There’s no shortage of good sci-fi series on Netflix. Black Mirror has been scrambling people’s brains for over a decade now, Dark is so dense you need to make a spreadsheet to even keep track of what’s happening, and the final season of Stranger Things is about to become one of the most-watched shows in the streamer’s history, regardless of how long it took to get here.
But if you’re looking for a sci-fi series that will make you think, you need to check out 3 Body Problem. It’s not the biggest sci-fi series on the service, but it may end up being the best.
The sci-fi concepts are imaginative, brainy, and not done to death
Except for the virtual reality game
In theory, sci-fi stories are limited only by the imagination of the author. But in reality, certain ideas tend to recycle. How many time travel movies have you seen? How often have our heroes had to fight the rise of super-intelligent AI? I’m not saying those aren’t topics worth exploring, but it’s nice to have some novelty every once in a while.
3 Body Problem throws a lot of scientific concepts at the audience, and a lot of them felt new to me. The central conflict involves an extraterrestrial civilization leaving their home planet so they can colonize ours. That by itself isn’t very special, but the devil is in the details. The aliens — called the San-Ti on the show — are leaving their world because it’s located in an unstable three-body star system; basically, their planet is passed between these stars in ways that make weather patterns catastrophic and unpredictable, resulting in periodic mass extinction events. You’d wanna leave too if you lived there.
And that just scratches the surface. San-Ti civilization is so technologically advanced that they’re capable of manipulating subatomic particles and turning them into weapons capable of writing messages on the eyeballs of every human on Earth, or disrupting all of our particle accelerators so they give bad results. That’s the San-Ti’s plan: to take away our ability to advance scientifically so we’ll be helpless to resist when they arrive.
I could keep going like that for pages, but you get the idea. I won’t claim to understand every scientific concept explored in 3 Body Problem, but watching the show certainly got me curious, which is always a good thing.
Scientists are the heroes
Nerds save the world
3 Body Problem is based on the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy of books by Liu Cixin, who himself is a computer engineer as well as a sci-fi writer. That’s definitely part of the reason so much of the science in the series feels convincing; this guy knows what he’s talking about, and the Netflix series is happy to trade on his expertise as well as his imagination.
It’s also not a surprise that Liu Cixin makes heroes out of scientists. The show actually expands upon that, giving us a team of nerds who must use their brains, not their brawn, to save humanity from extinction. We follow Dr. Jin Cheng (Jenn Chang), a theoretical physicist trying to make contact with the San-Ti. Eiza González plays Dr. Augustina Salazar, a nanotechnologist who produces a nanofiber so thin it does something too cool to spoil here. And the San-Ti are only coming to Earth in the first place because the astrophysicist Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) had the bright idea to use a high-powered radio telescope to send a message into deep space, bouncing it off the sun to increase the range. Of all the lifeforms who could’ve answered…
There are also some military types hanging around, and Marvel veteran Benedict Wong turns in a solid performance as a sarcastic MI6 officer, but mostly, it’s scientists who are in control of the story.
The show is just getting started
Get in on the ground floor
The first season of 3 Body Problem dropped on Netflix in March 2024. It did well but not spectacularly, and fans were nervous it might not be renewed. But Netflix came through and ordered two more seasons, to be filmed back-to-back. That’s one season per book; 3 Body Problem will officially not become one of those great sci-fi series canceled too soon.
Fans generally agree that the second and third books are better than the first, so the show’s best days may well be ahead of it. The second book is called The Dark Forest, a reference to the theory that advanced civilizations throughout the galaxy stay silent on purpose out of fear that they will be annihilated by even more advanced civilizations should they reveal themselves, which explains why the universe seems so quiet. Clearly, the heady sci-fi concepts will keep coming.
Look out for 3 Body Problem season 2 sometime next year
The showrunners on 3 Body Problem are David Benioff and Dan Weiss, the guys behind HBO’s epic fantasy show Game of Thrones. That show famously took over pop culture for eight straight seasons before ending in a bit of a catastrophe. But Game of Thrones only started to go downhill once the showrunners ran out of source material to adapt. With the whole of Liu Cixin’s book trilogy in the can, hopefully that won’t happen with 3 Body Problem.
There’s no official release date as of yet for 3 Body Problem season 2, but smart money has it coming out sometime in 2026. And because seasons 2 and 3 are being filmed back-to-back, hopefully, fans won’t have much longer to wait after that for the finale. So if you haven’t watched this yet, now is the perfect time. And if you want even more smart sci-fi goodness, there’s another show coming out right around the corner that you should be excited about.
