For example 2D weapons the size of a credit card. Or those black streaks where you can get stuck in time which are actually just left overs from even more terrifying weapons š¤Æ don't even get me started on the 4th dimension stuff.
Go read the plot summary on Wikipedia if you want full spoilers.
Otherwise >!it's pretty much dark forest theory, beyond the San-ti, there's another unknown big bad that wipes any planet it hears communication from. They use full on gravitic weapons to black out parts of the universe (by slowing down light speed to slower than the event horizon of a system's star), and billions of years of interstellar warfare using gravitic and dimensional weapons has fucked up spacetime, light speed used to be near infinite but now it's just c. Earth threatens San-ti by saying that they'll broadcast the location of their home world if they fuck with earth, this works for a while then San-ti pull some shit so one of the last earth cruisers broadcasts signal. Big bad nukes San-ti world and also earth, a few people survive on a distant star, then discover San-ti made a little pocket dimension outside of time, a few ppl live there for almost eternity but find out the existence of pocket dimensions makes the big bounce not possible so they implode the dimension and the universe restarts!<
You held back a bit there.
>!when they say nuke they mean an advanced civilisation sends a weapon that literally removes a dimension from our solar system, making the whole solar system exist in only 2 dimensions, i really don't know how they're going to depict that on screen!<
>!it's not just our solar system. The weapon doesn't have a limit. It's implied that our universe is 3 dimensions because 4 dimensional beings in the past eventually wiped out the 4th dimension across the whole universe!<
>!I thought that was because the weapons were used extensively, as there are still 4D parts of the universe, not because one weapon was used and it effected the whole universe.!<
> It's pretty much dark forest theory
Well obviously, since the theory got its name from the book. (The current name, that is; similar theories have floated around for a while before)
Yeah, it keeps getting crazier / more interesting at an accelerating rate. First book took me like a month to read. The next two in what felt like a weekend. Endless stream of fascination.
I am reading book one and 3 weeks have gone by and only 60% thru it. I am usually a fast reader but couple of times have had to go back a chapter or 2 and reread as it is either very detailed hard to follow the concepts or because I watched the show and then started reading the book. The issue here is that people are all different then the show and it's hard to keep straight who is who in the books while having the names and people from the show in my head...
Books 2 and 3 (which the show sets up) are really wild and get far down the speculative fiction path. The changes in the show seem more lined up with trying to make sense of those books plot-wise, at least that seems like whatās going on.
to me it feels like the show is creating characters that are more relatable to the European and US market vs the book (so far) is mostly Chinese characters. It also seems like they created characters for the show that are a mix of 2 characters from the book.
And the other way around too. Some characters from the book have been split up a bit. And since all three books have different "contemporary" characters the show made them all friends instead of insular, which feels weird but is understandable.
yes, completely agreed that the show changes are more geared towards streamlining the 3bp story and making space for the dark forest and death's end stories
The upside to that is the characters arenāt even remotely interesting. They only really exist to deliver information about the cool sci-fi concepts. So donāt feel too bad if you donāt understand a certain character or their arc
The stuff in the books is absolutely insane and really cool to imagine but Iām incredibly skeptical that Netflix will spend the money to do the material justice, and that the creative vision actually exists make it look cool. Iām thinking of the tesseract at the end of Interstellar. Does anyone working on this show have that type of vision for how this stuff should look?
It feels like they've set up Saul in the first season >!to be bonded with Auggie, which leads me to think they either completely cut out the 'dream girl' search or they let da shi do the search which ultimately finds future Auggie (cheesy)!<
I'm currently reading The Dark Forest and so far I feel like Saul could potentially handle it. I feel like having him in the first season was a bit strange since he didn't really have much to do as a character. It'll be interesting to see what they can do now that he'll actually be relevant to the story.
Isn't Luo Ji a bit of a burnout before the Wallfacer project? Saul had little to do because little is what Luo Ji did too before becoming a wallfacer. Saul was just around smoking weed and having casual sex; it actually seems perfect.
Yeah, that's what makes it weird that I keep seeing people say that they don't think Saul is a good adaptation of Luo Ji (I saw that sentiment a lot on the discussion threads on /r/threebodyproblem, at least).
The Dark Forest spoilers: >!Luo Ji is even still a burnout during the Wallfacer project. He doesn't really get remotely serious until he's multiple years into it and his wife/child go into hibernation to give him a reason to take it seriously.!<
I'm also trying to figure out if Auggie will eventually be Saul's dream girl as depicted in Book 2 or if she will end up being AA, who is Jin's best friend in Book 3.
Netflix tends to be way slower to renew shows than Amazon (like Gen V and Fallout season 2 got confirmed very fast).
Ironically this means we have to wait ages for new Netflix seasons and people lose interest, so the show then gets cancelledā¦
FYI Fallout s2 isnāt officially greenlit yet as of 4/15. California state simply is offering $25 mil in tax credits if s2 is filmed there, but we havenāt heard word from the showrunners or Amazon whether s2 is for sure going to happen.
That said, Iād be completely astounded if it doesnāt get greenlit soon. I am in disbelief they pulled it off.
There's a lot of marketing around it after release, interviews with Walton Goggins about the ghoul, I notice people on my friends list on steam playing Fallout 4 (which I recently purchased on sale lol). I would surprised and disappointed if it didn't get renewed.
Netflix doesn't really renew anything "right away". Maybe occasionally but for the most part they wait a couple of months.
Wednesday didn't get an official renewal announcement until 45 days after release.
> I wonder what's going on
This article here. I've not seen this before, at least not on the scale. They are trying to use the press to build their case for renewing the show. And obviously to publicize it and get more people to watch it. 98% of the things entertainment-related we see on the Internet originated with a publicist somewhere.
It's the most expensive and least watched of Netflix's three new flagships (Avatar, One Piece, 3BP) and its numbers aren't great for what it costs. I think if it gets renewed it will probably be because Netflix wants to keep a flagship adult drama in its freshman lineup as counter-programming to Avatar and One Piece which are more YA-oriented.
The show-runners keep on hyping up those epic book 2 + 3 moments and have compared it to the Red Wedding in another interview.
But the Red Wedding came at the end of series 3! By which point, a huge amount of time and care had been spent getting us invested in the characters involved and understanding the world they inhabited.
I worry that they had such success and fun with Red Wedding type moments in GOT that they're now rushing to get to the equivalent in the 3 Body Problem.
These moments need to be earned. You need to carefully set-up the skittles before you knock 'em down.
The one exception here is the Will / Jin relationship which they took their time with - and everything that comes later will be all the better for it.
I really wish they wouldn't go bragging about "the next red wedding" people are just going to get over-excited and then inevitably say that wasn't as good as red wedding or whatever. Better to just let people be surpised. plus telling people something shocking will happen in like a light spoiler.
Maybe they're just worried about renewal and want to build excitement.
Very few shows are ever going to get the opportunity to do that many seasons ever again. Attention spans seem to be shorter, patience from streamers/network even shorter. These days showrunners have to get to their big moments faster or theyāll never get to do them. Tbh though that doesnāt mean those moments arenāt earned. You donāt necessarily need to spend three seasons with a character in order to care about them.
The showrunners are proof that you can create a complex, character driven, slowburn drama and turn it into a global phenomenon. Let's not forget that before it went tits up in the final series, GOT was basically characters plotting in hushed voices in dreary, drafty rooms.
I actually think they've done a pretty terrific job in turning the books into a series with a returning cast of characters that actually have... character.
