is dark and full of spoilers.

As the Netflix version of 3 Body Problem continues to climb up the charts from word-of-mouth, I've noticed that many viewers have gotten confused about some of the story details in the series. This is not their fault since the series rushes through some of the most important details that explain how and why certain things happen in the story. The answers to their questions are virtually all in the books by Liu Cixin and between the lines of the parts of the TV series that are never spelled out. D.B. Weiss, David Benioff, and Alexander Woo are counting on the viewers to be smart instead of spoon-feeding them all the information with reams of exposition and on-the-nose dialogue like you would expect from network television writing. We decided to run an explainer's guide for everyone who's watched the series and is still confused. We're going to stick to what's in the series and what was taken from the books rather than speculate on future spoilers. That's coming later.

Here's everything that should have been clearer in 3 Body Problem:

Auggie and Saul Were a Couple But Broke Up

Many viewers dislike Auggie (Eíza Gonzalez), partly because the scripts never bother to make her likable (which could be a problem later if she's going to be one of the major heroes), but particularly when she seems to treat Saul (Jovan Adepo) badly. It's not spelled out, but they fell in love when they were students and still are. She's sharp and rude to him because he's disappointed her many times in the past. They're not together because he's constantly high, may have cheated on her many times as his many one-night stands imply, and his fecklessness would be frustrating to someone as focused and serious as she is.

The San-Ti Are Not a Collective Consciousness 

Some viewers were led to believe the aliens were a collective or hive consciousness when that's not the case. They do have individuals, which is how the first of the San-Ti to answer Ye Wenjie's signal warns her not to answer and reveal Earth's location – they're pacifists and don't want to see Earth conquered. That's the first indication the aliens are hostile.

It is Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce) who deduces that they communicate by projecting their thoughts to each other, which renders lying impossible. They can't read minds, which is why they regard humans as a threat. The fact that the San-Ti pacifists said they would conquer Earth means they would, at best, keep humans as pets and exterminate the human race at worst. There is no peaceful coexistence to be had. That is the nature of the Fermi Paradox: technologically superior species would destroy less advanced civilizations as a rule.

When Evans talks to them via his radio, it's the Sophon translating the San-Ti's speech into English for his benefit. He thinks he's talking to his "lord," but chances are he's really talking to more than one San-Ti, but they're communicating to him through one Sophon voice.

Mike Evans and Ye Wenjie Designed the 3 Body Problem VR Game

None of this is spelled out, but it was really Mike Evans and Ye Wenjie who designed the 3 Body Problem VR game to engage and recruit the smartest elite minds into the pro-alien cult. Only the best and brightest are invited to play, getting sent the VR headset once they've been selected as a candidate. The San-Ti sent Mike Evans the specs for developing the headsets and software for the VR game, but it needed humans to design the game so that humans could relate to the game story and learn the crisis the San-Ti are living under. They designed the game world to go through human history as a proxy for San-Ti history for it to be more relatable for humans. The goal is to make the players sympathetic to the San-Ti plight so they can be recruited into the cult.

A game needs a symbol of the San-Ti for the player to care about and watch to save, and that's Follower (Eve Ridley), the child NPC. That she's modelled after Vivian Ye, Mike Evans, and Ye Wenjie's daughter – a photo of her as a child is in Evan's study early in the series and later revealed in Ye Wenjie's living room. She's also the symbol of their love and how they ultimately failed her when adult Vivian (Vedette Lim) commits suicide because she can't live with their betrayal of humanity. Follower isn't just a cute kid – she's a Trojan Horse. She records every player's progress and whether they solved each level. Her inevitable death at every level is designed to be emotional manipulation, which certainly worked with Cheng Jin (Jess Hong).

Tatiana Haas is Not an Alien

Tatiana Haas (Marlo Kelly) is a true believer in the wisdom of the San-Ti and a zealous killer in their name. She doesn't have superpowers; she's just well-trained in physical combat, weapons, and all the ways to kill people. She doesn't have the ability to disappear – it's the Sophon hacking the cameras and electronics to erase her appearance on video, which lets her get away and stay unknown to the authorities.

