The scientists of The 3-Body Problem may have trouble solving this problem of classical physics and mechanics (and preventing aliens from invading Earth) but viewers had another question: what did the strange renewal of the series by Netflix, which indicated last week that the science fiction series would have “additional episodes” to close the story instead of using the usual formula of announcing the renewal for one or more seasons.
Was it a kind way on the part of the platform’s directors to indicate that they had not been convinced by the performance of The 3-Body Problem, which was labeled “the new series from the creators of Game of Thrones”? Were they going to produce a couple or three episodes to disguise a hidden cancellation and not leave Netflix subscribers dissatisfied? Or, on the contrary, were those “additional episodes” actually going to become two or three more seasons?
Screenwriters David Benioff and Dan Weiss, known for Game of Thrones, and Alexander Woo wanted to clarify that this is not a kind cancellation because they plan to write more “seasons” of The 3-Body Problem. “When we started the series we knew how many hours we needed to tell the rest of the story because we have a roadmap until the end,” they explained to The Hollywood Reporter.
Netflix offers them the necessary deliveries to make their vision a reality: “We have what we need to get to the end just as we planned since we started.” At the moment, therefore, they are writing the second season of the scientific series after having spent four years writing the first, which allowed them to lead the Netflix catalog, although without the forcefulness that could be expected from Benioff’s long-awaited first series. and Weiss after Game of Thrones.
The problem of the 3 bodies, as lovers of the genre who had read the Chinese author’s novels were clear, was not an easy work to adapt. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the communist government receives a signal from an extraterrestrial species that lives in a system with three suns that will lead to their extinction. In the present, these aliens are on their way to Earth, intending to invade it, and human scientists have 400 years to plan a defense plan. But how do you focus on a danger so real, so lethal but so far away?
Weiss, Benioff and Woo encountered multiple challenges: telling such an ambitious story but with such a distant threat and based on a text of very scientific ambition, whose interest often lies in the explanation of mathematical and physical theories. In the first season, which took four years to write, they tackled the first book of Cixin Liu’s Chinese trilogy, The 3-Body Problem, and part of the second, The Dark Forest.
To tell the entire story, therefore, they still have to transfer part of this second publication to the screen, in addition to The End of Death, which closed the science fiction story that won such prestigious awards as the Nebula and the Hugo. In interviews prior to the launch of the first season, the team of writers and showrunners reported that they intended to dedicate the next three years to finishing writing the adaptation.