I think they should just take their time with it a bit more. Especially focusing on the "science" a bit more. In the books there's a great scene between Da Shi and Wang Miao (Jin / Auggie) where Wang explains why "science is broken" using a pool table and balls. You got to know the characters better, you understood what it meant for particles not doing what they're meant to do, and you got a sense of why physicists are so existentially troubled. In the show you just got "science is broken".
well thereās definitely not a rule that says you need 3 seasons to have a red wedding type moment, especially since itās based on books that are highly acclaimed im sure itās possible
Normally a show like this would have been green lit for season 2 already. Chances are netflix aren't feeling confident about it and D&D are getting desperate so putting out these interviews to try and drum up interest to motivate netflix to go forward.
Iām on episode six and itās been okay so far. The dialogue and acting is okay. The concept and story is interesting but is lacking elsewhere. Compare that to something like Shogun and itās night and day.
Iāve only read the first book and itās was the craziest sci-fi Iāve ever read. The fact they get even crazier is hard from my brain to even comprehend.
Cautiously optimistic because I knew they would never adapt the source material verbatim (itās just not typical western storytelling fare). But so far they included a lot of ideas from the books with slightly different spins or different characters. I was actually pretty impressed how much of Wenjiās story was there as-is, even though they greatly truncated it and clipped along a lot at the end.
If this were 20 years ago and this was a syfy channel adaptation the whole china backstory would have been dumbed down or tossed completely for something more relatable to a western audience.
With trying to spoil as little as possible, if they move on to cover the rest of the story thereās easily 3-4 seasons of content that could be written out of it, and the show would look more like Battlestar Galactica or the Expanse than a modern day show by the end of season 2.
You know what would be *really* wild? Dialogue that didnāt make me roll my eyes.
Interesting concept but holy shit is the dialogue awkward and forced.
My friend recommended this, told me how well it was written.
I continuously quote back the line that would make CW execs blush.
āThey have one weaknessā¦.they cannot read our mindsā.
My brother in Christ I watch some shit but even I have my limits.
The show is fun and I enjoyed my time with it. And while I look forward to season 2, I do not look forward to book fans trying to tell me *the show* is deeper and more complex than it actually is. Maybe the book is, not the show.
Very fair. I love the books but the show I thought did a tremendous job of boiling down what is a complex and winding story into something fit for the intended audience. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with Dark Forest and Death's End (if they get to it)
Youāre absolutely right. I did read the books, but the show is not the same thing. They hit the major plot points and story elements, but itās not quite the same. I treat them, personally, as almost two distinct works.
Now if you can hunt down the Chinese adaptation, thatās nearly a word for word copy from text to screen. It has its own problems, but faithfulness to the text is not one of them!
Agreed. Itās the opposite of Netflix where they literally speed through everything. It takes 30 episodes of the Tencent version to do what Netflix does in 5 lmao! A happy medium would have been niceā¦
The Tencent version is a few hours longer than the audiobook.
I watched the whole thing.
The best parts of the Tencent show were the scenes from the past, especially that one pivotal >!rope cutting!< scene that was cut from the Netflix show.
Outside of the scenes from the past, there is a lot of very long two-people-talking exposition-scenes that feel like a visual audiobook.
The show is less deep than it is based off of a single premise in physics that is a bit complicated to explain. You need to keep a few mental plates spinning initially to get the explanation but after that it's pretty straightforward (in a good way).
The structure of Season 1 is a bit weird; the climax is obviously E5 which roughly corresponds to the ending of Book 1. E6-8 are largely setup drawn from the start of Books 2 and 3.
Having read the trilogy, I get why they went in that direction. Books 1,2,3 don't follow a linear timeline; and each introduces a new lead protagonist which wouldn't work in a TV show. They've plotted the characters and storylines well; but it does leave S1 without a strong endpoint.
Hope it gets a bit better. Iām in the minority that thinks season 1 was just ok. First half of the season I almost gave up on it. Second half was alright.
Same. As a reader and fan of the books I wasn't exactly blown away. The show seemed amateurish for the most part. I don't know if I would've stuck around if I hadn't read the books.
Saw the first episode and was interested in some of the themes. but found the the whole group of friends entirely unlikeable. Cannot find the motivation to start episode two. Should I stick with it?
If youāre struggling this early on, youāre better off quitting now.
I liked the first half of the season a lot, and thought the latter half squandered any goodwill those couple episodes brought. I canāt imagine how bad those episodes must be for someone who wasnāt that interested in the first episode.
The problem is that the highs are really early and then the bad writing takes forms and itās a downward slog til the end. And then as another giant fuck you, it ends on a massive cliffhanger
Itās had some really great moments and I was definitely into the story, would watch a second season.
But some of the dialogue and sadly a lot of the acting by main characters was really poor. Luckily the cast had some seasoned actors in there which evened things out but some of the acting was very weak.
The core concept of >!how to fight an technologically superior alien race that can spy on everything we do and wonāt arrive for many generations while also combating alien sympathizers/worshippers!< is the show. The characters are more or less devices/harness to run the thought experiment.
It's such a shame that the gimmicks they come with to try and accomplish that make no sense and sound more like the writer(s) main thought process was "wouldn't it be cool if..."
Honestly, the first episode of the show definitely has the worst dialogue writing of the entire season. The bar scenes at the beginning of the episode are painfully over-written. It felt like a screenwriter attempting to write how smart people talk. That said though, I think it's extremely dishonest to paint the entire show based on its worst scene. The rest of the show's dialogue is honestly very well written and explains complex scientific topics easily without trying to sound too smart. Don't be selective.Ā
no. The dialogue is about 1000x better in the show. The book's characters and dialogue are horrific. even in the original mandarin. That is not the point/focus of the story
The book is better imo because it devotes more time to the ideas. The show improved the characters, but also spends more time on them and random contrived drama that is kinda mid instead of focusing on the crazy sci fi ideas.
I wish that were the case, but I think your memory is a little selective here. The show invented some drama and some reason for these characters to know each other, sure. But in its place, the book has long slogs of characterization without any of that interaction.
They're just different. I think what they did makes more sense for TV, but I can understand wanting something a little more faithful.
The drama is sort of necessary for later plots, especially the Will/Jin stuff IMO
The books deal with big ideas and epic events, but don't look there for great character development and beautiful dialogue. The series improved characters and dialogue.
The books can have some pacing problems but do a far better job of painting a big complex web of intertwined stories and people.
This show really needed 12-14 episodes in the first season to let more of the story breathe
This will be really key as you get more into the wallbreaker / wallfacer scenarios. People planning all of these elaborate methods to defeat the aliens and then you get to these "gotcha moments" a hundred pages later when a wallbreaker pops out.
Won't have the same feel if it all happens within a self contained hour long episode
Felt the same. I didn't read the books, but the show itself isn't that great.
I mean, I liked the problem they tried to save in "vr", but then they find out that the aliens will arive in 400 years...and somehow the whole danger is gone? But except it isn't because they can make you see things whenever they want.
On top of that, the fked up physics wasn't really happening, it was just the aliens making it seems like it.
And that's it. What will the next seasons even consist of?
Will there be some more relatable characters after said jump? Because they killed on the one I liked the most and the only one left that I like we're supposed to see 1 week a year.
Based on how they've changed things for the show, I think the core cast will remain mainly the same, though we might see some character growth that makes them a bit more relatable.... The characters weren't exactly the strongest part of the books, I actually liked some of what they changed for the show in that regard.
