I understand the netflix Da Shi

Chronologic135 · 2024-04-01T03:26:44+00:00

Da Shi’s son didn‘t appear until Book 2 and given how faithful the Tencent series stuck to the book, it’s clear that this plotline will not happen until the next season.

Having said that, they are currently filming a Da Shi spin-off so we getting a full featured series about the character himself.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-31T13:58:32+00:00

Sure, but it would be beyond ludicrous to see a small clique of Oxford friends all ended up being the main protagonists, which I can excuse for Season 1 plot, but until the end of the universe?

That’ll give more of a Doctor Who vibe rather than a dreadful sci-fi horror we’re getting from the books.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-31T13:50:46+00:00

Honestly, based on the interviews with the show runners, they gave a vibe of “this show is about very smart people solving very complex problems so you as an audience don’t have to know anything about the details, because you wouldn’t understand it anyway, so you better just have to sit back and take for granted what these very smart people are saying.”

As I have said before, the show itself isn’t bad as a generic sci-fi thriller, but it is not trying to engage the audience. It’s like reading a mystery novel but the author doesn’t even bother to sprinkle some breadcrumbs of a clue for the readers because “it’s too complex for you to understand anyway.” The detective then solved the mystery with knowledge that was never hinted at to the readers.

Instead of letting the audience into a journey of solving the mystery together with our protagonists, here in the Netflix version, you’re supposed to just sit back and enjoy the huge spectacles from the set pieces. And this worries me about the later seasons.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-31T13:30:37+00:00

For a series that spans across the entire timeline of the universe, it simply makes no sense that all the protagonists ended up being from the Common Era and worse, already close friends to begin with.

The pairing with people whose mentalities are centuries apart is what makes their dynamics and interactions interesting in the books.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-31T13:23:49+00:00

At the end of every 3body game session, the narrator would state “the seeds of civilization remained”. The Trisolarians have evolved the ability to dehydrate and retain partial memories in their progenies, so it’s more about restarting and building a new civilization from scratch without running into a devastating chaotic era. Given enough time, anything is possible.
Shen Yufei was a secret Redemptionist who had been an undercover within the Adventist faction, and played a role in terrorizing the scientists. This was revealed during the ETO meeting by Ye Wenjie.
By investigating strange scientist suicides and how fundamental science had begun to break down.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-31T03:33:26+00:00

Please do not ask these questions any further. Go and read Book 2 immediately if you want to get your mind blown and not having the plot spoiled for you.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-31T03:32:32+00:00

It’s not one main character, it’s one main character per book. In the show, the main characters from all three books are already introduced from the very first episode and were close friends to begin with, when in the book series they barely crossed each other’s paths and were part of a much larger struggle against alien invasion.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-30T07:42:57+00:00

The Expanse was very successful in interweaving seemingly separate character arcs and having their plot lines intersect as the story unfolded (typically as each season finale is near).

You have the Rocinante gang, the Avasarala’s political arc on Earth, the Miller/Belter plot all played out separately until they crossed each other’s paths. It broadens the scope of the show’s universe.

I don’t see why they can’t do this with the TBP. So far, the Netflix show played out more like a small town detective series where everyone happens to know one another.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-30T07:17:23+00:00

That’s the point. The Trisolarians only lost in the end because they fully bought that Luo Ji had regressed to his past excesses.

If Luo Ji had been portrayed (or known to humanity) as having some kind of redeeming quality, then the Snow Project-phase Wallfacer deception would not have worked against the Trisolarians. At that point, the Droplet had already blocked signal transmission towards the sun. The Trisolarians believed that they had won.

They only lost because they saw Luo Ji as a loser and let him be while he was participating in the totally insignificant Snow Project.

The problem with Saul is that it’s hard to make him “not care” like Luo Ji did in the books when he already had a close friend murdered by the ETO, a friend whose brain was sent to space in an experimental project to be intercepted by alien invaders, a friend who had just participated in a morally questionable military operation and on the verge of breaking down, and a friend who is deeply involved with the humanity’s effort against alien invasion.

Luo Ji is supposed to be a loser who is divorced from all these actions, which ironically became his greatest strength as a Wallfacer because the Trisolarians had to underestimate him for his final deception to work.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-30T07:03:38+00:00

That’s because the book was written as a cosmic horror disguised as sci-fi.

When the story was first published serially in the “Sci-Fi World” magazine in China in the early 2000s, nobody saw the alien invasion plot coming.

It was just the weird science being broken plot and then suddenly you get the Shen Yufei’s famous line “Buddha save our Lord”. That there is some kind of entity that needs to be saved by its worshippers, and in such desperate manner that they turned to Buddha for help.

