Go inside the terrifying "Judgment Day" sequence from 3 Body Problem

3 Body Problem is a new sci-fi show on Netflix, based on the Remembrance of Earth's Past novel trilogy by Liu Cixin. When hyping up the series at SXSW, showrunner David Benioff said that, "I feel like if we can just get the audience to Episode 5, we got 'em hooked."

If you've seen Episode 5, "Judgment Day," you know what he's talking about. This episode has a set piece so inventively terrifying that I'm still thinking about it a week later, although it requires some setup. Kindly beware SPOILERS below!

So 3 Body Problem is about humanity's first contact with an extraterrestrial species that is currently heading to Earth so it can colonize our planet. It's being helped along by a group of humans who worships the aliens as gods. Many of these people live on a ship called the Judgment Day. The governments of the world, led by operative Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham) want to mine that ship for information on the enemy, but they need to capture the ship without alerting anyone on board as to what's happening, because that might give them an opportunity to destroy the evidence.

Auggie Salazar (Eiza González), a scientist working on developing ultra-thin nano-fibers so sharp they can cut through steel like it's butter, and so thin they're invisible to the naked eye. Wade and his crew string up long lengths of this nanofiber in the Panama Canal just as the Judgment Day is passing through. The ship and everyone on it are sliced to ribbons, but the hard drive with the information Wade needs slips between the gaps in the fibers.

That's what happens. But the sequence really comes alive in the way it happens. Episode director Minkie Spiro puts us firmly in the shoes of the people on the ship, many of whom don't realize anything is amiss until their bodies literally split into bloody chunks. There are children on this ship. We feel the terror in a visceral, immediate way that far outstrips what happens in the book, where we view everything from a distance. This scene knocked me out.

"I read the episode countless times trying to fathom: how am I going to visually pull this off?" Spiro said in a behind-the-scenes video. "For something as epic as the Judgment Day, it began with months of prep, and it started with the science...It's utterly terrifying. And that's the feeling I wanted to create, that you've been literally blindsided with this massacre."

Watching the video, you can see that a lot of the scene was filmed in real time, rather than inserted later in post, although of course there are plenty of special effets too. My favorite moment from the scene is the little paper dolls on the wall in the hallway slowly getting bisected as the ship runs through the nano-fibers. It's grimly funny to watch the behind-the-scenes video and see the crew members putting up half-clocks and such. "I wanted to keep quite a bit of it in camera," Spiro said. I thank you for that.

Good guys vs bad buys vs aliens

There's also a moral dimension to the scene. As showrunner Alexander Woo says, "The most violent horrific thing that we do is done by ostensibly the good guys." Yes, these alien worshippers are willing conspirators in the aliens' attempt to subjugate humanity, but after watching them get brutally butchered, it's hard not to have misgivings about it. The show puts those arguments in the mouth of Auggie Salazar, who is shocked that her work is being used this way. "I don't think we've ever seen something like this on TV," said actor Eiza González.

That's the big way this scene improves on the book version, I think, because it refuses to look away from the carnage. Whether you think the ends justified the means is up to you. Liam Cunningham certainly thinks his character was in the right. "I love Thomas Wade," he said in another behind-the-scenes video. "I think he's a good guy."

And his wasn't the only major set piece in the episode!

"You are bugs"

At the end of the episode, the aliens finally reveal themselves to humanity by using their sophons — highly advanced super-computers that take up the space of a proton — to write the message "You are bugs" on every screen on Earth. It's another knockout moment as we see how vastly outgunned we are.

In The Three-Body Problem book, the message "You are bugs" is written directly on the eyeballs of a select few people trying to resist the coming alien invasion. As Alexander Woo explained, they thought that would be tricky to do on TV, so they went another route. It was super effective. "If the aliens are going to announce themselves to everybody in the world, they're gonna want to do it in a way that shocks people into submission," said showrunner Dan Weiss.

I think the Judgment Day sequence is the best scene from 3 Body Problem, and the "You are bugs" sequence is the second-best scene. So this was quite an episode. "We knew from the time we outlined it was going to be the biggest episode by a longshot," Benioff said.

We still don't know if Netflix is going to renew 3 Body Problem for a second season — they would need three or four seasons to adapt the whole book series — but with episodes like this, I definitely think they deserve it.

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h/t Mashable