I'm a bit late to the party, but finished 3 Body Problem last night. Overall I liked it, but didn't love it. It's difficult to say why I didn't love it though. Spoilers for the entire show below.
When the VR game stuff started I was a bit worried because I didn't really think it was that cool of a concept. But I actually came to really like it when I realized that we were actually learning real stuff about the San-Ti behind a veil of human-looking characters. Without having ever seen the San-Ti, we actually have a pretty good base for what they're about, and even some cool hints to their history and even physiology, which I thought was neat.
I actually like most of the characters in this show, I thought they were well written and well acted. And obviously the Judgment Day scene is crazy. I honestly didn't think they would do it, but damn, they really went all out on that one, very uncomfortable and memorable. That said, there are just little bits and pieces spread across this show that just give me an underlying sense that stuff just doesn't make sense. Maybe I'm missing stuff, or it will be answered in later seasons.
As memorable and striking as the boat scene was, I don't think it made a lot of sense. The whole reason they couldn't do a normal operation was because they were worried that they would damage the information they needed, and their solution is to... literally shred the boat into tiny slices?
If the San-Ti are a collective hive mind, supervised by a basically omnipresent hyper-intelligent AI, how could a single lone pacifist intercept Wenjie's initial message and warn her not to reply without the entire species knowing about it instantly? And why is Wenjie in any way surprised when the San-Ti turn out to be hostile when literally the first piece of information she ever learns about them is that Earth will be conquered if the San-Ti ever learn of it's existence? I thought she was going to reply anyways because her experiences had made her lose faith in humanity and she just wanted to bring about it's end and cause chaos. I just thought it was really strange when I found out that she actually thought they were coming to save us and teach us a better way of life or something. Don't really understand where that came from.
A ticking clock is usually good for establishing urgency or stakes, but as others have pointed out, I do think the show suffers somewhat from that ticking clock counting down 400 years. I do actually like the concept of that, and it's actually realistic. But the narrative itself suffers somewhat from that, and is probably part of the reason why people perceive the final few episodes as not as engaging. I haven't read the books, and I'm sure they find a good story to tell anyway, but I have a difficult time seeing how this plays out in the rest of the series. Seems to me you either jump forward in time if the San-Ti invasion is ever going to be a thing, in which case all the characters that anchor us to the story are probably long dead; or you play out the entire story well before the San-Ti ever reach Earth, in which case the narrative suggests that we're building toward something we won't get to see. We seem to still be able to have immediate conflict with the San-Ti through the sophon, so I'm sure there is still a way to tell a cool story here, but as of right now it feels like a risky move.
Speaking of the sophon, I am a bit confused as to why humanity isn't entirely and utterly fucked. When the sophon revealed itself and stated that it was going to stop human progress, I just thought "okay well that's it then, there's no way to overcome that." But then it's sort of just... dropped. For understandable reasons, otherwise there would be no story. But it seems like humanity is carrying on just fine in using technology to prepare for the future invasion. I thought the sophon was basically just going to shut down all modern computer-based technology, throwing us back to industrial society, making us completely helpless to resist the San-Ti when they arrive. From what I've seen, the sophon seems perfectly capable of doing this. So why is everything still perfectly fine aside from an inability to run particle accelerators (unless we fire one up on the moon, in which case we can still do that too)? Literally the most significant things the sophon did after it said it was going to halt human progress completely was to hack into two cars and speak to a few people through a TV screen.
These things aren't really all that bad, it's just that there are oddly many things like this that constantly took me out of the story, even if just for brief moments. As I said, maybe some of this stuff is addressed in the books or will be addressed in future seasons, but that doesn't help me right now very much.
I realized as I was writing this post that I sound more negative than I intended when I started. I actually did like the show, and I look forward to future seasons. I guess it is a testament to the show that it made me think this much about it, or even care about any issues, something that not all shows can do.
Topic: Stuff on Netflix (Read 41018 times)
