TV
3 BODY PROBLEM
THE GAME OF THRONES TEAM SWAP DRAGONS FOR MULTI-DIMENSIONAL ALIENS
Doing it by the book: Yang Hewen as Bai Mulin and Zine Tseng as young Ye Wenjie.
★★★★
OUT 21 MARCH (NETFLIX) / EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8
SHOWRUNNERS David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, Alexander Woo
CAST Benedict Wong, Liam Cunningham, Jonathan Pryce, Jess Hong, Jovan Adepo, Eiza González, John Bradley, Alex Sharp
PLOT Detective Da Shi (Wong) investigates a series of mysterious deaths in the scientific community. Could they possibly be linked to an alien invasion?
IN PHYSICS, THE ‘three-body problem’ is what you’d call a real head-scratcher: a scientific conundrum to do with the positions and velocities of three bodies of mass when they attract each other with gravity. It is a centuries-old question of chaos theory; a mathematical riddle, seemingly unsolvable. And only slightly trickier than adapting Liu Cixin’s 2008 novel, The Three-Body Problem, for the small screen. The book (and its subsequent sequels) spans from history to the heat death of the universe; includes dense talk of theoretical astrophysics; and is set, at one point, in the tenth dimension. How, exactly, do you make a television show out of that? “Ambitious” doesn’t quite cut it, which perhaps makes Game Of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, alongside True Blood’s Alexander Woo, the ideal stewards for Netflix’s massive, multi-million-dollar punt. The three creators are experienced with giant budgets; they know their way around a jaw-dropping set-piece; they can wrestle with sprawling, unwieldy source material; they can world-build; they can character-build. To borrow a phrase, they consider chaos a ladder. (After the decidedly mixed response to the final season of Game Of Thrones, Benioff and Weiss also, arguably, have something to prove.)