If you’ve seen episode 5 of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, your jaw might still be on the floor. For the residents of the doomed ship Judgment Day in the show, it’s not just their jaws.
Taken directly from Liu Cixin’s book, it’s one of the most horrifying scenes you’ll see on TV this year. The sequence sees the military deployment of Auggie Salazar’s (Eiza González) nanotechnology against a large repurposed tanker. It’s the floating HQ of oil magnate Mike Evans’ (Jonathan Pryce) and his Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO), a population of 1,000 people, including children, awaiting the arrival of the aliens known as the San-Ti — who have just gone cold on Evans after a bedtime story.
In the episode, Strategic Intelligence Agency head Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham) gets intel from Detective Da Shi (Benedict Wong) that the ship — yes, forebodingly named Judgment Day — has booked passage through the Panama Canal. There, Wade recruits Salazar’s basically invisible technology to set a trap, easily cutting through the bow and its inhabitants like one of those old-school egg slicers. It’s deeply messed up.
In a new clip from Netflix, showrunners D.B. Weiss, David Benioff, and Alexander Woo unpack the sequence alongside episode director Minkie Spiro and the production team. “The Judgment Day sequence in the book was one of those ones that we talked about before where you just think, ‘Oh man, I really want to see that on-screen, see it done right,'” says Benioff.
The team spoke about how the production designers leaned into physics to make the Judgment Day’s destruction feel horribly realistic, and the episode’s analysis of how far someone would go in a wartime situation.
“I read the episode countless times trying to fathom: how am I going to visually pull this off?” says Spiro. “For something as epic as the Judgment Day, it began with months of prep, and it started with the science.”
Dr Matt Kenzie, who worked as a particle physics consultant on 3 Body Problem, says the key to that nasty piece of tech is not moving the cutter itself, but the thing you want to cut — which is Wade and Auggie’s horrible plan in the series.
“When we were trying to design the nanofibre cutter in Auggie’s lab, something I realised quite quickly was that if I was really doing this experiment, I would want to be observing the property of these fibres,” he says. “So you would probably want to avoid moving the fibres; you would want to keep the fibres static and move the block through the fibres.”
Production designer Deborah Riley also speaks about how the show’s construction manager, Keith Perry, used neoprene to build the destroyed tanker, so the camera could move through that shredded wreckage easily.
Take a look at the clip above for some solid behind-the-scenes footage for this absolutely awful moment in a glorious series. If you’re craving more 3 Body Problem deep dives, we’ve got plenty more for you on Mashable.
How to watch: 3 Body Problem is now streaming on Netflix.
