How To Solve The Three-Body Problem Struggle Session
Yuri's review of The Three-Body Problem (Netflix) and the collateral damage of Chinese Cultural Revolution struggle sessions
Comrades: The Three-Body Problem is a struggle session.
The Three-Body Problem has made history as the first mainstream Hollywood production to film a Chinese Cultural Revolution struggle session. During the opening 5 minutes of the series, astrophysicist Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death after her mother denounces him. If you watch nothing else from the show, this graphic scene will shake you to your core. It is a visceral portrayal of antihuman forces we are up against in the real-life modern world of the American Woke Revolution (my next post will present a reimagined version).
Struggle sessions are among the cruelest punishments humans have ever inflicted upon each other. In a culture where face is so important, to be shamed and assaulted in front of everyone you know is a fate just as bad as death. Over 2 million people were killed during the Cultural Revolution on top of tens of millions from the Great Leap Forward, though the true toll will never be known due to CCP commie censorship. It is a minor miracle that author Liu Cixin was able to publish The Three-Body Problem novel as a Chinese citizen in 2008. He originally hid the struggle session scene in the middle of the long 3-book series, then moved it to the beginning. Liu deserves all the accolades including the Hugo Award and this TV adaptation.
***SPOILER ALERT: The remainder of the review will contain plot spoilers. The show jumps around between different time periods and virtual reality, but I will discuss it in a linear fashion. Since I have not read any of the books, I don’t know any plot lines from them and will not be making any comparisons between the TV show and the books.
Like many class enemy children of her era, Ye is banished to the countryside for hard labor. CCP commissars identify her talent and assign her to a secret military base that operates a radio telescope dish. She devises a plan to amplify communications using the sun to reach beyond our galaxy. Even though the commissars reject it, she disobeys their orders and begins transmitting messages into deep space. Several years later, she receives responses from aliens called the “San-Ti Ren” (in Chinese: three-body people).
Due to her exile and family’s bloody humiliation, Ye resents humanity so much that she believes the aliens deserve to conquer us. Her character is similar to Emperor Xi Jinping, whose own father Xi Zhongxun was punished at a struggle session (picture below). Many children who endured such cruelty hardened their hearts with cynicism and venom. In their eyes, the world is a zero-sum game of raw power that they must seize. Denounce or be denounced. Kill or be killed. We can sympathize with the brutality they endured, but recognize that vengeance only makes things worse. Perhaps finding forgiveness through spirituality would have been a better path.
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Near the CCP military base, Ye encounters a British trust fund kid named Mike Evans. The son of an oil magnate, he is rebelling as an environmentalist and attempting to save a local bird species from extinction. Like Ye, he harbors deep anti-human sentiments. He vows to use his inherited wealth to help them make a positive impact. Sound familiar? Evans and Ye’s unholy marriage of Eastern shame and Western guilt, representing the worst of cruel communism and crony capitalism, spawns an apocalypse.
Over the following decades, Ye and Evans form a cult that is preparing for the arrival of their savior gods. They betray their own species by teaching the San-Ti all about humans to help them take over Earth. In their eyes, we don’t deserve this planet and deserved to be wiped from it. They assist the Santi by taking active measures of demoralization against scientists. Many are driven to suicide, including Evans and Ye’s only daughter.
ESG/DEI is wrecking e/acc. Religious imagery abound:
Although the Santi are still 400 light years away, Evans makes a fatal mistake. While reading them fairy tales to build trust, he explains to them that humans lie. The Santi recoil. They warn him “We cannot coexist with liars” before cutting off all communication. The climax of the season occurs when the Santi flex their power by covering the sky, blinking the stars, and taking over every screen to announce to the humans:
The Cultural Revolution destroyed one woman’s humanity to such an extent that she would rather destroy all humans than heal herself. Now the world has to clean up her mess. British intelligence agent Thomas Wade assembles the world’s leading scientists to devise a plan to counter the Santi. How will the human race adapt for ~400 years to survive the coming onslaught? The weakest part of the show is the Netflix-style casting of the all-star scientists. In the book, they are all Chinese men. In the show, they are anything but. Instead, most are diversity for diversity’s sake - neither compelling nor believable. At its worst moments in the final episode, TBP feels like a poor version of Black Mirror.
Overall, TBP is thrilling scifi with a humanistic message and stunning visuals. 4.5/5 stars, would recommend.
Game of Thrones showrunners DB Weiss David Benioff recasted three actors from that series as the same character types in their adaption of TBP:
Liam Cunningham as a crafty soldier (Davos Seaworthy, Thomas Wade):
Jonathan Pryce as a creepy cultist (High Sparrow, Mike Evans)
John Bradley as a dorky sidekick (Samwell Tarley, Jack Rooney):
For more of my favorite SciFi movies:
I watched episode one last night. I got bored after 30-40mins. Maybe I should give it another try. (I hated The Wire the first time I watched it.) I was thrilled by the opening scene because of current events—educating people on “woke” revolutions provides a context for debate. Another good film for providing this context is “First They Killed My Father.” So many people don’t know about The Great Leap Forward or the Khmer Rouge. How can you explain anything about the problems with DEI if they don’t know their history?
We just finished the season. The first episodes were compelling, especially the China scenes. But the cast was so WRONG it was distracting, and it really got stuck around episode 6 or 7 for us. Too little interesting science, too little of the weird cult stuff, too much of the unlikely relationships between the scientists. Unfortunately it also went from being accurate about the Cultural Revolution to having a feeling of “woke” later. But maybe that’s just my paranoia there! It was worth a few hours, and I’m interested to see what they do with Season 2.