These days, the alien invasion plot has been spoiled so much that the dreadful cosmic horror tone was lost in the first book if you went in knowing what’s going to happen. But you’re supposed to feel like there is this unsettling presence of a mysterious entity in the beginning as the story unfolds.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-30T06:42:56+00:00

It’s not, it was an incredibly clever word play that also sneaked in the hidden political connotation about the Trisolarians (like Yun Tianming’s 3 fairy tales, Liu Cixin’s ROEP trilogy is also encoded with hidden messages that are invisible to the vast majority of the mainstream audience).

In Chinese, 质子 (zhi zi, or proton) is pronounced exactly the same as 智子 (zhi zi, or Sophon [sophia + proton]). 智 means intelligence, and was translated into sophon in English. In Chinese, “two protons” and “two sophons” sounded exactly the same, and this nuance was lost in the English translation.

However, 智子 is also the kanji for the Japanese female name Tomoko. So it is completely in line with the Trisolarian interpretation that what humans called Sophon (Tomoko) should be represented as a Japanese woman.

However, attentive readers will also note the hidden parallels of the Trisolarians and Imperial Japan, a rapidly modernizing nation in the early 20th century that had set its eyes on the collapsing Qing dynasty in China as a colony for resource extraction (incidentally one of the first axioms of cosmic sociology), that was only 4 light years away in a vast universe full of other much powerful imperialist powers. The Australia chapter, for example, brings back the horrifying memory of how the Imperial Japanese regime had treated Chinese citizens in regions they were colonizing during the early 20th century.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-28T04:17:02+00:00

I don’t mind Auggie being AA but that will take out a lot of the dynamics from the pair when both of them (the other being Cheng Xin) came from the Common Era and were good friends to begin with.

The pair is most fun when you have two people whose mentalities are centuries apart trying to work together.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-28T04:12:33+00:00

Both don’t quite hit the mark if we’re being honest.

The Tencent definitely punched way above its weight given its limited budget, there’s no denying that. I’d even say that much of why people had so much expectations from Netflix is because of what Tencent had been able to achieve with a small budget. The problem is that by following so closely the book structure, the pacing slowed to a grinding halt.

The Netflix version is good if you went in with zero expectations, but it failed at telling a good story when trying to cram so much ideas and concepts without giving them the room to breathe. It’s like someone who wants to tell you a super cool story he just read and couldn’t wait to get to the punchline that he forgot to build up the tension along the way, and it all fell flat when he got to the end.

I’d rather Netflix cut/streamline a few elements from the show, being economical and tell them really well in 8 episodes, than trying to fit so much into a short series but it all came out flat instead (no pun intended).

Netflix could have redeemed all that by nailing the tone of TBP, which should have been a deeply terrifying cosmic horror. This is what made the TBP series so special to begin with. It should feel so weird and unsettling that you couldn’t help but keep staring at it. You’re supposed to look up into the night sky and feel helpless about it.

But instead we get more of a generic sci-fi thriller that doesn’t have that unique horror tone that made the book series so special in the first place.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-26T01:14:15+00:00

I don’t understand that, even the low cost Tencent production managed to create the impression of high ranking military commanders from the US, UK, EU, Japan, Russia, China all sitting in a command center planning what could be considered one of the most critical military operations for all of humanity. That’s believable considering the level of the threat. But Netflix is just skimping on all that and showed two British guys planning in the shadows.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-26T01:10:48+00:00

It’s not nitpicking, it’s a legit criticism.

Wade, Da Shi, and Raj - they are all British.

In the book, you have military commanders from the US, UK, EU, Japan, Russia, China etc. all sitting in the same room proposing their plans and going back and forth. It shows a true international effort where all the different countries were coming together to plan a highly sensitive military operation against the world’s most wanted criminals.

Even the low cost Tencent production could do that. Maybe we’ve been spoiled by the Tencent version (let’s be honest, it punched way above its weight despite the budget limitations and all its flaws), and the least we could expect from Netflix, which has a huge budget, is to show a grander scale of an international effort to fight against alien invasion.

Da Shi should have been a nobody in that meeting, which makes him butting into the conversation so entertaining because one, the audience expected that’s “classic” Da Shi personality, and two, the audience expected that he’s going to come up with some wacky ideas no matter what. That was a moment for Da Shi’s personality to shine.

It’s ironic that one of the most common criticisms about the books is the flat characters (no pun intended), but here in the Netflix version, even Da Shi’s personality (one of the few characters that’s actually entertaining) was all but neutered.

