Hogan Reviews

I was really hopeful when this series was announced as I was always interested in the three books the series is based on but they’re all massive, and given I only read for like 10-15 minutes before going to bed tackling a series like that would tie me up for most of the year. So while this series has changed a few things (including setting a lot of it in London rather than all of it in China and therefore the nationality of a lot of the characters) by the sounds of it this is a good adaptation. Well, at the very least, I can confirm it was really fun to watch with a great high-concept sci-fi story at its core. I had some issues with a lot of the central characters, but not enough to stop me from enjoying myself. Let’s take a look…

The series kicks off in 60s revolutionary China, where a young Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng as the young version, Rosalind Chao as the older one) sees her father brutally murdered for teaching Western knowledge and then she herself ends up in a labour camp. Due to her knowledge in physics though she is eventually reassigned to a radio telescope lab and works there, where they’re trying to reach alien life out in the greater universe. Eventually thanks to Ye’s idea to bounce the signal off the Sun she gets a response, warning her that if she contacts them proper they will come and conquer Earth, to which she responds to let them come as humanity can’t look after itself, which given her recent experiences, you can’t blame her really. That leads to the present day (for the record that was spread out via flashbacks over the course of the first few episodes) and we meet our lead protagonists, who for the most part are really hard to actually like.

Ye’s father finds out first hand that China’s 60s were anything but groovy…

Our main quintet are all extremely intelligent in their separate but often related fields but have all in one way or another failed to capitalise on their abilities: Auggie Salazar (Eiza Gonzalez) seems to have come out the best as she is the head of a lab that’s creating super-durable nanofibers but seems to be the most miserable, never smiling and sarcastically complaining about everything; Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) has the character trait of “smart person” and just goes along with whatever is presented to her with little to no resistance and therefore never develops in any way; Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo) is working for a particle accelerator that gets shut down in episode 1 and then spends the rest of the series literally doing nothing other than smoking weed / taking drugs and being the person other characters relate exposition to (with the exception of the very last episode which I’ll get to in the spoilers); Will Downing (Alex Sharp) is thankfully a really likeable person who became a teacher but right at the start of the series is diagnosed with cancer and debates about finally professing his love to Jin before his untimely death; and Jack Rooney (John Bradley) turned away from science to make snacks and drinks and became extremely rich and as a result is an arrogant knob, but at least that’s the actual intention of the character. Thankfully Benedict Wong’s Clarence Shi character was a highlight, playing the old disgruntled, down-on-his luck policeman role but belonging to a highly secretive government agency instead, he really bounces well off his sweary, blunt boss Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham), who was also fun to watch.

Benedict’s actual expression when he read the series’ synopsis…

Rounding out the cast is Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce, at least in the present day) who runs a cult of sorts based around the aliens Ye contacted, and Tatiana Haas (Marlo Kelly), who is one of his most trusted followers. It’s this “cult” that are the main focus for the first half of the show as Evans is legitimately in contact with the aliens, known as the San-Ti, and they have used their higher technology to manipulate events to prepare for their arrival in 400 years’ time, and by “prepare for their arrival” I mean intentionally stunt our technological growth so we don’t pose a threat to them when they finally get here. You see at the start Clarence is looking into a string of scientist suicides that start to link up with a timer ticking down and/or a strange VR headset, and Auggie meets Tatiana and is told to stop her breakthrough research into nanofibers and is given a countdown timer in front of her vision as a warning. It eventually works, she shuts the project down just after they create a fibre so small you can see it but it slices through metal like its nothing. Eventually Jin gets her hands on one of the VR headsets and is transported to an extremely realistic world where she is given a set of tasks revolving around the “Three Body Problem”, or how can a civilization survive in a trinary star system as the constant fluctuation in weather and gravity is impossible to predict. Jin and eventually Jack keep playing levels each time failing to save the people but each time showing intelligence in one way or another, until they’re invited to a secret meeting in the real world.

It’s here where Jin and Jack are told about the San-Ti and while Jin of course accepts everything and wants to join, Jack is understandably sceptical to say the least, even if the tech they’ve been using is clearly far in advance of anything humanity could create. The San-Ti come from a trinary star system and so the VR scenarios were recreations of moments their race have actually lived, just with human people put in place to make it easier to understand for the people with the headsets on (though one moment where the people are dehydrated and folded like a sheet only to be resurrected by being thrown in water makes it easier to see how they’re clearly not like us physically) Jack is killed by Tatiana, though she doesn’t appear on any CCTV footage, which convinces Jin to swap sides again and quickly agrees to help Wade’s shadowy organisation spy on a secret meeting where the head of the cult is revealed not to be Mike Evans but the now older Ye Wenjie. The meeting is broken up by armed intervention and Mike Evans and his massive ship become a target for Wade’s group, but at the same time Evans accidentally reveals humanity’s ability to lie and deceive, which convinces the San-Ti that humans can’t be trusted so they stop talking to him and soon reveal themselves to the world with the message “you are bugs” appearing on all screens across the world and the sky turning into a gigantic mirror with a massive eye looking down from above…

The sky begins to turn into a mirror in the big trailer-featured set piece of the show!

