Streaming Spotlight by Cindy Summers
3 Body Problem – Netflix
Breeze rating from 1 to 4 palm trees, 4 being best.
“3 Body Problem” begins during the 1960 Cultural Revolution in China, when Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) watched her father beaten to death in the public square merely for being a notable scientist during the Chinese class warfare. Due to her background as an astrophysicist, Ye was sent to the work camps and after nearly dying was eventually brought to a large radio telescope station nearby to serve the rest of her time. Ye was given limited tasks but quickly came to the conclusion that what they were working on was not a weapon but a communication device.
Ye learned it was designed to communicate with alien life and devised a plan to magnify the signal using the sun, though one of the guards took credit. Ye waited for the right opportunity to be alone to launch the signal and shockingly got a reply repeatedly saying “Do Not Answer” and that she was lucky a pacifist on the other end received her message from a world that would conquer Earth without hesitation. Ignoring this warning Ye replied “Come. We cannot save ourselves. I will help you conquer this world.“ forever changing the course of history on Earth.
Fast forward to current day in the UK where renowned Oxford scientist Vera Ye (Vidette Lim) (daughter of Ye Wenjie (Rosalind Cho) and Mike Evans, who met in China) led a group of researchers, all former physics students at Oxford, until recent unexplained suicide that coincided with a rash of intentional deaths of scientists around the globe. The students were a very close group of friends: Auggie Salazar (Eiza Gonzalez) who was working on nanofiber tech that she worked closely on with Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo) along with Jin Chen (Jess Honog) and wealthy entrepreneur and former member of the Oxford physics lab Jack Rooney (John Bradley).
Around the time of Vera’s death, Auggie started seeing a countdown and was given a message to quit work on her nanofiber project. Then a strange woman approached her asking “Has the universe ever winked at you?” telling her to be outside at midnight. Auggie told Saul about the interaction and asked him to be with her at midnight. Sure enough, all the stars in the sky started blinking in what Saul thought seemed to be a code that exactly matched Auggie countdown. The next day Auggie performed the scheduled and much anticipated test on her nanofiber project, but immediately shut it down after the text which did make the countdown clock disappear.
Jin visited Ye for answers to Vera’s death and Ye said she was constantly playing a video game, giving Jin a strange headset to take with her. It appeared to be a game where Jin had to save the world from some sort of climate catastrophe and after her initial hesitation, played the game to level 3. Jin discovered the problem was that there were 3 suns, not just one, affecting the climate and causing it to become unstable. Jin went to talk to Jack about the headset, but when he tried it on a woman immediately appeared saying you don’t belong here and chopped off his head with a Samurai sword. The next day a box with his name showed up at Jack’s door with a headset.
British investigator Clarence “Da” Shi (Benedict Wong) was investigating the multiple scientist suicides and discovered several of them possessed the same headset. Ye and Mike Evans knew that it was not a game, but as Jin and Jack eventually realized it was actually a portal to another planet repeatedly experiencing the same climate crisis that was looking for solutions through Earth’s scientists. The aliens were also working with Mike and Ye who were gathering allies and supplies around the world in anticipation of the alien race’s arrival. Through Mike’s arrogance and ignorance, he caused the aliens to not trust humans and the aliens sent a message to every device on Earth saying “YOU ARE BUGS” and related they were on their way to conquer Earth.
Runtime: 8 – 1h episodes
