A lot of Liu’s dialogue seems to have been moved straight from book to screen (though questions of translation, in both media, make it hard to be sure). Through 20 episodes, most of the major plot points arrive at about the same places they did in the book. For Liu’s hard-core fans, that may be all that matters. For a general audience, the show’s similarities to the book may be more problematic.
Liu’s “The Three-Body Problem” takes place in Beijing during the novel’s setting in the mid-aughts, with flashbacks to the countryside 40 years earlier. It is superficially a mystery, with a mismatched pair, the reserved physicist Wang Miao and the Rabelaisian cop Shi Qiang, investigating a rash of suicides among high-level scientists. Discovering what lies behind the deaths involves uncovering a conspiracy that dates to the Cultural Revolution; it also involves Wang’s frequently donning virtual-reality gear to play an elaborate, cosmically expansive video game.
The story’s bleakness, its motifs of environmental destruction and the possibility of human extinction give it resonance, as does its allegory of the despair and vengefulness fostered by the Cultural Revolution. But what sets it apart is how science, rather than being a backdrop or framework, drives the action at every turn.
Liu’s style reflects this: Structurally, the book proceeds like a mathematical proof, with arguments — about science, nature, society — building upon one another toward a conclusion that has been veiled, but visible, since the beginning. Wang’s unraveling of the mystery takes the shape of a capsule history of scientific and technological advances. And the plot advances less through action than through long, expository statements or recaps of past events.
In recognition of this, the creators of the Chinese “Three-Body” series have made some logical choices. Without materially changing the story, they have shifted the balance toward the present (in this case 2007, during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics) and focused more firmly on the serio-comic frenemy relationship of Wang and Shi (Zhang Lu Yi and Yu He Wei). The details of police work get more attention, and contemporary characters, mostly female, are added or greatly expanded upon, including a reporter (Rong Yang), Shi’s all-business deputy (Zehui Li) and Wang’s wife (Min Liu). Scenes that are formulaically funny (Shi gruffly babysitting Wang’s daughter) or suspenseful (murder on a long train ride), but have nothing to do with science fiction, have been added.
