What’s Next for 3 Body Problem?
If you’ve finished bingeing 3 Body Problem and are a little bummed, we feel you. After all, the fate of Earth hangs in precarious balance, our characters are no closer to defeating the San-Ti, and it seems impossible for us puny human bugs to defend ourselves against an alien civilization that has everyone under all-seeing surveillance 24/7. Thankfully, showrunners David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo say they’ve already “got better than a rough idea” for what could happen next in this adaptation of Chinese writer Liu Cixin’s sci-fi book trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past.
Amid the somewhat mixed reviews that greeted this debut season of 3 Body Problem, it’s important to remember that Game of Thrones, Benioff and Weiss’s other big, expensive genre-TV project, became appointment television only in season two with electrifying sequences like the Red Wedding and the Battle of the Blackwater. The showrunners have acknowledged in interviews that the first book – which most of the first season is based on – is the weakest in the trilogy. Liu’s writing really starts flying in the second and third books, The Dark Forest and Death’s End, with vivid passages of interstellar mutiny, geopolitical intrigue, and spaceships getting blown up like a string of children’s firecrackers. This all sets the stage for an even more ambitious second season, the showrunners’ stated hope being that it will be part of a four-season arc.
Netflix hasn’t yet officially commissioned a second season, but Benioff recently told Games Radar that they are “pushing forward full steam” regardless, adding, “If we do get a second season, we’ll need to hit the ground running in terms of pre-production and production to get it out to people in some kind of reasonable time.” So: Initial signs are promising enough to begin speculating about what may await us in that potential second season. Thankfully, there’s plenty of material to draw from in the books, and the Easter eggs and hints sprinkled throughout the first season help illuminate what might lie ahead.
Spoilers follow for all of 3 Body Problem and the Remembrance of Earth’s Past book series.
Saul will be a flop Wallfacer — at first
At the end of season one, Saul has no idea why the San-Ti want him dead or why he’s been selected as a Wallfacer. If Benioff, Weiss, and Woo stay true to the story of Luo Ji, Saul’s parallel in the books, expect him to fumble his responsibilities and opt to spend the unlimited Wallfacer budget living the nihilistic high life. For Luo Ji, that meant a remote lakeside villa with his dream woman, a private chef, and a fully stocked wine cellar. For Saul, that might mean top-shelf weed and acid – and in terms of his dream woman, who would be a better match than his are-they-or-aren’t-they friend Auggie Salazar, whom he once described as “beautiful in a boring way”?
Of course, it isn’t all smooth sailing for Luo Ji in the books. After getting impatient with his lack of progress, the authorities end up putting Luo Ji’s now-wife and their child into hibernation to motivate the lazy Wallfacer. That encourages him to revisit a mysterious conversation with Ye Wenjie wherein she advised him to think about “cosmic sociology.” A subsequent near-death experience on the frozen lake inspires the epiphany that will lead to a truce with the aliens: dark forest deterrence. It’s the idea that every civilization in the universe is an armed hunter stalking through the night, trying its best not to be heard. If you broadcast the location of your own planet, as Ye Wenjie did all those decades ago, you’re essentially screaming for attention and writing an open invite for your own annihilation. By extension, threatening to expose your enemies’ presence is a pretty effective way to head off any violence from them.
In 3 Body Problem, Ye Wenjie doesn’t talk about cosmic sociology in her pivotal final convo with Saul – instead, she relays a joke about Einstein getting kicked in the balls by God for having the temerity to play the violin in Heaven (God, you see, is a saxophonist). If you squint, you can spot the basic tenets of the dark forest. Don’t want to incur the wrath of a superior being? Try to be as quiet as you possibly can. Broadcasting the position of the San-Ti planet would make it easy for any other alien civilization to spot Earth, so Saul might broadcast what Luo Ji called a “spell” – the location of a distant star. As the sophons are still listening in, Saul won’t be able to explain himself to the Wallfacer committee, but his theory about dark-forest deterrence will be proved right when his target is destroyed by an even more advanced alien civilization, spooking the San-Ti.
Meet the Wallbreakers
In the books, the shadowy ETO (Earth-Trisolaris Organization) is devoted to undermining humanity and preparing the ground for invasion, and they’re understandably a little freaked out by the idea of the Wallfacers. After regrouping in the VR game, they decide to appoint an elite ETO member to every Wallfacer. Just like the Wallfacers, these Wallbreakers are given unlimited resources and are tasked with figuring out the Wallfacers’ true plans to protect Earth from their alien overlords. Cue psychologically fraught confrontations between each Wallfacer and their Wallbreaker, leading to Wallfacer breakdowns, suicide, and, in one particularly vivid scene, one of them getting stoned to death. The only one who escapes the fate of getting a Wallbreaker? Luo Ji, because the members of the ETO are told by their Lord that he is his own Wallbreaker.
