Posted in: TV | Tagged: Liu Cixin, Review, science fiction, TenCent, The Three-Body Problem, three-body

The Three-Body Problem Ep. 2 Review: Things Start Getting Weird

The second episode of The Three-Body Problem gets pleasingly weird, introducing a sense of foreboding and even cosmic horror to the mystery.

The second episode of The Three-Body Problem has been unlocked to watch for free on Tencent's YouTube channel, so we might as well review it. Why? Because things are starting to get pleasingly weird after the table-setting pilot episode.

"Physics doesn't exist" is explored right off the bat in this episode, with series protagonist Wang Miao (Zhang Lu Yi) commiserating with fellow theoretical physicist Ding Yi (Eric Wang) over the death of Yang Dong (He Du Juan). Yang Dong was distressed by the suicide of her mentor – and her discovery that he was sent the results of the particle accelerator failure before she got the results herself directly from her experiment. Could that have set off the existential crisis that drove her to suicide? A drunk and grief-stricken Ding YI decides to test what would happen if Physic really stopped working through a simple billiards game with Wang Miao. Physics dictates that the laws of gravity and thermodynamics are set, but what if they're broken and no longer function? That would be a disaster not only for scientific research but for the whole universe and all Life. The result is the first truly creative sequence in the show that lifts it beyond talking heads. It also establishes the real stakes of the story – it's not just Life and Death, but the entire fate of the Cosmos is at risk.

Wang Miao starts to hallucinate about the failure of physics and gravity in everyday life but are they just hallucinations? He ends up returning to Frontiers of Science (the increasingly suspect think tank that Yang Dong and the other dead scientists had joined). He witnesses at least one scientist freaking out over the hypothesis that there are boundaries of science that humanity hasn't crossed yet, and that their limited knowledge might put them in the position of Thanksgiving turkeys unknowingly waiting to be slaughtered. This might not just be a hypothesis, but nobody on Earth knows that yet (nor do any viewers who haven't read the novel The Three-Body Problem).

We find out that Shi Qiang had been suspended from duty in the police force, and his former army commander General Chang has thrown him a career lifeline by transferring him to their secret organization to investigate the deaths of the physicists. Shi Qiang is exactly the kind of asshole cop who would beat up suspects and think he didn't do anything wrong. It's a mark of Yu He Wei's performance that he conveys all that through his body language and tone of voice. As a cop, he has to think about whether dozens of scientists committing suicide out of existential despair constitutes a conspiracy to murder, but even he doesn't know what's coming. Meanwhile, he does the job he's good at: following Wang Miao and goading him into asking the questions that need answers, manipulating him into going to the Frontiers of Science, then attending Yang Dong's funeral where another piece of the puzzle drops into Wang's lap. The problem is that Wang has obviously been targeted by the unknown forces who want him for their agenda, and he doesn't have any clue or defense against them. Nobody does. Meanwhile, Shi Qiang and Wang Maio's central relationship as the heart of the show is shaping up, and the fact that they can't stand each other keeps it refreshing.

The second episode of The Three-Body Problem ups the ante on the show and is already living up to the promise of the story. The sense of almost Lovecraftian cosmic horror is something not in any Chinese TV show. It's still a slow burn – we don't know who the mystery woman at the observatory in 1979 is or how she ties into the mystery. The show's decision to start late in the book at the deaths investigated as a mystery gives the series its drive that will tie the various strands of the story together later for the big payoff is the best decision the writers made. By the end of the second episode, the direction of the show toward the payoff is set.

Not only can you read our review, but you can also watch the episode of The Three-Body Problem via the YouTube link.

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