First Impressions: Netflix’s Three Body Problem
This is not a review of the whole series, it is just my first impressions of the first couple of episodes.
Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu was the last Hugo-winning novel of the year that will ever enjoy any real broad spectrum respect from actual readers as opposed to the literary community. The translation of the first book of Liu’s Remembrance of Earth Past trilogy arrived in the middle of the Great Puppy War. It was so good it enjoyed enough support from both Toristas and the Puppies that it handily won Best Novel of the Year in 2015. That was the last time that would happen.
In some ways, Three Body came across as a bit of a throwback to the golden age of science fiction, because the science was rock-hard, (which the Puppies were sort of championing). Yet the narrative was deeply character-driven. Three Body seemed to finally have delivered on the promise of the 1970s New Wave school that never materialized (as represented by the Toristas).
The other two books in the trilogy are The Dark Forrest and Death’s End. In all candor, I have not read Death’s End at the time of this writing. I intend to, but the truth is I have to take Liu’s work in small bites. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great stuff but it’s also very, very dour. Consequently, I’m not in a good position to judge the whole of the series and I kind of need to be. You see, Netflix’s Three Body is kind of an abridgment of the trilogy.
A lot of people are blaming Beinhoff and Wiess, the comedy duo that train wrecked the final season of Game of Thrones. However, they didn’t have any say in this. The abridgment was ordered by Netflix. It’s not even the first time they’ve done it. Shadow and Bone while telling Leigh Bardugo’s Starkov trilogy of romances, also crammed the (much more engaging) characters from her Crows books into the series as well.
Netflix’s business model strongly favors a two-seasons-and-done approach. Their TV shows exist solely to generate new subscriptions or bring back old ones. When a show gets renewed everybody expects and usually gets a raise. The problem for Netflix is obvious, what interest the show generated was pretty much expended in the first season, the show is becoming worth less, yet costing more with each season.
Stranger Things is an exception because it’s so massively popular.
As for Cobra Kai, that one is an oddball. It started off on the now-defunct YouTube Red, Netflix bought it up because the first two seasons had already been streamed and the third was in the can when YouTube pulled the plug. They started with three seasons already made, so adding two more wasn’t much different from their usual business practice.
The Remembrance of Earth Trilogy is a huge work filled with a lot of big ideas and few of them are going to be easy to explain to the average audience. Like Dune the word ‘unadaptable’ is applied to it. And Like Dune, it’s already been adapted three times. The Chinese made a couple of versions of it.
The first thing that might surprise a fan of the book who didn’t know how Netflix does business is the fact that this story is not taking place in China. It’s taking place in London with a hugely diverse cast of cliches. The producers are claiming that this is to reflect the huge global crisis of the Trisolarians.
Rather than the huge tax incentives that the UK pays out to production companies. Those tax incentives do come with strings attached. Did I mention the diverse cast of cliches? Yeah, the diversity is a legal requirement if you shoot in the UK. It’s not like these production companies object at all, so far as American producers are concerned this is like being paid vast amounts of cash to snort cocaine and bang call girls.
There have been other changes but I approve of some of them.
Now that whole thing about the abridgment of the trilogy works better than you think it would because the Remembrance of Earth was a non-linear story to begin with. They are just juggling the order of events around. I don’t mind that. Since this is about the trilogy as a whole it honestly makes more sense to do it this way.
Some characters are being combined which is almost avoidable in a screen adaptation. You won’t confuse readers with a vast array of characters but you will lose an audience.
The writers changed the name of the hostile aliens from the Trisolarians to the San Ti. This is also fine. It was the translator who came up with the name Trisolarian, which obviously just means three suns. Liu called his aliens the “San Ti Ren” or Three Body People. This truthfully feels like an improvement.
Benedict Wong, who is obviously playing the police detective Da Shi is now ‘Clarence.’ I’ll take that one in stride because (a) family names are critical to the Han but nicknames are almost more important than a birthname. And (b) he’s credited as Da Shi at IMDB. What’s important here is that he’s being played by Benedict Wong who I’ve always pictured in the role. So have you admit it.
The only other Chinese character you’ll recognize from the books is Ye Wenje. Her story is pretty much unaltered. Except she was in a relationship with Wade. I think this was some necessary condensation of the material but I don’t know for certain how well this will work.
You’ll recognize several faces from Game of Thrones, which isn’t a surprise since this is Benioff and Weiss. Since we are getting that band back together the performances are solid.
My first impressions are that it’s not unbearably woke, but is an adaptation that is Woke Washed.
As for the whole of the work I’m reserving judgment until I’ve finished this season. If you were trying to decide if you wanted to give it a shot or not, I’ve given you enough to decide that on your own.
