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I am recognizing most of the story elements, but where the Chinese show took 30 episodes to tell this complicated story, The Netflix producers are trying to ultra compress it.

The Chinese version had me actually caring about the few characters that it focused upon. This one, instead of focusing on just three basic characters there are several.

The story of Ye Wenjie, and this is the only character where they did not change the gender, nationality, or name of, is told in this first episode, and it matches what we knew from the Chinese show. Of course, Netflix added some extracurricular romance, which did not happen in the original. In the original story, Ye Wenjie was a woman totally unmoved by romantic interests. Originally a victim of the Chinese state and then one of their main operators. The Chinese version shows how she changed from the 60s to the early 2000's.

The other major difference is that the Chinese show was a period piece, occurring during the early 2000's, just prior to the onset of the first iPhones and other personal digital gadgetry. Nokia phones were still popular. This version of the story is completely contemporary, and so everybody is using iPhones instead of pre-Intel MacBooks, in my opinion this damages the story. That was one of the things that made the Chinese show unique is that they replicated how digital was in the early 2000s. This show, destroys that effect. They should have kept to the original period.

One of the other things we recognize is the character played by Benedict Wong, who is the cigarette chomping' cop "Da Shi": In the Chinese, This was "Shi Qiang" played by Hewei Yu.

And then the character of "Wang Miao" Has been deleted and transplanted into "Auggie Salazar" (Elza González)- she is the one that sees the countdown, and is approached by somebody named Tatania, who is supposed to be an analog of the character "Shen Yufei" - who initially appears to be speaking about "God" but in fact, they are talking about "the Lord" or, "Lord". Which I suppose you would have to watch this series in the original Chinese or read the novel to find out what that actually means. And it is not a religious reference, it is something insidious.

What has not been mentioned yet is the organization called "The Frontier Of Science" which Tatania/Shen Yufei and another character named "Pan Han" (whose analog has not yet appeared in this series) appeared to control.

I have only gotten halfway through the first episode, but I recognize these highly compressed story elements and characters based upon the original. What made the Chinese version endearing to me was that everything focused upon a small group of people... in this one, they had to hire a lot of the Game of Thrones stable of actors, and so the story has been shuffled across a deck of about 10 Game of Thrones actors.

Visually, this is done very well, but I don't like this supercompression of the story. The original Chinese Show took place across 30 episodes, and all of that information is crammed into only eight here, but that is the way that TV shows are made on Netflix or America these days. Nobody in America makes a TV show that has 26 episodes per season anymore. It went down from 26 to 16 to 13 and then to 10 and now 8 and 6. Only CW shows, sometimes still have 22 episodes per season.

It's just not enough time to tell a compelling story, 6 one-hour episodes? 8 one-hour episodes? Especially a story as complicated as "three body problem", a hugo award winning book.

And between the Chinese and American shows, these are only the first seasons, there are more books in this story. Which makes me very interested to see how the Chinese television industry does it, and how Netflix will respond...

I found the first episode to be a good intro to a world where history, science, and mystery exists!. From the flashbacks of China's revolution to London in the present day, the way this episode mixes past events with our present, literally science and fiction, was good!

As the episode kept going on, I found myself drawn into the not so much alien mysteries hinted at throughout the episode. Not to mention that the pacing of the storyline literally forces you to binge the entire thing.

One thing in mind is that they maybe should've chosen an older actress for the role of Ye, as in the sixties she looked 20ish so now she should be in her eighties! Other than that, all is good!

So... Having read the novel, the part in China is amazing, really manages to capture the feel in my opinion, watching the first scene in 1966 I was glued, really good acting from everyone!

That's the first giant star in our binary system.

However, the second, present-day part feels like a mediocre run-of-the-mill Hollywood flick, unlikable and simple characters, the common girl-boss tropes, which belongs more in a university activist sorority than a multimillion dollar production.

This is the white-dwarf orbiting the giant...

Sometimes it felt like two completely different TV-shows, one a serious, thrilling and intriguing one, the second, another "Oo something spooky happening, but did you see that one dumb guy, lol slay"-story.

Note that almost none of these present-day characters are in the novel, yes each are based on book characters, but, how much though... Basically, when the writers, David Benioff and D. B Weiss, follow the story of the writer it's very good, when they get to write on their own the quality plummets as fast as a neutrino going through earth... Now where have we encountered this situation before...

And let's just get this over with. They took Liu Cixin's novel and wanted to adapt it for the screen, and doing so changed character genders. That's fair, can always be interesting to give your own take on things, as long as you do it with a respect to the source material. Is that what D&D does though? Well, not yet... This is just episode 1, so we'll see how it goes. But as of now, just cut, pasting the gender of a bunch of characters and similarly cut & pasting the standard Hollywood girl-boss dialogue is not worthy of praise in any way. If you can't write women in STEM without making them into the standard unlikable Hollywood feminist protagonist, what does that say about your view of women?

Anyway, they setup the main storyline and introduce one or two very interesting characters (mainly Ye Wenjie, portrayed amazingly by Zine Tseng), which will be interesting to see how they adapt Cixin's work in later episodes, the rest though, recycled tropes and common grabs. Not that interesting.

I still give the episode a 6/10 since the parts in China are well done and the main idea presented well.

In the Netflix series, the book's protagonist's actions are divided among several characters, which makes better use of the excellent actors in the ensemble cast. There is less exposition or interior monologues because the characters share information with one another. The plotting is now more focused and, I believe, more entertaining than the plodding 30-episode Chinese version (freely available with subtitles on YouTube, complete with Chinese advertisements for tomato soup and apparently a dating app).

The first episode of "The Three Body Problem" opens with "struggle session", humiliating an honest Chinese professor. This scene should be watched by those who think that there has been anything admirable about Maoism.

It's definitely got me hooked, it's a book I read a little while back, and enjoyed, I had it explained to me by a Chinese former colleague, who detailed the significance of the book, and how big the theory was in China.

You'll have to concentrate, as there are lots of subtitles to read, and you'll need to, remembering how the story unfolds, there's a lot of detail in the early sequences.

I was a little surprised to see it actually brought to life, but it works very well, if I had one little gripe, only, it's that The British segments are so wonderfully English, we're straight back to the 1980's with those rounded English vowels, it jarred in comparison to the harshness of The Chinese segments.

I don't want to be critical, because this was a very, very fine start, it's unsettling, it's eerie, it very much feels like Judgment day is landing.

8/10.