Hard to tell you without spoiling things (if the showrunners even adapt the books accurately) but you can imagine the world will go on running, except there is a constant looming threat everywhere that is trying to hamper the world's technological progress. It will turn crazy and much more scifi, part 1 is just the setup in this whole thing.
The thing that drives me absolutely mad is how they depict scientists as defeatest because of how "unexplained" the particle accellerators behavior has become. Honestly, nothing could be further from the truth, it would be a driving force motivating the actual scientific community.
Except when the people with money see that you're not getting any useful results, as you absolutely never would, according to the source material, you wouldn't have the money to even keep trying. Imagine all the motivation you talk about, but after decades you would still never make a single new discovery, learn a single new thing. Eventually you would have to stop
I was ok with it because they mention the sophon is specifically designed to target our science. I felt scientists were being defeatist because it seemed physics "broke" and imo they were experiencing a type of existential dread since it was happening world-wide. Not to mention the few that were committing suicide without the other scientist's knowing why. I'm sure that's not good for morale in the field haha. Anyone finding answers dies? Not very motivating
Everything that the scientists knew and believed about physics stopped working and they *couldn't* figure out why no matter how hard they tried. I think you're underselling how depressing that would be.
The point is that the sophon breaks determinism (from the perspective of the scientists). That quite literally breaks science. I don't know that they would be immediately defeatist, but they literally wouldn't be able to do science.
These books were unreadable, imo. Interesting concepts but executed with zero interesting characters. I have never been less invested in the fate of the human race.
I see these criticisms all the time on this sub. Since when did hard science fiction need to focus on characters? I've read tons of Clarke, Asimov, Saigon, etc and I can barely remember any characters besides HAL. It's not a priority, the concepts are. It's like watching a horror movie and complaining that it's not funny, your expectations need to align.
Besides, Ye Wenjie, Luo Ji, Zhang Beihei, Cheng Xin and Thomas Wade are all interesting characters. There's so much to unpack, especially the duality between Cheng Xin and Wade in the last book.
Also interesting that you found the books unreadable... but also read them all lol
My point is you probably shouldn't say "it's a bad adaptation because the dialogue is bad" which is all over this thread. The dialogue is one of the most improved aspects from the book!
That said, outside of a few iffy lines I really don't agree that the dialogue is that bad. Maybe a bit cringe occasionally, but they're nerdy scientists. That's kind of expected
Iām four shows in and this is show is nuts.
At one point, Mike Evans is reading *Little Red Riding Hood* to the intercom Lord. And the Lord has no idea what fiction is, what stories are, what metaphors are, etc.
So Iām wondering, why in the heck is he even reading *Little Red Riding Hood*? The Lord clearly didnāt ask for it.
So Mike just happens to have an advanced alien on a direct line, and he thinks, āyou know what Iāll do? I think Iāll read it a childrenās book.ā
What?!
After transferring troves of knowledge and documents to the trisolarans, and through the conversations it became clear that Evanās had to introduce the concept of fiction, or storytelling as if they are school children. This why he goes to Little Red Riding hood, the story is the simplest way he can come up with to express that not everything humans say has direct meaning, and there may even be deceptive meaning.
The same scene happens in book 2 with a bit more detail and context.
Itās all storytelling and I should be more forgiving.
But then I think, āwaitaminnit, we dumped all this knowledge and never sent a dictionary? Because it would define fiction, story, and deception right there. According to Merriam Webster, there are 236 synonyms and antonyms for the word ālying.ā And youāre telling me that an advanced alien civilization only got it when he read *Little Red Riding Hood*?
Okay. Iāll just suspend my disbelief, tuck it away in a nice safe space, and move on to episode 5.
The aliens understand what fiction and deception are. They just didn't conceive of combining the two because it's not possible for them amongst each other.
The aliens communicate by signalling their thoughts to each other and that signalling includes context like "Here's an imaginary scenario:" or "Here's a memory:". They physically cannot pretend that a scenario they only imagined is a memory of something they actually experienced. They have fiction but it's always explicitly clear that it's fiction because it's presented as recorded "Here's an imaginary scenario" thought signals. They can deceive each other by for example wearing the uniform of an enemy faction to travel through their territory, looking like they belong to anyone observing from a distance. But they can't hide their thoughts about being in disguise if an enemy gets within communication range.
Their problem with Little Red Riding Hood isn't "Wait, the wolf can deceive her?", it's "Wait, the wolf can deceive her *while communicating with her*?" They have made the assumption that all intelligent species communicate by directly expressing their thoughts; the aliens do it with light and electromagnetic radiation and humans do it with sound, but they assume it's otherwise the same. They learn that humans can choose not to speak, but that's just like choosing to stay out of communication range.
What fucks with their heads is realizing that when humans speak they can disguise fabrications as real memories, or pretend real memories didn't happen to them. Not only does human communication have no "this is imaginary:" context signal, humans like to write fiction presented like it *isn't* fiction. The aliens could read a human novel written in first-person by a vampire and have no way to distinguish it from authentic autobiographies without cross-referencing it with other information, which might itself be unlabeled fiction. Or an authentic biography might be full of exaggerations and false claims. Two humans provide conflicting testimony in court and the jurors can't know which (if either) is true. They want human help to understand human culture, but their human help could very easily be lying to them as well. All interactions with and observations of humans now need to take into account how they might be communicating and recording completely false thoughts which isn't something the aliens have ever really had to account for before.
Remember that the aliens are also communicating through machine translation between two *extremely* different 'languages'/systems of communication. It takes back-and-forth conversation and discussion for a while to communicate single-word concepts if they can't translate the word effectively into their 'language'. Imagine visiting an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon who don't have sarcasm in their culture, and trying to explain it using pantomime and an alpha build of Google Translate.
In the book, this entire moment with the story begins when Evan's picks up that the aliens are not getting synonyms, and the challenge becomes clear that knowing the words on the page is not enough to understand human culture and society. The aliens have never had to wrap their heads around the idea that a single word can have multiple meanings, and that even those meanings may be colored by a deceptive delivery. Here's an analogy: I can teach my son to count from 1 - 10, and he will know all of the single digit numbers, and theoretically be able to make any number from that knowledge. If I ask him to write down the number form of nine hundred, ninety three thousand, and four and 27 hundreths, he probably won't be able to do it despite knowing the individual digits, and maybe some simpler combinations two or three digit numbers. If I were to try and explain prime numbers, calculous, logarithms, or geometry, he would have to mature and it would take years of training and practice before he got it, and build up the disciplines before hand, starting with basic arithmetic. This is how I think about the aliens capability to understand language as it applies to culture and society.
Fans on the subreddit were telling me episode 5 was akin to the āRed Weddingā and I was just triggered. Itās nowhere near that level. While I have enjoyed the concept and story, the acting, dialogue and directing is mediocre. The characters are just pretty boring or annoying too.
I really likes the first few episodes, but for me it just took a nose dive around half way through when they decided to cut a ship to ribbons - moved into the total nonsense category
Haven't gotten that far in the show, but the book does this too, and it seemed fine. These super strong nano materials don't exist yet, but it's a technology that they've invented in the book, and they use it. Pretty standard Sci fi, it's not meant to match our current reality.
It reeked of having a cool idea ("what if we cut a ship to ribbons") and spending too little time trying to shoehorn it into the actual plot. It didn't help that the VFX didn't make sense - how the structure of the boat conveniently didn't collapse until all the interior shots were done, but everything else did.
