3 Body Problem: The Joke Was Great, and the Last Few Episodes Were Even Better

I haven't read the novel by Liu Cixin and its sequels, and I didn't read much about the series because I wanted to be surprised.  I'd say the first season of 3 Body Problem was superb -- a powerful mix of thought-provoking, stunning action, and heartbreaking human stories, all in support of a story of a life-threatening interstellar intelligent species, the San-Ti, who have been in contact with our planet for more than 50 years and now are approaching us, some 400 years away from arriving, which may mean the end of our species.  And there was a wise and funny joke about Einstein and God which I hadn't heard before.

But almost all of that happened in the last few episodes, and the beginning and middle of the eight-episode first season was bogged down with a computer game the interstellar beings are doling out to various people on Earth for various reasons.   I've always enjoyed science fiction about computer games interacting with reality, beginning with Orson Scott Card's path-breaking and brainy Ender's Game, but its situation in 3 Body Problem was needlessly repetitive.  The heart of 3 Body was closer to Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End and Damon Knight's "To Serve Man" (see this collection of Knight's stories), and the first season of the 3 Body television series, whatever may have been done in the novel, should have spent more time on that.  (This slow start is reminiscent of another iconic novel in science fiction, Frank Herbert's Dune, that also took a long time to get going, but once it did was fabulous, and led to not just a trilogy but a whole series, exceeded in excellence only by Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, in my opinion.)

But speaking of hearts and brains, biology was actually far more the star of the first season than was space travel.  This puts 3 Body Problem in a league with Andrew Niccol's debut motion picture Gattaca.  If I'm making 3 Body sound derivative, that's because it is, but that's ok, because the first season puts all of these perennial elements of science fiction together in an original, compelling way.  It's not every day you see a science fiction series starting in Mao's China and its emphasis on ideology over truth (a problem unfortunately arising now in the United States and other parts of the world, off the fiction screen and for real), moving into a life-and-death James Bondian present fighting for the survival in the future of our very species.  

Ironically, the unflattering depiction of intellectual life in Mao's China at the beginning of the 3 Body Problem television series contradicts the warning that five Republican US Senators sent to Netflix in 2020 that the TV series would just be spreading Chinese propaganda. Of course, those Senators and no one other than the creators of the TV series had any idea what would actually be depicted in the TV series, and thus those Senators based their concerns on the novel. The original Chinese publication of the novel indeed did not begin with the jolting scene of a physicist brutally killed in the throes of the cultural revolution -- because he believes in truth over ideology -- but that scene did appear in the middle of the original Chinese novel, and at the beginning of the English translation (Liu Cixin confirms that he wrote the novel with that scene at the beginning). Apparently those US Senators didn't take the time to read the novel before offering their ill-founded concerns about the TV series.

In any case, I don't recall seeing anything quite like this TV series at all, and I'm eagerly awaiting the second season and more.  The dialog, by the way, was excellent, as was the acting.  Nearly everyone was new to me, other than Game of Thrones' Liam Cunningham, and it was good to see him on the screen again. Kudos to David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo for creating the series, and kudos to me for not having to warn you about spoilers in this review, because they really aren't any, are there?

Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams 1.3 Human Is: Compassionate or Alien?

Humans in outer space has been adapted to the screen less frequently than other themes of Philip K. Dick.   But his work in that area is equally brilliant and sometimes better than his better-known themes - I've thought that ever since I read his "Beyond Lies the Wub" first published in 1952 - and in the case of Bladerunner ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"), the two motifs (outer space and robots) are in effect combined.

Human Is, the third standalone episode in Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams 10-episode anthology now streaming on Amazon Prime, and which I'm reviewing one episode at at a time (see my review of the first episode for how I'll be reviewing these episodes), is just about outer space, and is science fiction at its very zenith.  Though, if we're dealing with Philip K. Dick, nothing he writes is ever just about that, whatever that is, because it's always imbued with the question that haunts and animates just about everything he wrote:  is it real or dream, human or android, this dimension or another one?

In Human Is, the question is whether Silas (powerfully played, of course, by Bryan Cranston) is human or Rexorian, a dangerous species from another planet that likes to inhabit its human hosts.  Silas left on the mission cold and distant to his wife Vera (played with sensitivity by Essie Davis, last seen - by me - in The White Princess and Game of Thrones) and returns full of tenderness, consideration, and lovemaking that Vera tells him she never experienced like that from him before.  Silas nearly died on this mission.   So is his new, much better behavior the result of that experience changing him, making him more human, or because he is no longer just Silas but a meld of Rexorian and human?

I'm not going to tell you ending.  What I will say is that this is one beautiful piece of work, down to the cinematography by David Katznelson, the directing by Francesca Gregorini, and the writing for television by Jessica Mecklenburg.  And the acting not only sails with Cranston and Davis, but strong supporting performances by Ruth Bradley (last seen in Humans - an android series about as Dickian as it gets) and Game of Thrones' Liam Cunningham.

Having now seen three episodes of Electric Dreams, I'd say it's right up there with The Twilight Zone, and better (from what I've seen) than Black Mirror.

See also Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams 1.1 Real Life: Mutually Alternate Realities ...  1.2 Autofac: Human v Machine ... 1.4 Crazy Diamond: DNA Batteries ... 1.5 The Hood Maker: Telepathy and Police ... 1.6 Safe & Sound: This Isn't A Drill ... 1.7 The Father Thing: Dick from Space ... 1.8 Impossible Planet: Eye of the Beholder ... 1.9 The Commuter: Submitted for Your Approval ... 1.10: Kill All Others: Too Close for Comfort