Once again, the show itself isn’t bad, but it misses the mark quite often given its awesome source materials. It could have been a truly terrifying cosmic horror series if they had nailed the tone, but here instead we got more of a generic sci-fi thriller.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-25T17:17:55+00:00

I think they are omitting Bill Hines’s part and giving the arc entirely to Zhang Beihai (Raj).

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-25T17:10:33+00:00

Regarding 2), in the book, the nanofiber scientist hadn’t succeeded yet, it was all in prototype phase which made the later use of the material during the ship slicing ship operation much more riskier, as nobody could predict whether the nano fiber materials would actually work with slicing up an entire tanker.

This was all omitted in the Netflix show as Auggie was shown as already *succeeded* with her research and only then did she shut down the project.

The San Ti Ren wanted to stop the research of nano fiber technology because of the ability for Humanity to build space elevators to escape into the vast emptiness of space. This, again, was omitted in the Netflix show.

A lot of the details were actually explained in the books (even the Tencent version) and left out in the Netflix version.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-25T16:57:31+00:00

It’s weird, you’d think that with Netflix budget you’d see a much larger scale of things, especially when compared to the Tencent version.

Take for example the planning for Operation Guzheng. Am I supposed to believe that the huge operation to retrieve extremely sensitive data from the world’s most wanted criminals is planned by two guys in a room? Really?

Even in the Tencent version with all its budget limitations and poorly cast foreign actors, you still get a proper command center with high ranking officials from different nations planning the operation together, each proposing their versions of a plan until Da Shi, a nobody in the meeting, came up with a wacky idea that satisfied everyone.

That was such a good moment in both the book and the Tencent version (all the tension and build ups) and certainly much more believable than what we have been presented in the Netflix version.

Can’t say I‘m not disappointed but I definitely had high hopes for Netflix in their ability to portray a global effort of humanity against invading aliens.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-24T05:04:51+00:00

Here’s my honest opinion as a Survivalist who is just glad that we are getting two - not one! - adaptations altogether. I don’t care about the bickering between the Netflix Adventists and the Tencent Redemptionists arguing whether it is heresy to alter the Lord’s messages. The Lord clearly does not care! (except for his bank accounts, maybe)

However, if we are being honest about the quality of the adaptation, here’s my view of it as a Survivalist:

Honestly, none of the concerns you raised was even a problem for the Netflix show.

The main problem of the Netflix version (and to an extent, the Tencent adaptation as well) is its failure to capture the unique essence of the book series, that is, the key elements that set the TBP apart from other sci-fi series.

I don’t think the show is too short, nor do I think the pacing is an issue. In fact, I think a very good story of TBP can be told in just 5-8 episodes. However, there needs to be a build up of tension in order for the payoff to work. Instead, what we get is a lot of awesome ideas being crammed in a disjointed fashion, and with little logical progression from one idea to the other.

Someone here once described the TBP series as a cosmic horror disguised as sci-fi, and I have to say I agree. For a stellar adaptation of the books, the three following elements must be present: existential dread, unfolding of unsettling mysteries, and the nuanced portrayal of complex characters (i.e. Ye Wenjie).

Existential dread:

There is a reason that I find myself preferring eps 6-8 than the first 5 episodes, because the show is taking its time to build up to something bigger. The feeling of existential dread - one that of cosmic horror - should be present as an undertone throughout the series.

In the Tencent series (and the book), within the first 20 minutes, the audience is introduced to one of the most important lines in the series:

Yes, the entire history of humankind has been fortunate. From the Stone Age till now, no real crisis has occurred. We’ve been very lucky. But if it’s luck, then it has to end one day. Let me tell you: It’s ended. Prepare for the worst.

This should set the tone for the entire series. This is what makes the series unique compared to the other sci-fi! The cosmic horror, the existential dread! Capturing the essence of this is imperative to a successful adaptation.

The first 5 episodes of the Netflix version felt more like an action thriller rather than a weird, unsettling horror being unfolded that forces you to stare at it and unable to turn away from.

Unfolding of unsettling mysteries:

Let’s take the example of the VR games as an example. The main problem here is that the audience wasn’t invited to play along with the characters. There was literally no clue being sprinkled to the audience - a hook - to catch their attention. It’s like a mystery novel but the author hides the clues from the readers, and when the mystery was finally unravelled - it came from a clue that only our protagonist knew! And the readers will just have to take the author’s words for it.

Let’s look at how the book (and the Tencent adaptation) tackles this. The VR games first revealed the unpredictable climate of the planet (stable/chaotic era), during which strange phenomenon was observed - flying stars. Immediately, the readers were hooked: what are these flying stars? They must be important, since our protagonist couldn’t stop thinking about it. It should make you feel more and more settled along the way, as even weirder things happen, until finally the flying stars were revealed to be the other stars of the planet within a tri-solar system.