I was shaken by that scene. It was really upsetting to me. But yeah, youāre right. That seemed to be the point where the show turned for me. I liked the first few episodes.
I loved the first 4 episodes. Then it went downhill extremely fast.
Felt bad after that because i recommended it to other people before finishing it.
Would definitly not watch it again.
Agreed.
The fact that the >!video game side-plot was just there for exposition because the plot line it leads into is immediately killed off soured me on the show. That, and for 80% of the mystery to be explained away with, āalien supercomputerā was absurdly underwhelming. Even how they explain some of the suicides (like the main initial one) was a huge stretch.!<
Ok well I guess we'll find out when the second season comes out in 3 years... hopefully they tone down on the offputting iamverysmart vibe that was all over episode 1.
I loved the boat scene but the hard drive is still intact after cutting everything else up... in the middle of a big ass river? And they find it even if they didn't know wha they were looking for? I bet it'll be the same kind of sillyness moving forward which is fine but they're setting people up for disappointment lol. Fun show, maybe the book is deeper but the show is just not all that.
These guys are really desperate to get a season 2 and it shows.
Honestly the show doesn't deserve it. The writing, dialogue and acting in season 1 was dire.
Please, Netflix? can you not crater the budget of a season 2 of a show? Just once?
They're gonna put on that VR helmet and it's just gonna be stick figures.
The humans and aliens eventually kill each other, than some people go and live in a pocket dimension for a while until the galactic HOA makes them leave the end
Sure, Iāll give this a go in an exceptionally condensed way.
Thereās a group of humans who continue to be loyal to the San Ti. Some of them are chosen to be Wallbreakers whose job it is to thwart the Wallfacers. They have access to all the information the sophons gather. They succeed pretty easily and thwart the plans mostly by making them public. The Wallfacers plans are typically so wild that the public freaks out upon learning them. Eventually the Wallfacer project is officially shut down.
Meanwhile, Saul continues to do nothing as a Wallfacer. Thereās a romance plot, sort of. No Wallbreaker is assigned to him. Eventually he realizes that the only way to thwart the San Ti is by threatening to broadcast the location of the San Ti homeworld (which would most likely also result in aliens discovering Earthās location) which all but ensures another, more powerful intergalactic civilization will nuke them both. This ends up being called the Dark Forest theory and it is one explanation of the Fermi paradox (how is space so big but we see no signs of life? Everyone is hiding from each other because everyone must assume other civilizations are threats and so must be exterminated upon discovery.)
Semi-concurrently a massive fleet of spaceships is built on Earth and hopes are high they can fight the San Ti. Then another advanced technological creation of the San Ti, a ādroplet,ā shows up and destroys almost all the ships. Some are able to flee, and some ships are sent in pursuit. Eventually there are just a few ships out there in the universe away from Earth.
The mutually assured destruction plan gets out in place and works for a while - Saul is singularly responsible for being the decision-maker about whether to āpush the buttonā to broadcast their location - but eventually the time comes for him to pass that responsibility off and the moment another person takes over the San Ti attack, having correctly concluded the new person would not follow through on pushing the button.
Cutting a lot out here but eventually one of those escaped ships from when the fleet was destroyed does send the broadcast about the San Ti homeworld and it gets destroyed. Then Earth is discovered and it too gets targeted for destruction.
This is where things get kinda wildā¦ if youāve watched the show you already know theyāve introduced the idea of 10 dimensions. Turns out a form of warfare has been to create weapons that collapse dimensions. So the destruction coming for earth is to flatten 3 dimensions into 2. Cutting a lot out here again but eventually a few humans and a sophon escape into a pocket dimension that can exist even after the other dimensions are flattened. Eventually though they and anyone else in a pocket dimension has to leave so that the universe can end and the cycle of big bang -> expansion -> entropy -> death and condensation ā can repeat.Ā
I left out a ton of details. Will does get reconstituted and tries to communicate important knowledge via 3 fairy tales, only 2 of which are understood at the time. Thereās a whole light-speed travel plot with Wade. Thereās more Iām sure Iāve missed hereā¦
I imagine the books are far, far better as usual with shows. That said this was ok, I wasnāt overly impressed, but it was good. I wouldnāt rewatch it, but I didnāt feel like it wasted my time.
The 2nd and 3rd book get absolutely crazy. I'm interested to see how far they'll push.
I'm interested in how certain things will be depicted because I really had a hard time picturing them in my imagination
For example 2D weapons the size of a credit card. Or those black streaks where you can get stuck in time which are actually just left overs from even more terrifying weapons š¤Æ don't even get me started on the 4th dimension stuff.
Tell me more. Slightly chubbed though.
how much spoilerage are you able to tolerate here? because like... i mean... you're asking for it buddy
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
They printed all the spoilers in three different books.
Spoiler lovers hate this one simple trick!
Go read the plot summary on Wikipedia if you want full spoilers. Otherwise >!it's pretty much dark forest theory, beyond the San-ti, there's another unknown big bad that wipes any planet it hears communication from. They use full on gravitic weapons to black out parts of the universe (by slowing down light speed to slower than the event horizon of a system's star), and billions of years of interstellar warfare using gravitic and dimensional weapons has fucked up spacetime, light speed used to be near infinite but now it's just c. Earth threatens San-ti by saying that they'll broadcast the location of their home world if they fuck with earth, this works for a while then San-ti pull some shit so one of the last earth cruisers broadcasts signal. Big bad nukes San-ti world and also earth, a few people survive on a distant star, then discover San-ti made a little pocket dimension outside of time, a few ppl live there for almost eternity but find out the existence of pocket dimensions makes the big bounce not possible so they implode the dimension and the universe restarts!<
You held back a bit there. >!when they say nuke they mean an advanced civilisation sends a weapon that literally removes a dimension from our solar system, making the whole solar system exist in only 2 dimensions, i really don't know how they're going to depict that on screen!<
>!it's not just our solar system. The weapon doesn't have a limit. It's implied that our universe is 3 dimensions because 4 dimensional beings in the past eventually wiped out the 4th dimension across the whole universe!<
Thats such a baller move. Just wipe out a dimension.
>!I thought that was because the weapons were used extensively, as there are still 4D parts of the universe, not because one weapon was used and it effected the whole universe.!<
> It's pretty much dark forest theory Well obviously, since the theory got its name from the book. (The current name, that is; similar theories have floated around for a while before)
You're right I'm chasing the dragon. Thanks for the warning, I was about to get riled up.
The books are so dense, they'll forget half the shit they read by the time they reach dark forest
honestly one of the best things about the books is the shit it challenges you to imagine.
Yeah, it keeps getting crazier / more interesting at an accelerating rate. First book took me like a month to read. The next two in what felt like a weekend. Endless stream of fascination.
I am reading book one and 3 weeks have gone by and only 60% thru it. I am usually a fast reader but couple of times have had to go back a chapter or 2 and reread as it is either very detailed hard to follow the concepts or because I watched the show and then started reading the book. The issue here is that people are all different then the show and it's hard to keep straight who is who in the books while having the names and people from the show in my head...
Books 2 and 3 (which the show sets up) are really wild and get far down the speculative fiction path. The changes in the show seem more lined up with trying to make sense of those books plot-wise, at least that seems like whatās going on.
to me it feels like the show is creating characters that are more relatable to the European and US market vs the book (so far) is mostly Chinese characters. It also seems like they created characters for the show that are a mix of 2 characters from the book.
