Season 1 of The 3-Body Problem takes place in a time window of approximately 70 years. The next seasons of the Netflix series will greatly expand the timeline of the story – if they are confirmed.
The first season of 3 body problem is fully available on Netflix and we do not know, to date, if the streaming platform is willing to extend the adventure by making season 2 of the series official. David Benioff, DB Weiss, and Alexander Woo, who are in charge of the adaptation, would like to deploy the story over three or even four seasons in total.
During the first season, we could see that the story did not stick exclusively to volume 1 of the trilogy by Chinese writer Liu Cixin. The eight episodes broadly follow the first book — The 3-body problem –, but elements from the following two works (The Dark Forest And Immortal Death) are also included.
This reconfiguration of the story is notable for those who have already read this science fiction trilogy. However, we also see that everything that was taken from the other two novels was inserted into a relatively tight chronology. Indeed, everything happens between the mid-1960s, with the Chinese cultural revolution, and today.
To put it another way, characters we see in flashbacks are still there when the current plot plays out. We especially think of Ye Wenjie, who is young in the 1960s, and who then appears much older in 2024. Other temporal flashbacks occur in the 70s and 80s.
This time window of approximately 70 years has the advantage of giving readability and a certain uniqueness to the characters and the plot. We follow the same people throughout, sometimes their descendants, or strangers who knew them. The locations are familiar and everything presented provides a more or less stable framework.
Warning, the following contains spoilers.
The (very) distant future of the 3-body Problem
It’s from volume two, The Dark Forest, that things are going to get tough: first, new characters will be introduced and will be at the heart of the action. However, this will not be a real problem. We have seen that the three showrunners have no problem rewriting the characters, replacing them or dividing them between several new protagonists.
It is at the level of the timeline that the continuation of Liu Cixin’s novels is a certain challenge. Indeed, a first very important ellipse takes place in the third part of the second work, with a jump of two centuries. An essential leap to realize the threat posed by the San-Ti (or Trisolarians), who will only arrive on Earth in four centuries.
Both the book and the series have already laid the foundations for this shift to be properly negotiated.
Cryonicization and hibernation will help characters survive for decades, and thus maintain a thread with the story developed so far. As a pretext, the need for these protagonists to follow the Earth’s preparation for the alien invasion will be invoked.
Conversely, we must also expect to lose a lot of people along the way, simply due to deaths caused by old age – unless there is a twist of events. For example, if the showrunners somehow decide to put the entire main cast in cryonics, so that they will still be around during season 2.
(millions) of years later
Volume 3, Immortal Death, is even more challenging, since we move even further into the future — we pass, among other things, the years 2200, 2300 and even 2400. There is even an incident which causes an ellipse of a few tens of millions of years for two characters. We are far from the time window of the first volume.
Again, the first season laid the foundations on which to build these leaps. Remember the character Will Downing (in the novels, he is Yun Tianming). He is sick, he is going to die, but he agrees to have his brain extracted, placed in hibernation and sent to the San-Ti fleet, to establish contact.
Presumably, these events will be told instead with season 3 if it is ever confirmed. Without revealing too much, the challenges everyone will face will go beyond the Trisolarian threat. Same thing for the showrunners, who will have to manage time gaps counting in hundreds and millions of years.
But to know how this challenge will be resolved (will it be necessary to change casting over the seasons? Or deviate from the path traced by Liu Cixin?), the continuation of the series must be ordered. There is no doubt that the showrunners are already thinking about it. Now it’s a question of whether Netflix wants to sue as well.
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