3 Body Problem marks the return of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to television after five years away. Though the pair executive produced the Sandra Oh academia dramedy The Chair, their role on this Netflix series is far more hands-on here, with the duo credited as co-writers on four episodes of the sci-fi series they co-created with True Blood’s Alexander Woo. Game of Thrones ended ignominiously, but time (and a successful spin-off series like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:House of the Dragon) heals all wounds. Heading in, I was curious: would 3 Boꩲdy Problem be more early Thrones♍ or more late Thrones?

The answer is: a bit of both, and also neither. Like late Thrones, it's messy, but with a hook that's nearly as compelling as the White Walkers we met in that series' earliest moments. I've never read the novels on which the series is based (Liu Cixin's The Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy) but as far as source texts go, it's hard to do better than Martin's fantasy series. At least in this adaptation, the world and characters Benioff and Weiss are working with aren't nearly as rich or believable as what they were working with on GOT. That's the neither.

Like the introduction of the frozen interlopers from beyond the Wall, 3 Body Problem kicks off with a mysterious (and time-sensitive) threat. Auggie Salazar (Eiza González, following her 2022 should-be star turn in the criminally underseen Ambulance) is a high-level scientist doing groundbreaking work on microfibers. But, when an unexplained countdown appears that only she can see — it seems to be imprinted on her eyeballs so that she can’t not see it — a mysterious woman appears, telling her t💮hat the only way to stop the countdown 🎀from reaching zero is to cease her scientific work.

The first few episodes set up quite a few threads that, at first, don't seem related. A detective (Benedict Wong) is investigating a spate of suicides. One of those deaths is Vera Ye (Vedette Lim), a leading expert on particle physics. Her death brings together a group of friends, also mostly scientists, including Auggie, Saul (Jovan Adepo), Jin (Jess Hong), Will (Alex Sharp), and Jack (John Bradley). Jack's the odd man out as a businessman who has made his fortune in chips. Not microchips or anything, chips like crisps.

Another thing that's happening: science is broken. For reasons that no one understands, all previously established rules about how the world works are no longer proving true in experiments. Also, there's a futuristic VR game — housed in a gleaming, seamless, metal helmet — that appears to be a dozen or so generations down the line from current tech like the Apple Vision Pro. Meanwhile, the story is intermittently flashing back to 1960s China, where a young woman who saw her father brutally executed by the Communist Party is recruited to work at a top secret facility..

There’s a lot going on. Toward the end of the series, I thought, “Oh yeah, this is the show about people seeing a mysteri🍸ous countdown,” and marveled at how far it had moved away from that initial idea. It’s all related, and one of the joys of the series is seeing how seemingly disparate threads🅷 actually knit together. But it can feel a little messy at times, like the series has at least as many premises as the title has bodies, at times orbiting each other, and at times colliding.

The series is balancing multiple different timelines, and does it well. But, it also offers up three hooks that are individually sturdy enough to hang a show on, which makes the early going feel a bit all over the place from episode to episode. I was never confused about what was happening, but I was wondering why the countdown, introduced in the pilot and prominently featured in the show's advertising, seemed like an afterthought after the first few episodes. In Game of Thrones, you had different point-of-view characters pursuing different goals. Here, it feels more like the show has several different premises.

The clearest example of the show's messiness is a big set piece toward the middle of the season (that I need to talk about in very vague terms, because again, it’s a massive spoiler). It’s extremely cool, ridiculously gory, and maybe the best directed bit of the whole series. But, the emotional stakes are so lightly sketched ahead of the moment that, when it happens, it sort of breaks the reality of the show. Characters are shown to be affected by the violence, but it was planned, and none of the people involved (one of whom seems like they would strenuously object) challenged it. I suspect it will get written about as the series’ Red Wedding moment, but the motivations behind the Red Wedding were so clear that you can't believe it wasn't obvious in hindsight. This has the opposite effect. You look back on the events of the series that led up to it and believe them a little less, believe the characters as real people a little less.

There are some great performances anchoring the action, even if the story occasionally gets away from itself. Hong is particularly great as the confident scientist driving much of the plot. Despite playing such an intellectual role, the thing that struck me most about her performance was her physicality. She makes the character believable through micro-expressions, with the slightest smirk helping to sell the moment she first begins to understand the VR game or a hard-driving walk selling her determination. Sharp is similarly strong in a quiet performance that sings in the details. He undergoes a physical transformation over the course of 3 Body Problem's eight episodes, and is utterly believable the whole way through.

Benioff, Weiss, and Woo have cooked up an interesting dish. The strong flavors don't entirely come together, but you can't deny the quality of the ingredients.

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