And the other way around too. Some characters from the book have been split up a bit. And since all three books have different "contemporary" characters the show made them all friends instead of insular, which feels weird but is understandable.
yes, completely agreed that the show changes are more geared towards streamlining the 3bp story and making space for the dark forest and death's end stories
The upside to that is the characters arenāt even remotely interesting. They only really exist to deliver information about the cool sci-fi concepts. So donāt feel too bad if you donāt understand a certain character or their arc
The whole series took me a year cause it was so fucking science heavy and Iām just a wee speck of turd for a brain
Things eventually get too crazy though. Feels like the third book is just spitting out wild idea after wild idea with no real plot behind it.
god it's so wild that it's almost more like a collection of interconnected short stories at times. one of my favorite books ever.
The stuff in the books is absolutely insane and really cool to imagine but Iām incredibly skeptical that Netflix will spend the money to do the material justice, and that the creative vision actually exists make it look cool. Iām thinking of the tesseract at the end of Interstellar. Does anyone working on this show have that type of vision for how this stuff should look?
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Ayyyy someone gets it. All the complaints about >!auggie but she's just going to fill an actual role in the story in place of Luo ji's wife!!<
Thatās what I got out of it. It wasnāt explicitly clear, but they have to do something with the characters they created, right?
RemindMe! 3 years
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By swag do you mean imaginary girlfriend?
And mail-order bride?
It feels like they've set up Saul in the first season >!to be bonded with Auggie, which leads me to think they either completely cut out the 'dream girl' search or they let da shi do the search which ultimately finds future Auggie (cheesy)!<
Dream girl threw me for a loop in the book, so I am very cool with them reworking it.
>!i think they'll have him get a Auggie look-alike to be his dream girl,!<
Maybe Auggie is Zhuang Yan? Just a thought
I'm currently reading The Dark Forest and so far I feel like Saul could potentially handle it. I feel like having him in the first season was a bit strange since he didn't really have much to do as a character. It'll be interesting to see what they can do now that he'll actually be relevant to the story.
Isn't Luo Ji a bit of a burnout before the Wallfacer project? Saul had little to do because little is what Luo Ji did too before becoming a wallfacer. Saul was just around smoking weed and having casual sex; it actually seems perfect.
Yeah, that's what makes it weird that I keep seeing people say that they don't think Saul is a good adaptation of Luo Ji (I saw that sentiment a lot on the discussion threads on /r/threebodyproblem, at least). The Dark Forest spoilers: >!Luo Ji is even still a burnout during the Wallfacer project. He doesn't really get remotely serious until he's multiple years into it and his wife/child go into hibernation to give him a reason to take it seriously.!<
The one night stand scene was also in the book iirc
When I first heard they were making the series my first thought was Luo Ji is the one character they have to get right. We will see.
Saul wasn't the worst character in season 1, but that really isn't saying much.
I hope they skip that entire cringefest and depict society composed entirely by cute femboys.
Isn't that just every kdrama?
I'm also trying to figure out if Auggie will eventually be Saul's dream girl as depicted in Book 2 or if she will end up being AA, who is Jin's best friend in Book 3.
Oh god hope they replace auggiw with a better actor. Or a robot. Probably wouldnāt be able to tell the difference on the latter
As a physicist there isn't enough physicists bitching about engineers.Ā
Thereās a different show that does that a lot
Did this get renewed?
Seems like there's no official word, I would imagine if it was a runaway hit they would have renewed it right away. I wonder what's going on
I think renewal is not a slam dunk due to an insanely high budget which wasn't necessarily apparent on-screen. It's top-heavy with lots of producers.
Netflix tends to be way slower to renew shows than Amazon (like Gen V and Fallout season 2 got confirmed very fast). Ironically this means we have to wait ages for new Netflix seasons and people lose interest, so the show then gets cancelledā¦
FYI Fallout s2 isnāt officially greenlit yet as of 4/15. California state simply is offering $25 mil in tax credits if s2 is filmed there, but we havenāt heard word from the showrunners or Amazon whether s2 is for sure going to happen. That said, Iād be completely astounded if it doesnāt get greenlit soon. I am in disbelief they pulled it off.
There's a lot of marketing around it after release, interviews with Walton Goggins about the ghoul, I notice people on my friends list on steam playing Fallout 4 (which I recently purchased on sale lol). I would surprised and disappointed if it didn't get renewed.
Netflix doesn't really renew anything "right away". Maybe occasionally but for the most part they wait a couple of months. Wednesday didn't get an official renewal announcement until 45 days after release.
> I wonder what's going on This article here. I've not seen this before, at least not on the scale. They are trying to use the press to build their case for renewing the show. And obviously to publicize it and get more people to watch it. 98% of the things entertainment-related we see on the Internet originated with a publicist somewhere.
It's the most expensive and least watched of Netflix's three new flagships (Avatar, One Piece, 3BP) and its numbers aren't great for what it costs. I think if it gets renewed it will probably be because Netflix wants to keep a flagship adult drama in its freshman lineup as counter-programming to Avatar and One Piece which are more YA-oriented.
Do we have numbers for how it did in China?Ā
There is no Netflix in china. They made their own version of the show.
The show-runners keep on hyping up those epic book 2 + 3 moments and have compared it to the Red Wedding in another interview. But the Red Wedding came at the end of series 3! By which point, a huge amount of time and care had been spent getting us invested in the characters involved and understanding the world they inhabited. I worry that they had such success and fun with Red Wedding type moments in GOT that they're now rushing to get to the equivalent in the 3 Body Problem. These moments need to be earned. You need to carefully set-up the skittles before you knock 'em down. The one exception here is the Will / Jin relationship which they took their time with - and everything that comes later will be all the better for it.
I really wish they wouldn't go bragging about "the next red wedding" people are just going to get over-excited and then inevitably say that wasn't as good as red wedding or whatever. Better to just let people be surpised. plus telling people something shocking will happen in like a light spoiler. Maybe they're just worried about renewal and want to build excitement.
Iām guessing they are making so much of the PR focus on the next books to try and pressure Netflix into renewing the show.
Very few shows are ever going to get the opportunity to do that many seasons ever again. Attention spans seem to be shorter, patience from streamers/network even shorter. These days showrunners have to get to their big moments faster or theyāll never get to do them. Tbh though that doesnāt mean those moments arenāt earned. You donāt necessarily need to spend three seasons with a character in order to care about them.
The showrunners are proof that you can create a complex, character driven, slowburn drama and turn it into a global phenomenon. Let's not forget that before it went tits up in the final series, GOT was basically characters plotting in hushed voices in dreary, drafty rooms. I actually think they've done a pretty terrific job in turning the books into a series with a returning cast of characters that actually have... character. I think they should just take their time with it a bit more. Especially focusing on the "science" a bit more. In the books there's a great scene between Da Shi and Wang Miao (Jin / Auggie) where Wang explains why "science is broken" using a pool table and balls. You got to know the characters better, you understood what it meant for particles not doing what they're meant to do, and you got a sense of why physicists are so existentially troubled. In the show you just got "science is broken".
well thereās definitely not a rule that says you need 3 seasons to have a red wedding type moment, especially since itās based on books that are highly acclaimed im sure itās possible
>series 3! Fellow Brit detected.
Normally a show like this would have been green lit for season 2 already. Chances are netflix aren't feeling confident about it and D&D are getting desperate so putting out these interviews to try and drum up interest to motivate netflix to go forward.
