Spoiler Alert! Several months ago, my husband started recounting to me the latest audiobook on his playlist. As an engineer, he enjoys “hard” science fiction — the type that works scientific explanations into the storyline. This novel, part of a trilogy written and published in China, sported an unsolvable math problem about predicting the revolution of three spherical bodies. Interwoven were historical elements about Mao’s Cultural Revolution. I was intrigued, but mentally shelved it; we were preparing for the birth of our first child, and there was no way I would have time to read it.
My husband persisted. Netflix was coming out with a show based on the book, but even better, there was an older TV version produced and aired in China, available on Amazon Prime. So, we settled in and turned on the subtitles (which only I needed, since my husband is the son of two native Mandarin speakers). The show opens with a worldwide crisis in the scientific community. Science has “stopped working” — experiments are producing impossible results, and no one can explain it. Scientists are committing suicide in despair, and the world is quickly losing some of its most talented minds. Three possible explanations are presented: the supernatural, the rational, and the extraterrestrial. Perhaps God is involved. Perhaps there is science to explain it and humanity just does not understand it yet. Or perhaps there are aliens messing with our world.
The Chinese version of the show played with this question for the first 18 episodes. And I was completely hooked. It was a slow burn of watching relationships develop between the characters during a race against time to find the answer and save the lives of scientists, with periodic flashbacks to the Cultural Revolution. When the big reveal finally happened, it turned out that one scientist, Ye Wenjie, had invited a technologically superior alien race (whose planet was caught in a destructive orbit of three stars, hence the real-life unsolvable “three-body problem”) to come and conquer our world because of her anger about her father being a victim of Mao’s purges.
During this entire time, we assiduously avoided anything related to the Netflix show, for fear of spoilers. And rightly so — the Netflix trailer shows the aliens! This made me curious: what was the draw of watching the Netflix version if there was no suspense involving this question? Ultimately, we watched both: 30 episodes of the Chinese version and eight of the Netflix. (And no, I still haven’t read the book.)
The way we consume media has changed radically, with streaming services redefining the meaning of a “season.” The Chinese version breathed and explored and pondered in a way that the Netflix version had no time to do. This is not to wax nostalgic about broadcast TV. Thirty episodes of subtitled television requires patience, and there were moments when it dragged. But after taking the time to absorb the Chinese version, I found the Netflix version jarring, with a few plot holes large enough to threaten the integrity of the storyline.
More fascinating to me, though, were the cultural assumptions revealed by the differences in plot and characterization. The Chinese version followed the book in having the entire story take place in China, but the Netflix version moved everything after the Cultural Revolution to Oxford, England. It also replaced the main character, a prickly, middle-aged scientist named Wang Miao who gets his best ideas from playing with his young daughter, with a racially diverse group of attractive young scientists plagued by a PG-13 level of sexual tension.
This attempt at “diversity” felt canned to me; the show used predictable tropes to fast-track the young scientists’ relationships because it did not have time to do anything more authentic. In addition, it changed the essence of the story in a way that felt subtly denigrating toward China. In the homegrown version, China created the problem for the world and China would lead the world in solving it. In the Netflix version, China created the problem, but the West would solve it with all the flair of a British accent.
The Chinese version notably minimizes any violence in the scenes about the Cultural Revolution. Because of this, I was unclear why Ye Wenjie would invite this alien race to Earth, fully anticipating the destruction of humanity. My husband had to explain that in the book, her father had been brutally killed for affirming Einstein’s theory of relativity, and not just disgraced, as pictured on Chinese television. (I suspect that in China, people would intuitively fill in those details.)
What is clear, however, is that Ye Wenjie does not believe that salvation is possible for humanity. It is a race bound on destroying itself and its planet, and her only recourse is to broadcast the location of Earth to a conquering horde of aliens. She seeks judgment for her people’s sins and she seeks it outside humanity. The aliens’ qualification to be humanity’s judges is their superiority, that is, their transcendence.