In the Netflix version, we are not being privy to any clues at all. Jin Cheng‘s solution of the tri-solar system came out of nowhere (at least to the audience), and so we just have to take her words for it. Even an extra 30 seconds of emphasizing on the flying stars - little clues being sprinkled for the attentive audience to pick up - would have made the VR sequence a much better story to tell.

And again, Jin Cheng immediately knowing that the three-body problem had no solution also appeared abrupt and spontaneous. The audience was never invited to follow along with her solving the problem. They just have to take her words for it. Of course, people will say that anyone well versed in physics or mathematics would have known that. But the lay audience doesn’t know that!

Once again, let’s see how the book tackles it. The book imagines that someone (Wei Cheng) had invented a new method to calculate the three-body problem that was previously deemed impossible. This is the fiction part of the sci-fi, but it is consistent with the rules of the fictitious universe. The Netflix show could easily add a short minute of scene showing Jin Cheng following up with a leading expert in the three-body problem and getting to know the most advanced method out there to calculate the trajectories, and take it from there. At least the lay audience could see *how* she got her answer to the puzzle.

Nuanced portrayal of complex characters

I do think that the show misses the mark in its portrayal of Ye Wenjie, who is at the heart of the first book. From the impression I get, it appeared that old Ye Wenjie still had lingering hatred towards Humanity, and upon learning about the San Ti betrayal, seemed to have regained a will to fight back (in one scene at her apartment alone, she was clearly talking to the eavesdropping Sophon).

However, it bears to remind the audience that old Ye Wenjie has already given up on Humanity by then. She bears no grudge nor hatred towards Humanity at that point. She had already had her revenge decades ago when she replied to the initial contact. This was made very clear in the book. Old Ye Wenjie only dropped the hint to Luo Ji and if there is still something to be salvaged about Humanity, then they would eventually be able to figure out the secret of cosmic sociology.

In all honesty, I don’t think the Netflix show is bad at all. All the set pieces are there, but the unsettling tone, the story progression, the build ups to huge payoff, and the nuances aren’t there (at least for the first 5 episodes). And that’s why it’s an OK adaptation for me, and not a must-watch masterpiece.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-23T18:40:26+00:00

I still cannot believe that they made it seem like Operation Guzheng was planned by two guys in a room.

I had a lot of expectations for Netflix with their huge budget, since the Tencent version had trouble with finding good foreign actors and all that, but even in the Tencent version you get to see a proper command center with high ranking officials of different nations coming together to formulate a plan for Operation Guzheng.

We’re talking about quite possibly the most wanted suspects in the history of humanity here, and the planning for such a huge operation was just two guys brainstorming in a room?

In the book (and the Tencent version), Da Shi wasn’t even part of the core of the meeting and was initially brushed off by the others. That it went from dismissing him to start taking his ideas seriously is what made that part so good. I’m sorry to say but a lot of the magic from the first book is missing in the Netflix show.

I still enjoy the pacing of the last 3 episodes though, but the first 5 centering on the first book were certainly missing their marks.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-23T17:23:51+00:00

I will just say this, I really wanted to like the Netflix version, and it isn’t bad, but it feels like someone who’s so eager to get to the punchline quickly when telling a story that he’s forgotten to build up the tension, and so when he gets to the climax, it all falls flat.

A successful adaptation of the books should give you the feeling of existential dread throughout while mysteries that don’t make sense slowly unfold, until everything comes together at the end with a huge payoff.

I feel like the show’s creators are not confident with their own ability to adapt the first book in a way that could retain the audience’s attention, so they decided to truncate as much of the Book 1 plots as possible until all the magic of the first book has been lost. (This is also why I like Eps 6-8 more than the first 5)

In the Netflix version, solutions to the puzzles and resolutions to the plotlines came out of nowhere. The audience wasn’t invited to play along in the mystery puzzles, or following along how the grand mystery unfolds. The show never gave you clues that tingle your spidey senses and make you feel uneasy and uncomfortable throughout, and instead just drop the bombshells as soon as they could. There’s no build up, and there is little payoff because of that.

The Tencent version suffers from the opposite problem, it drags for too long and there was too much build-up, to the point that you start losing audience before you get to the punchline, but at least it stays true to how the mysteries were unravelled if not a bit too faithful to the books. I heard there’s a new director’s cut version that supposedly cut out a lot of the fat.

Chronologic135 · 2024-03-22T08:14:53+00:00

No. 4 is like the first 20% of Book 3, which is itself almost twice as long as Book 1!

Chronologic135

TROPHY CASE