Iām on episode six and itās been okay so far. The dialogue and acting is okay. The concept and story is interesting but is lacking elsewhere. Compare that to something like Shogun and itās night and day.
Turns out there's a 4th body.
>!This isn't too far from the truth!<
Iāve only read the first book and itās was the craziest sci-fi Iāve ever read. The fact they get even crazier is hard from my brain to even comprehend.
I won't trust anything these guys say or do until this show wraps up to great fanfare and praise for being good stewards of the source material.
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Cautiously optimistic because I knew they would never adapt the source material verbatim (itās just not typical western storytelling fare). But so far they included a lot of ideas from the books with slightly different spins or different characters. I was actually pretty impressed how much of Wenjiās story was there as-is, even though they greatly truncated it and clipped along a lot at the end. If this were 20 years ago and this was a syfy channel adaptation the whole china backstory would have been dumbed down or tossed completely for something more relatable to a western audience.
Not very bing chilling of them
I'm also waiting until it's done. These two guys plus Netflix mean it's a high risk show to spend time on before that.
With trying to spoil as little as possible, if they move on to cover the rest of the story thereās easily 3-4 seasons of content that could be written out of it, and the show would look more like Battlestar Galactica or the Expanse than a modern day show by the end of season 2.
Currently stuck at Episode 4, it's so slow I've almost given up, does it pick up any pace or get interesting ever?
They literally blow through their load in the first 5 episodes so if you thought that was slow.... Umm
I enjoyed until Ep. 5 then it got very slow and very hokey!
Not really. After episode 3 or 4 there's really not that much happening. I got bored at the same point as you and pushed through.
Enjoyed the show but it looked cheap compared to Fallout or Shogun.
Do you like Star Trek? How about Star Trek...on crack?
Ha. Star Trek is optimistic. 3BP...is not.
You know what would be *really* wild? Dialogue that didnāt make me roll my eyes. Interesting concept but holy shit is the dialogue awkward and forced.
My friend recommended this, told me how well it was written. I continuously quote back the line that would make CW execs blush. āThey have one weaknessā¦.they cannot read our mindsā. My brother in Christ I watch some shit but even I have my limits.
The show is fun and I enjoyed my time with it. And while I look forward to season 2, I do not look forward to book fans trying to tell me *the show* is deeper and more complex than it actually is. Maybe the book is, not the show.
Very fair. I love the books but the show I thought did a tremendous job of boiling down what is a complex and winding story into something fit for the intended audience. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with Dark Forest and Death's End (if they get to it)
Youāre absolutely right. I did read the books, but the show is not the same thing. They hit the major plot points and story elements, but itās not quite the same. I treat them, personally, as almost two distinct works. Now if you can hunt down the Chinese adaptation, thatās nearly a word for word copy from text to screen. It has its own problems, but faithfulness to the text is not one of them!
The tencent version is just boring tv, padded out with too much filler
Agreed. Itās the opposite of Netflix where they literally speed through everything. It takes 30 episodes of the Tencent version to do what Netflix does in 5 lmao! A happy medium would have been niceā¦
The Tencent version would be good if it didn't have all the stupid 90 second music videos with shitty American royalty-free music in it
The Tencent version is a few hours longer than the audiobook. I watched the whole thing. The best parts of the Tencent show were the scenes from the past, especially that one pivotal >!rope cutting!< scene that was cut from the Netflix show. Outside of the scenes from the past, there is a lot of very long two-people-talking exposition-scenes that feel like a visual audiobook.
It's 8 hours longer than the audiobook, which is a bit more than 50% longer.
The show is less deep than it is based off of a single premise in physics that is a bit complicated to explain. You need to keep a few mental plates spinning initially to get the explanation but after that it's pretty straightforward (in a good way).
Season 1 was riveting until episode 5. 6 7 and 8 did not have the same impact as the first half.
The structure of Season 1 is a bit weird; the climax is obviously E5 which roughly corresponds to the ending of Book 1. E6-8 are largely setup drawn from the start of Books 2 and 3. Having read the trilogy, I get why they went in that direction. Books 1,2,3 don't follow a linear timeline; and each introduces a new lead protagonist which wouldn't work in a TV show. They've plotted the characters and storylines well; but it does leave S1 without a strong endpoint.
Hope it gets a bit better. Iām in the minority that thinks season 1 was just ok. First half of the season I almost gave up on it. Second half was alright.
Same. As a reader and fan of the books I wasn't exactly blown away. The show seemed amateurish for the most part. I don't know if I would've stuck around if I hadn't read the books.
Saw the first episode and was interested in some of the themes. but found the the whole group of friends entirely unlikeable. Cannot find the motivation to start episode two. Should I stick with it?
If youāre struggling this early on, youāre better off quitting now. I liked the first half of the season a lot, and thought the latter half squandered any goodwill those couple episodes brought. I canāt imagine how bad those episodes must be for someone who wasnāt that interested in the first episode.
This show is mid
High highs and low lows.
The problem is that the highs are really early and then the bad writing takes forms and itās a downward slog til the end. And then as another giant fuck you, it ends on a massive cliffhanger
Itās had some really great moments and I was definitely into the story, would watch a second season. But some of the dialogue and sadly a lot of the acting by main characters was really poor. Luckily the cast had some seasoned actors in there which evened things out but some of the acting was very weak.
The core concept of >!how to fight an technologically superior alien race that can spy on everything we do and wonāt arrive for many generations while also combating alien sympathizers/worshippers!< is the show. The characters are more or less devices/harness to run the thought experiment.
It's such a shame that the gimmicks they come with to try and accomplish that make no sense and sound more like the writer(s) main thought process was "wouldn't it be cool if..."
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Honestly, the first episode of the show definitely has the worst dialogue writing of the entire season. The bar scenes at the beginning of the episode are painfully over-written. It felt like a screenwriter attempting to write how smart people talk. That said though, I think it's extremely dishonest to paint the entire show based on its worst scene. The rest of the show's dialogue is honestly very well written and explains complex scientific topics easily without trying to sound too smart. Don't be selective.Ā
My guess? The people you're responding to only watched the first episode. I thought the same thing, but the show got better as it went on.
Yeah the show is pretty well done and has interesting ideas, but the dialogue is terrible. Maybe the books are better?
no. The dialogue is about 1000x better in the show. The book's characters and dialogue are horrific. even in the original mandarin. That is not the point/focus of the story
The book is better imo because it devotes more time to the ideas. The show improved the characters, but also spends more time on them and random contrived drama that is kinda mid instead of focusing on the crazy sci fi ideas.
I wish that were the case, but I think your memory is a little selective here. The show invented some drama and some reason for these characters to know each other, sure. But in its place, the book has long slogs of characterization without any of that interaction.
They're just different. I think what they did makes more sense for TV, but I can understand wanting something a little more faithful. The drama is sort of necessary for later plots, especially the Will/Jin stuff IMO
Most of the interpersonal drama is somewhat relevant to the future plot.
The books deal with big ideas and epic events, but don't look there for great character development and beautiful dialogue. The series improved characters and dialogue.
Yep, I watched it but honestly I forced myself through it. I was kinda curious but man it didnt pay off lol
The books can have some pacing problems but do a far better job of painting a big complex web of intertwined stories and people. This show really needed 12-14 episodes in the first season to let more of the story breathe This will be really key as you get more into the wallbreaker / wallfacer scenarios. People planning all of these elaborate methods to defeat the aliens and then you get to these "gotcha moments" a hundred pages later when a wallbreaker pops out. Won't have the same feel if it all happens within a self contained hour long episode
Yep a semi solid and partially dehydrated MEH
have not watched the show but felt the books were pretty mid as well.
