23/09/2026
There are series that end with the final episode. And there are others that stay with you for a while, making you go back in your head to certain scenes and the choices the characters made. *3 Body Problem* was one of those for me.
At first, it looks like a science-fiction story. Humanity finds out that another civilisation exists and is moving towards Earth. It will take around four hundred years for it to arrive. Science starts behaving strangely, the usual explanations stop working, people react very differently to the same threat, and decisions made now are meant to affect a world that none of the people making them will ever see.
But something else caught my attention. How differently people can look at the same reality. The idea itself is not new, of course.
We rarely take in what is happening as a simple set of facts. Between an event and our reaction to it, there is usually a whole personal history: past experience, trust or distrust of people, expectations, a sense of safety, and what relationships, loss, violence, closeness or betrayal have taught us before. All of this works like a filter of sorts. Sometimes you barely notice it. Sometimes it becomes so strong that a person stops separating their own experience from the way the world is in general.
In *3 Body Problem*, this is especially clear when you look at what traumatic experience can do. It clearly affects the kind of person we become. After difficult experiences, someone may start to look differently at power, closeness, danger, responsibility and the future. They may become more cautious, harder, less trusting. They may start noticing threat in places where before they might not have seen it at all.
At the same time, one thing matters to me here. What happened to us does not have to stay in control for ever, quietly turning us in the same direction again and again. Some experiences can be worked through over time, become part of our own story, and be understood for what they changed in us. It becomes possible to stop looking at the present through the eyes of the past every time. The trace stays, and some changes stay too, but their place and meaning can change.
That is why Ye Wenjie’s story feels so strong to me. Not only because of the decisions she makes, but because you gradually start to understand how she got there. If someone spends a long time seeing cruelty, broken trust and helplessness, their conclusions about people can become much bigger than the individual events themselves. At some point, the question is no longer only what happened to them, but what picture of humanity they built from it.
Another part of the series is uncertainty. Scientists find themselves in a situation where the rules they relied on no longer seem to work. We usually cope better with a bad prognosis when we understand what is happening and what is likely to come next. It is much harder when the map no longer matches the ground. And the series shows quite well how quickly anxiety grows when predictability disappears.
There is another strange thing about time in the story. The threat is enormous, but it is outside the lifetime of almost everyone who knows about it. Four hundred years is far too distant to feel personal, but still close enough to demand decisions now. And this makes it clear how differently people relate to a future they will never see themselves. Some find meaning in trying to influence it. For others, the whole situation makes relationships and things left unsaid feel more important than the plans they had before.
I also liked the way the series works with “us” and “them”. A shared threat changes the way people begin to see each other. At the same time, something that is usually a weakness of the human mind becomes useful: we are hard to read completely. We can hide what we want, make mistakes, change our minds, contradict ourselves. In ordinary life, this lack of clarity often makes relationships harder. Here, it becomes part of how people survive.
That is probably why *3 Body Problem* stayed with me mostly as a story about human perception and how different it can be. About how the past affects our decisions, how uncertainty changes the way we behave, how the fact that life is limited changes our priorities, and how quickly the line between “I”, “we” and “they” can shift under threat.
In the next posts, I want to look at these four themes separately. Not to diagnose the characters, and not to turn the series into a psychology textbook. More to look at familiar human patterns that become much easier to see when the story blows them up to the scale of an entire civilisation.