The Wallfacers have changed in the Netflix adaptation — there’s three, not four of them: a Kurdish war hero, a Chinese military historian and general, and Saul. Expect the first two to encounter their own Wallbreakers in the next season (Tatiana, perhaps?) and our favorite stoner lab assistant to spend most of it being his own worst enemy.
A big jump forward in time
At the end of season one, the San-Ti fleet is 400 years away from reaching our solar system, which means that humanity has a relatively long lead time to prepare for invasion. Viewers already know that Wade is keen to hibernate, which will allow him to keep tabs on the progress of Earth’s planetary defense through the decades. But Wade probably won’t be alone. Other characters in Remembrance of Earth’s Past also opt for deep freeze: Zhang Behai, Luo Ji, Da Shi, and Cheng Xin — or as they’re known in the Netflix adaptation, Raj, Saul, Clarence, and Jin. Staying faithful to this would mean the showrunners don’t need to slog through centuries of exposition to establish the huge jumps in technology that allow humanity to travel through space — so expect a highly convenient House of the Dragon-style fast-forward at some point in the next season.
Watch out for the droplet
It’s no secret that Benioff and Weiss love a big, dramatic set piece. In fact, Benioff already hinted at another Judgment Day-like scene in a potential second season. “There’s one scene, if we get to it, we’re golden — like when we got to the Red Wedding on Thrones,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. If you’re waiting for another Red Wedding-level body count, look no further than Liu’s jaw-dropping twist in The Dark Forest involving the destruction of almost every single ship in humanity’s space fleet.
The second book jumps ahead 200 years into the future, when Earth detects the presence of a probe racing ahead of the alien fleet: a seemingly harmless 11-foot droplet of what appears to be liquid mercury. Humanity’s interstellar warships are now bigger, more powerful, and faster than ever before, and they’re all keen to be the ones to make first contact. How bad could a teeny teardrop be, right?
Big mistake: It turns out that the droplet isn’t a peace offering but a super-lethal weapon that ping-pongs among the assembled ships, destroying almost 2,000 of them. Some captains even panic and immediately hit the accelerators without preparing their crew, and the resulting G-force liquefies everyone to death in an explosion of guts. And you thought Robb Stark and his pregnant wife getting stabbed to death was bad.
Raj in space
British Navy officer Raj Varma is roughly analogous to The Dark Forest’s Zhang Behai, an ultracompetent member of the Chinese navy who later becomes an integral part of Space Force, Earth’s interplanetary army. Like Zhang Behai, Raj is the son of a former soldier and is appointed to the space-fleet team. If season two follows the books, Raj will become one the first humans to travel into space — only for him to mutiny, seize control of a spaceship, and jet off into the darkness of space. When the droplet destroys almost every other warship in existence, Raj is hailed as a hero by the surviving ships and establishes the beginning of a new space-based human civilization. In the books, Zhang Behai also proves to be a mercenary commander, one willing to destroy other ships in order to strip-mine them for fuel and resources. Which makes the story of Raj’s Indian-army father killing and stealing resources from enemy troops all the more foreboding …
Fairy tales, paper boats, and Jin’s fishbowl are more important than you may think
In season one’s tearjerker conclusion to Will and Jin’s unrequited love story, Will embraces euthanasia and donates his brain to her nuclear-powered probe — only for the spacecraft to go off course and disappear into the vastness of the cosmos. Don’t worry: This isn’t the last we’ll see of him. Benioff, Weiss, and Woo have sprinkled plenty of hints that he’ll be back.
In Liu’s third book, Death’s End, Yun Tianming, Will’s counterpart in the series, is reunited with his long-lost love after being resurrected by the Trisolarians (a.k.a. the San-Ti). Under the watchful eye of his alien benefactors, he tells her three fairy tales — coded messages about how mankind can survive in a hostile universe that wants to destroy them. As we found out from Mike Evans reading “Hansel and Gretel” and “Little Red Riding Hood” to his lord, the San-Ti are unable to understand metaphor, meaning they’re ill-equipped to recognize how fairy tales (or jokes) could mask something much more important. And recall that one of Will’s prized possessions is an old book of fairy tales gifted to him by Jin — foreshadowing much?
Then there are the paper boats that Jin folds for Will at his beachside retreat, one of which he sweetly imagines himself drifting in as he breathes his last. In Death’s End, Cheng Xin decodes the meaning of one of the fairy tales with the use of an origami boat and is able to unlock the secret of light-speed technology. As for that fishbowl that Jin gives Will as a present in episode six? Well, let’s just say that Remembrance of Earth’s Past quite literally ends on an image of a fish leaping out of what Liu describes as a “watery sphere” — one that calls to mind a fishbowl in more ways than one.