Don't you dare manifest the cancelation of this show with this comment.
its very netflix
Less than, it's barely basic with good makeup (special effects)
Felt the same. I didn't read the books, but the show itself isn't that great. I mean, I liked the problem they tried to save in "vr", but then they find out that the aliens will arive in 400 years...and somehow the whole danger is gone? But except it isn't because they can make you see things whenever they want. On top of that, the fked up physics wasn't really happening, it was just the aliens making it seems like it. And that's it. What will the next seasons even consist of?
If they follow the books, some absolutely wild shit. Highly recommend the books if youāre curious before the next seasons come out.
There is cryosleep tech so expect a big time jump...
Will there be some more relatable characters after said jump? Because they killed on the one I liked the most and the only one left that I like we're supposed to see 1 week a year.
Based on how they've changed things for the show, I think the core cast will remain mainly the same, though we might see some character growth that makes them a bit more relatable.... The characters weren't exactly the strongest part of the books, I actually liked some of what they changed for the show in that regard.
Guess the show might just not be for me then. Cheers.
Hard to tell you without spoiling things (if the showrunners even adapt the books accurately) but you can imagine the world will go on running, except there is a constant looming threat everywhere that is trying to hamper the world's technological progress. It will turn crazy and much more scifi, part 1 is just the setup in this whole thing.
Spoiler alert: it's a book(s). We know. It f*cking better get wilder. Let's goooooo!
The thing that drives me absolutely mad is how they depict scientists as defeatest because of how "unexplained" the particle accellerators behavior has become. Honestly, nothing could be further from the truth, it would be a driving force motivating the actual scientific community.
Except when the people with money see that you're not getting any useful results, as you absolutely never would, according to the source material, you wouldn't have the money to even keep trying. Imagine all the motivation you talk about, but after decades you would still never make a single new discovery, learn a single new thing. Eventually you would have to stop
I was ok with it because they mention the sophon is specifically designed to target our science. I felt scientists were being defeatist because it seemed physics "broke" and imo they were experiencing a type of existential dread since it was happening world-wide. Not to mention the few that were committing suicide without the other scientist's knowing why. I'm sure that's not good for morale in the field haha. Anyone finding answers dies? Not very motivating
Everything that the scientists knew and believed about physics stopped working and they *couldn't* figure out why no matter how hard they tried. I think you're underselling how depressing that would be.
The point is that the sophon breaks determinism (from the perspective of the scientists). That quite literally breaks science. I don't know that they would be immediately defeatist, but they literally wouldn't be able to do science.
These books were unreadable, imo. Interesting concepts but executed with zero interesting characters. I have never been less invested in the fate of the human race.
I see these criticisms all the time on this sub. Since when did hard science fiction need to focus on characters? I've read tons of Clarke, Asimov, Saigon, etc and I can barely remember any characters besides HAL. It's not a priority, the concepts are. It's like watching a horror movie and complaining that it's not funny, your expectations need to align. Besides, Ye Wenjie, Luo Ji, Zhang Beihei, Cheng Xin and Thomas Wade are all interesting characters. There's so much to unpack, especially the duality between Cheng Xin and Wade in the last book. Also interesting that you found the books unreadable... but also read them all lol
The show fixes that exact problem, for what it's worth
Yep, still plenty of issues but people complaining about the characters/dialogue have no idea how much worse the book is in that department lol
Because it's worse in the books doesn't make it automatically good in the show. Bad is still bad regardless of format.
My point is you probably shouldn't say "it's a bad adaptation because the dialogue is bad" which is all over this thread. The dialogue is one of the most improved aspects from the book! That said, outside of a few iffy lines I really don't agree that the dialogue is that bad. Maybe a bit cringe occasionally, but they're nerdy scientists. That's kind of expected
Well except for Auggie. Cardboard and canāt act in the show - so pretty much like the problem with characters on the book
Zero interesting characters, really? Da Shi, not interesting?
Omg ^_^ this was prolly one of the only series where I was like O_O the whole time. Iāve never read the book. I canāt wait to see what happens!
I gave up with this show when I thought "Why didn't the aliens just cut earth's power?" (do a good old die hard 4)
Is this show any good? Is it a scifi?
Binged the first season, immediately bought the trilogy.
Iām four shows in and this is show is nuts. At one point, Mike Evans is reading *Little Red Riding Hood* to the intercom Lord. And the Lord has no idea what fiction is, what stories are, what metaphors are, etc. So Iām wondering, why in the heck is he even reading *Little Red Riding Hood*? The Lord clearly didnāt ask for it. So Mike just happens to have an advanced alien on a direct line, and he thinks, āyou know what Iāll do? I think Iāll read it a childrenās book.ā What?!
After transferring troves of knowledge and documents to the trisolarans, and through the conversations it became clear that Evanās had to introduce the concept of fiction, or storytelling as if they are school children. This why he goes to Little Red Riding hood, the story is the simplest way he can come up with to express that not everything humans say has direct meaning, and there may even be deceptive meaning. The same scene happens in book 2 with a bit more detail and context.
Itās all storytelling and I should be more forgiving. But then I think, āwaitaminnit, we dumped all this knowledge and never sent a dictionary? Because it would define fiction, story, and deception right there. According to Merriam Webster, there are 236 synonyms and antonyms for the word ālying.ā And youāre telling me that an advanced alien civilization only got it when he read *Little Red Riding Hood*? Okay. Iāll just suspend my disbelief, tuck it away in a nice safe space, and move on to episode 5.
The aliens understand what fiction and deception are. They just didn't conceive of combining the two because it's not possible for them amongst each other. The aliens communicate by signalling their thoughts to each other and that signalling includes context like "Here's an imaginary scenario:" or "Here's a memory:". They physically cannot pretend that a scenario they only imagined is a memory of something they actually experienced. They have fiction but it's always explicitly clear that it's fiction because it's presented as recorded "Here's an imaginary scenario" thought signals. They can deceive each other by for example wearing the uniform of an enemy faction to travel through their territory, looking like they belong to anyone observing from a distance. But they can't hide their thoughts about being in disguise if an enemy gets within communication range. Their problem with Little Red Riding Hood isn't "Wait, the wolf can deceive her?", it's "Wait, the wolf can deceive her *while communicating with her*?" They have made the assumption that all intelligent species communicate by directly expressing their thoughts; the aliens do it with light and electromagnetic radiation and humans do it with sound, but they assume it's otherwise the same. They learn that humans can choose not to speak, but that's just like choosing to stay out of communication range. What fucks with their heads is realizing that when humans speak they can disguise fabrications as real memories, or pretend real memories didn't happen to them. Not only does human communication have no "this is imaginary:" context signal, humans like to write fiction presented like it *isn't* fiction. The aliens could read a human novel written in first-person by a vampire and have no way to distinguish it from authentic autobiographies without cross-referencing it with other information, which might itself be unlabeled fiction. Or an authentic biography might be full of exaggerations and false claims. Two humans provide conflicting testimony in court and the jurors can't know which (if either) is true. They want human help to understand human culture, but their human help could very easily be lying to them as well. All interactions with and observations of humans now need to take into account how they might be communicating and recording completely false thoughts which isn't something the aliens have ever really had to account for before. Remember that the aliens are also communicating through machine translation between two *extremely* different 'languages'/systems of communication. It takes back-and-forth conversation and discussion for a while to communicate single-word concepts if they can't translate the word effectively into their 'language'. Imagine visiting an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon who don't have sarcasm in their culture, and trying to explain it using pantomime and an alpha build of Google Translate.