The series has some issues, no doubt. Not just the fact that Auggie and Jin are set up as the central focus and I didn’t like either of them (though that is a big issue!) but some early episodes suffer from both a poor script and some serious exposition issues as characters just drop plot details or their own character’s backstories like they’re reading a Wikipedia entry out loud, all while normally smoking for some reason. Seriously, episodes 1 and 2 are full of back-to-back sequences of characters smoking and lighting up all the time, then it settles to a more standard occasional scene afterwards, it’s really weird! Those two episodes are the only two directed by Derek Tsang so maybe its just something he really likes to do and wants to make sure to get it in every scene possible. Well, anyway, after the smoke-sposition episodes it settles into a good hard sci-fi groove, with odd fun government agency scenes with Wade and Chi, again the definite highlight of the show character-wise. The effects are good too, which you’d expect from a big Netflix production, though this isn’t a massive alien invasion story or anything…

Overall Thoughts:

Jin realises she’s in a realistic computer game where a civilization is being destroyed over and over by destructive weather yet somehow its better than living on Earth in the 2020s…

A wordy review (it’s quite complex story-wise, even if a lot of the characters are the opposite) but overall I really enjoyed the series in spite of most of the leads either being annoying or just not registering with me as the actual sci-fi and concepts presented were so good. Fingers crossed for more, as I don’t know if I’d be bothered to read the books if it doesn’t happen, but I do want to find out what happens next!

In a really weird scene Wade wants to stop Evans’ ship but doesn’t want to hit it with explosives as it might damage the conversation logs with the San-Ti, nor does he want to give them advanced notice to allow them to destroy them, so he gets Auggie to create a wall of her tiny nanofibers across a river and slices the massive ship and all its 1,000+ inhabitants to pieces, which is surely just as likely to damage records as firing missiles… even more so really as the missiles would just damage one part where as these strings cut everything (and everyone) to bits. Well, anyway, it works as they find the logs being clung to by a now very dead Mike Evans. Auggie now hates herself (even more!) for agreeing to help kill loads of people, including children, which… well, yeah. Understandable, though you did know that going in… Anyway, a short while later Jin (who is fully on board Wade’s group) and Thomas Wade himself put on two headsets and commune with the San-Ti (using an avatar played by Sea Shimooka) where they reveal that they have created four super intelligent AI computers and reduced them to the size of protons and sent two of these “Sophons” to Earth and thanks to them being quantumly connected they can communicate and control them despite the 400 years of space travel between them (particles that size being able to travel super fast and all) It’s these Sophons that have been making scientists commit suicide by showing them countdowns and spreading themselves out across the whole Earth’s atmosphere to deliver their message earlier. It also means they can listen in on everything humanity does and says and will go out of their way to make sure technology never progresses.

Safe to say this isn’t a fairytale ending, I’m afraid…

Soon Wade gets the idea to send someone into deep space to have a good look at the San-Ti before they arrive but in order to get to the right travelling speed it’s eventually decided that not only does the craft need to be propelled by a long string of nuclear blasts in space at exact intervals but that a human was too heavy so the decision is made instead to send a frozen brain into space and hope the San-Ti use their technology to recreate a body for the brain. Yep, that’s a plan alright. Jin plans the nuclear path, Auggie creates the solar sail (for the people who made her kill a thousand people, then leaves in a huff after her work is done because she re-realised Wade is willing to sacrifice for the greater good) and Will is picked to be the brain as he is intelligent and dying anyway. He inherited Jack’s fortune and spent most of it “buying” a distant star and naming it after Jin in a final act of love, something Jin doesn’t find out about until after his brain is already in a jar (so to speak). Good bittersweet drama, if nothing else. Sadly after all that the plan doesn’t work anyway due to a random technical fault and Will’s brain is sent randomly spiralling off into deep space… oh well!

Humanity begins to come up with plans to deal with the San-Ti, including Wade deciding to freeze himself and pop out of his pod once a year to make sure everything is on track so he can face off with the San-Ti himself in 400 years’ time, while the rest of the world’s governments came up with a plan that as the Sophons can see and hear all but can’t read minds they pick three “wallfacers” who will come up with plans to defeat them in their heads and direct people to achieve these plans without revealing what their actual plans are to anyone (not sure that would work out, but sure, why not?) but to make matters weirder Saul, who as a reminder has spent the series doing literally nothing, is picked as one of the three which leads to a good chunk of Episode 8 being dedicated to him and his issues after becoming a target for the San-Ti, which frankly I didn’t really care about because I was so down on the character that suddenly being told he was important and I should care about him came way too late. At least Clarence Shi was made his bodyguard so we got more of the character… In the end Jin and Saul, with Shi, raise their spirits after the whole brain rocket plan went tits up to set up the next series and end on a somewhat hopeful note, I guess…