Ye Wenjie calls the alien race Lord, which belies the ultimate atheism of the show. God is not the answer for humanity, and yet the devotees of the aliens grant them godlike status. Whatever they decide for humanity when they arrive is for the best. It is sin, judgment, and punishment, but carried out by judges who in their transcendence have no connection to or understanding of humanity. Yet Ye Wenjie’s faith is absolute; at no point in the Chinese version does she repent, or doubt her actions.
The Netflix show has no compunction about showing the gory details of the Cultural Revolution. But in this version, the most shocking truth is revealed when the aliens hack every screen in the world to send a message to humanity: You are bugs. They throw their transcendence in humanity’s face. This is the proverbial line in the sand. This is the truth that cannot be faced in the West, that in the eyes of this technologically superior alien race, humans are worthless.
Individuality is erased in a swarm of fragile, squashable insects. The concepts of sin and judgment are minimized as the remainder of the Netflix episodes turn to desperate preparation for war, and even Ye Wenjie joins the rest of humanity in conspiring against the aliens. (Honestly, I preferred the misguided hardliner Ye Wenjie who sought out judgment for her people over the Netflix version who naively created an interplanetary race war and then said, “Oops.”)
Both shows end with the same scene, with the main characters surveying swarms of insects and realizing that bugs are hard to wipe out. While this scene is supposed to create hope in the face of the annihilation of humanity, it felt empty to me. Humanity panics over being called bugs, and rightly so. There is something innate in us that demands to be recognized and valued as individuals. This is what causes Ye Wenjie to call to the aliens in the first place — outrage over how human beings treat each other, exemplified by her father’s murder at the hands of Red Guards.
This sin demanded judgment because an individual life matters. The survival of swarms of bugs, despite large portions of them being killed, does not solve this quandary. It means humanity endures, yes. But it provides no framework for why we should be valued as individuals or how we should handle it when humans fail to treat each other as valued individuals. And aliens as judges cannot provide that framework, either, because they have no touchpoint with humanity. Their superiority makes it impossible for them to empathize; all they see are bugs. Transcendence without immanence means that their only recourse is to attempt annihilation.
The story of The Three-Body Problem shows us that transcendence alone does not solve our problems in a meaningful way. What it fails to realize is that transcendence and immanence combined can offer hope to humanity. A God who is far enough above us to judge us and close enough to have compassion on us — he is the one who gives humans individual value and redeems us when we fail to value each other.
This is fascinating! Thank you, MJ, for writing this. We are, as it were, two puzzle-pieces here, in that I’ve read the book but not seen either series. I found the book in a hotel in Santiago de Compostela, where I was staying last May after walking the Camino. It was used, in a place for take-or-trade. I knew of the 3-body problem from college: it’s a problem of physics. I also like sci-fi, but had never heard of Liu Cixin, the author, who turns out to be hugely famous in China and elsewhere.
I took the book and read it on my flight home.
It has marvelous exchanges. Here’s one: Towards the end (page 376 in my copy), to her interrogator, the main character, Ye, says of the aliens: “A society with such advanced science must also have more advanced moral standards.” The interrogator responds: “Do you think this conclusion you drew is scientific?”
The book may simplify, but it moralistically it is not simplistic. Environmentalism is given a good voice here. As are: human imperfections; human exceptionalism; human unimportance; the value of intellectual work; the value of the wisdom of a smart street cop; and more.
In the Chinese original (pub. 2008) the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution are brought out mid-story, as flashbacks to explain motivations. In the English version (2014), it opens with those brutalities. This, I gather, was done in accord with the author’s intent and consent. I am not surprised to learn of differences between the two Netflix versions, nor of the downplaying of the violence of the Revolution, presumably to get past censors.
I hope others will see or read one or the other versions. The English book and the Chinese series (at least) both seem to offer much for Christians to ponder.
Victor, I agree that there’s so much in the storyline for Christians to consider, whether it comes out in the book or the show. An additional scene in the Netflix show that was striking is where Ye confronts the woman who killed her father, who says to Ye, “No one ever repents.” It was left out of the Chinese version. I didn’t work it into my article, because then the Netflix version of Ye does repent, but I didn’t feel like they did enough character development with her in the shortened version to show why she had a change of heart.
Now I just need to go read the book.