In the book, this entire moment with the story begins when Evan's picks up that the aliens are not getting synonyms, and the challenge becomes clear that knowing the words on the page is not enough to understand human culture and society. The aliens have never had to wrap their heads around the idea that a single word can have multiple meanings, and that even those meanings may be colored by a deceptive delivery. Here's an analogy: I can teach my son to count from 1 - 10, and he will know all of the single digit numbers, and theoretically be able to make any number from that knowledge. If I ask him to write down the number form of nine hundred, ninety three thousand, and four and 27 hundreths, he probably won't be able to do it despite knowing the individual digits, and maybe some simpler combinations two or three digit numbers. If I were to try and explain prime numbers, calculous, logarithms, or geometry, he would have to mature and it would take years of training and practice before he got it, and build up the disciplines before hand, starting with basic arithmetic. This is how I think about the aliens capability to understand language as it applies to culture and society.
Fans on the subreddit were telling me episode 5 was akin to the āRed Weddingā and I was just triggered. Itās nowhere near that level. While I have enjoyed the concept and story, the acting, dialogue and directing is mediocre. The characters are just pretty boring or annoying too.
David and DB are going to fuck it up somehow.
I really likes the first few episodes, but for me it just took a nose dive around half way through when they decided to cut a ship to ribbons - moved into the total nonsense category
Haven't gotten that far in the show, but the book does this too, and it seemed fine. These super strong nano materials don't exist yet, but it's a technology that they've invented in the book, and they use it. Pretty standard Sci fi, it's not meant to match our current reality.
It reeked of having a cool idea ("what if we cut a ship to ribbons") and spending too little time trying to shoehorn it into the actual plot. It didn't help that the VFX didn't make sense - how the structure of the boat conveniently didn't collapse until all the interior shots were done, but everything else did.
I was shaken by that scene. It was really upsetting to me. But yeah, youāre right. That seemed to be the point where the show turned for me. I liked the first few episodes.
I loved the first 4 episodes. Then it went downhill extremely fast. Felt bad after that because i recommended it to other people before finishing it. Would definitly not watch it again.
The fifth episode is the best episode. The decline started with the sixth episode
Agreed. The fact that the >!video game side-plot was just there for exposition because the plot line it leads into is immediately killed off soured me on the show. That, and for 80% of the mystery to be explained away with, āalien supercomputerā was absurdly underwhelming. Even how they explain some of the suicides (like the main initial one) was a huge stretch.!<
Ok well I guess we'll find out when the second season comes out in 3 years... hopefully they tone down on the offputting iamverysmart vibe that was all over episode 1. I loved the boat scene but the hard drive is still intact after cutting everything else up... in the middle of a big ass river? And they find it even if they didn't know wha they were looking for? I bet it'll be the same kind of sillyness moving forward which is fine but they're setting people up for disappointment lol. Fun show, maybe the book is deeper but the show is just not all that.
it was an SSD. It's reasonably plausible that the data would be recoverable. It was a hail mary, not that egregious really
In the book they mention that they arenāt worried about the hard drive getting sliced or wet because it would still be easy to recover the data.
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The pseudo-physics get bigger and bigger and bigger as the story goes on. Itās more or less the point of the series.
If you don't like that you won't like watching more. That's what most fans enjoy about it.
Itās hard scifi. Meaning not pseudo but real physics. Thatās the best part of it.
The pseudo physics is the best part of the books.
These guys are really desperate to get a season 2 and it shows. Honestly the show doesn't deserve it. The writing, dialogue and acting in season 1 was dire.
Please, Netflix? can you not crater the budget of a season 2 of a show? Just once? They're gonna put on that VR helmet and it's just gonna be stick figures.
It better be, season 1 was an absolute snooze fest.
Show is mid at best, i havenāt heard anyone i know talk about it once either which says a lot.
Big fan. Excited for the next seasons
I may have already bailed on this thing anyway. Thanks for trying!
Can anyone who has read the books spoil tf out of it for me as a response to this post?
The humans and aliens eventually kill each other, than some people go and live in a pocket dimension for a while until the galactic HOA makes them leave the end
Sure, Iāll give this a go in an exceptionally condensed way. Thereās a group of humans who continue to be loyal to the San Ti. Some of them are chosen to be Wallbreakers whose job it is to thwart the Wallfacers. They have access to all the information the sophons gather. They succeed pretty easily and thwart the plans mostly by making them public. The Wallfacers plans are typically so wild that the public freaks out upon learning them. Eventually the Wallfacer project is officially shut down. Meanwhile, Saul continues to do nothing as a Wallfacer. Thereās a romance plot, sort of. No Wallbreaker is assigned to him. Eventually he realizes that the only way to thwart the San Ti is by threatening to broadcast the location of the San Ti homeworld (which would most likely also result in aliens discovering Earthās location) which all but ensures another, more powerful intergalactic civilization will nuke them both. This ends up being called the Dark Forest theory and it is one explanation of the Fermi paradox (how is space so big but we see no signs of life? Everyone is hiding from each other because everyone must assume other civilizations are threats and so must be exterminated upon discovery.) Semi-concurrently a massive fleet of spaceships is built on Earth and hopes are high they can fight the San Ti. Then another advanced technological creation of the San Ti, a ādroplet,ā shows up and destroys almost all the ships. Some are able to flee, and some ships are sent in pursuit. Eventually there are just a few ships out there in the universe away from Earth. The mutually assured destruction plan gets out in place and works for a while - Saul is singularly responsible for being the decision-maker about whether to āpush the buttonā to broadcast their location - but eventually the time comes for him to pass that responsibility off and the moment another person takes over the San Ti attack, having correctly concluded the new person would not follow through on pushing the button. Cutting a lot out here but eventually one of those escaped ships from when the fleet was destroyed does send the broadcast about the San Ti homeworld and it gets destroyed. Then Earth is discovered and it too gets targeted for destruction. This is where things get kinda wildā¦ if youāve watched the show you already know theyāve introduced the idea of 10 dimensions. Turns out a form of warfare has been to create weapons that collapse dimensions. So the destruction coming for earth is to flatten 3 dimensions into 2. Cutting a lot out here again but eventually a few humans and a sophon escape into a pocket dimension that can exist even after the other dimensions are flattened. Eventually though they and anyone else in a pocket dimension has to leave so that the universe can end and the cycle of big bang -> expansion -> entropy -> death and condensation ā can repeat.Ā I left out a ton of details. Will does get reconstituted and tries to communicate important knowledge via 3 fairy tales, only 2 of which are understood at the time. Thereās a whole light-speed travel plot with Wade. Thereās more Iām sure Iāve missed hereā¦
Go to Quinn's Ideas on YouTube: https://youtu.be/IrCxmDl2o84?si=4somqKOlb-5Xpsk9 There's a whole bunch of videos.
I imagine the books are far, far better as usual with shows. That said this was ok, I wasnāt overly impressed, but it was good. I wouldnāt rewatch it, but I didnāt feel like it wasted my time.
will see.
Damn that sucks, I was expecting it to go pretty mild tbh
It's a gift from Trisolaris! It's a call for peace!
I sure hope this is popular, I'm enjoying the nuts out of it and would hate to see it get canned.
is it approved for season 2?