Problematic

• Published date: 26 March 2024
• Publication title: Signal

WELL, hello again to Game of Thrones’ David “Unfilmable books a specialty!” Benioff and DB “Likewise!” Weiss! This time they are on Netflix, with an adaptation of the hardest of hard sci-fi tomes, Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (the first in a trilogy called Remembrance of Earth’s Past). The eight-part series is near-named after the book as 3 Body Problem and opens with a truly harrowing scene of a Maoist struggle in which an eminent professor of physics, who has fallen foul of the Chinese Cultural revolutionaries for teaching the principles of Western science, is beaten to death on stage in front of his wife — who denounces him as he is killed — while his appalled daughter and protege, Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), watches in the audience. One of the timelines follows her as she is sent first to a forced labour camp in Inner Mongolia and then, when her astrophysicist skills are needed, to a mysterious scientific project (lots of buttons, big satellite dish) on its outskirts

In the present day, particle accelerators around the world have started delivering results that make a mockery of all known physical laws and eminent scientists are killing themselves — or looking as if they’ve killed themselves — at what is mathematically known as a rate of knots. These “suicides” are being investigated by ex-cop Da Shi (Benedict Wong, the acceptance of whose transition to dramatic roles after 15 Storeys High I still find harder than understanding the three body problem itself, regardless of his excellence here). He reports to Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham), a shadowy figure who is working for (or is possibly the head of) an even more shadowy secret authority bent on preserving humanity. Or not. I think.

Anyway. One of the mysterious deaths brings a group of five former students of the deceased teacher back together. It comprises underachieving borderline nihilist genius Saul (Jovan Adepo), engineering supremo Auggie (Eiza Gonzalez) who is on the verge of a world-changing breakthrough in nanofibre technology, brilliant theoretical physicist Jin (Jess Hong), relative dropout Will (Alex Sharp), who now teaches science to high schoolers but is as in love with Jin as he was in their university days, and Jack (John Bradley), who sold out to make a fortune from snack foods and whose wealth is going to come in handy later. And who was their late teacher? Vera Ye (Vedette Lim), the daughter of the daughter in the audience who watched her father being killed in 1966 Beijing. The...