"Fuck Him"

Yeah, Auggie totally told Saul what she and Raj did in Panama. That's why neither of them is particularly into Cheng Jin continuing her relationship with Raj.

What Exactly is a Sophon?

This is the biggest scifi high concept in the series: the Sophon. What exactly is the Sophon? It's a supercomputer the San-Ti created to monitor Earth and sabotage Earth's Science. The Sophon is the size of a photon. The San-Ti developed the means to unfold dimensions, so they unfolded a single photon to the size of a planet to imprint their supercomputer's components in it the same way you build a computer's circuit board and guts. Then they programmed it and woke it up before shrinking it back to the size of a photon. They have two pairs of Sophons, keeping one on their homeworld and sending the other halves to Earth. It takes an enormous amount of energy to send something fast enough to Earth, so the smaller the mass, the less energy it would take, hence something as small and undetectable as photons. Once the photons reach Earth years later, they infiltrate all the Large Hadron Colliders to corrupt the results so Earth's Physicists can no longer get reliable data to develop higher scientific theories that would enable Earth's sciences to advance beyond what's currently available, handicapping any chance of developing technology or weapons that can fight the San-Ti fleet when it arrives on Earth. Since the San-Ti homeworld is four light years away, it'll take them four hundred years to reach Earth.

The two Sophons on Earth are linked to their counterparts on the homeworld through Quantum Entanglement so they can send their information back to their masters immediately with no lag, so the San-Ti know what's happening on Earth in real-time, not years apart. Mike Evans uses the Sophon to talk to the San-T back on their homeworld with no delay.

The Sophons are Behind Everything Weird that Happens Throughout 3 Body Problem

The Sophons arrived on Earth less than a year before the series began, and that's when scientists across the world started dying. The Sophons are mainly used for surveillance, so they can see and hear literally everyone and everything on Earth and send back the recordings to the San-Ti in real-time. They can hack into Earth's computers, such as hacking the Large Hadron Collider's computers so that the results come out as nonsense.

The Sophons have limits – they can't physically attack or kill anyone on Earth; that's why they depend on human agents like the cult and Tatiana to do that for them. The dead scientists either killed themselves or were murdered by Tatiana. They can send signals to influence the light that enters people's eyes, which is how they could project the countdowns to the scientists they deem a threat to them. Auggie sees the countdown because her work is a potential threat. The Sophons can unfold themselves into a screen that envelops the Earth to create footage of the stars blinking for the world to see and reveal the San-Ti's abilities by hacking into every electronic screen in the world to send the message "YOU ARE BUGS" and then reflecting every city and the CGI of a giant Eye of Sauron as a tactic ordered by the San-Ti to scare the shit out of the entire world as a prelude to their invasion. The Sophon can't build killer robots. They're strictly glorified spycams, hacking tools and audiovisual projectors following the San-Ti's commands.

The Sophons are also present in the 3 Body Problem VR game as moderators, observers, and explainers. This also gave the showrunners an opportunity to bring in the visual avatar of the Sophon from the third book in the trilogy: a glamourous human woman with a sword (Sea Shimooka) who seemed to walk out of an anime nerd's fantasies, probably created from observing the tastes of every male gamer geek on Earth.

What Really Happens at the End of the Countdown?

By the finale, we've largely forgotten about the countdown or what's at the end of it, but the series pays that off when the San-Ti communicates with Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham) on his plane. First, they hack the plane's systems, then hack the TV screen for Sophon to show up on it, then send a signal to his eyes so she can appear before him, manifest the end of the countdown over his eyes, and at the end, show him what the dead scientists saw. Wade sees his own bloody corpse with the eyes gouged out, causing him to recoil in terror. So that's the vision that's so horrific it drove those scientists to kill themselves that Auggie was spared from.

That's it for the most under-explained and confusing but important parts of 3 Body Problem. We'll talk about possible spoilers for future seasons of the series later. The series is streaming now on Netflix.

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