The Oxford Five has become the Oxford Four. 

While Episode 3 of 3 Body Problem explored the realms of virtual reality, the close-knit college friends face real-world tragedy in Episode 4. The shocking death of Jack Rooney (John Bradley) unmoors the central characters in 3 Body Problem, the cerebral sci-fi thriller from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, and True Blood writer Alexander Woo. Brilliant physicist Jin (Jess Hong) and savvy snack-lord Jack discovered the truth behind the VR headsets: A condemned civilization sent the tech as a recruitment tool to vet top thinkers for an Earth-based organization who would welcome their eventual invasion. 

“It seems like the craziest possible explanation,” says Woo. “But as our characters come to figure out, the only one that makes any sense at all is that aliens do exist.”

The episode, named “Our Lord,” takes us inside the doomsday organization, which is headquartered on an oil tanker, and bankrolled by Mike Evans (Ben Schnetzer). It also reveals how he reconnected with Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) after their meeting in China decades earlier.     

“Watching that scene and all their scenes together, there is a real chemistry between them,” says Benioff. “You believe it from the first time they met in China until the reunion in the restaurant. There’s something there. I mean, you just feel it.”

Read on to discover how the extraterrestrial action unfolds.

Executive producers David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo break down Episode 4’s Little Red Riding Hood scene.

How do Ye and Evans reunite?

In 1982, Mike Evans meets up with Ye, who’s in London for an astrophysics conference. She’s now a professor, and Evans runs his father’s oil company — though he claims nothing’s changed. “In order to fight power, sometimes you have to embrace power,” he says to Ye in Mandarin. Ye then says he’s the only one she can talk to. “It’s a decade later and the line ‘in nature, nothing exists alone’ still resonates for Ye,” says Woo. “She still has not met anyone else who could possibly share this worldview that she has, except this one guy that she met once. They’re still in each other’s minds.”

Ye confesses to Evans: “Back on that hilltop, I did something.” And by “did something,” she means she invited alien overlords, the San-Ti, to conquer the Earth. A bit of an understatement, but she still needs Evans’ help. 

“I don’t think [Ye’s] a good guy or a bad guy, I think she’s a person who made a tremendous mistake,” says Weiss. “That mistake grew from the decision that she knew what was best for the world, that she could make a determination that no one person could make.”

Ed Miller

How does Evans help to further Ye’s project?

A couple of years later, Evans brings Ye to a modified oil tanker that will be their mobile research center. The ship has a massive parabolic radio dish on it, just like the one at the Red Coast base in China. Inside, it has all the gear necessary to continue Ye’s transmission into space, and Evans says the aliens have been sending her messages for years, which have been piling up like unread emails. “You’re very important to them,” he says, adding in Mandarin, “You have brought us hope.” Then they make out by the reel-to-reel tape machines.  

Is it love? Maybe, but Benioff has a “cold-blooded way of looking at it.” 

“He’s got resources, right? She knows about his father and that he’s inherited the oil company,” he says. “So not only is he probably a fellow traveler, but he’s got billions of dollars to spend for the cause, soon to be their joint cause.”

Where in the world is Mike Evans in the present day?

Clarence “Da” Shi (Benedict Wong) locates Evans (Jonathan Pryce) on the large oil tanker and guesses that there could also be a thousand people on it. The ship is fittingly named Judgment Day. Onboard, kids play basketball and ride bikes, families congregate on picnic tables, and shipping-container living spaces perch on the deck. It’s all a very cult-chic aesthetic. Evans greets a brainwashed kid who asks excited questions about “Our Lord,” the name that followers call the San-Ti. He’s overly honest with them, politely explaining that they probably won’t be around when the San-Ti arrive. But it’s all part of their plan.      

“When we were trying to recruit Jonathan Pryce for this role — he’s Oscar-nominated and a living legend and probably not normally drawn to science fiction roles — we did remind him that [his dystopian film by Terry Gilliam] Brazil is science fiction, even though he doesn’t think of it that way,” says Benioff.

Evans chats again with the San-Ti about the upcoming summit, and they tell him his enemies know all about it and are watching their every move. The San-Ti aren’t the only ones with superior surveillance skills. But the San-Ti say they will protect Evans’ flock. 

Later, Evans reads Little Red Riding Hood to “the Lord” via a microphone. The San-Ti are perplexed by the nuances of the story and the human ability to hide intentions. “He’s trying to explain to an alien who doesn’t understand metaphor or deceit what those things mean,” says Benioff. “It’s hard to explain to a very high intelligence that has no background with the notion of saying untruths.” 

Evans complains that the intelligence operatives tracking them are pests, but the San-Ti only understand the literal meaning. Evans tries to teach them about metaphor: Their enemy is like “inconsequential… bugs you can squash under your shoe.” The San-Ti infer that they can’t lie and communicate through thoughts. They struggle with the concept of the fairy tale, so Evans tells them it’s a kind of lie and confesses all humans lie sometimes. “So this story is a lie about a liar? We think we understand now.” 

“In Cixin Liu’s books, fairy tales play an important part, so I think we were all drawn to that aspect of the story,” says Benioff. “It’s actually one of my favorite scenes of the whole season. Jonathan Pryce did such a great job. I just love him in the scene. He’s interacting with a voice coming over the loudspeaker.”

Why do the San-Ti freak out?

Evans says they can help the San-Ti understand them better. Then the San-Ti freak out with their unfeeling, almost robotic vibe: “A liar cannot be trusted. We cannot coexist with liars. We are afraid of you.” Then they ghost Evans. “Evans’ big mistake is he’s asked if he lies, and he should have lied,” says Benioff. 

Weiss adds that we see on Pryce’s face Evans’ “understanding of just how catastrophic a mistake he just made.” When it comes to pivotal scenes, Pryce tries not to overthink it. “As an actor — when it’s behavior that’s so extreme — what you don’t want to do is comment on it while you’re playing it, or make decisions. You just have to be,” says Pryce. 

Ed Miller

What’s up with the Oxford Five, ahem… the Oxford Four?

Saul (Jovan Adepo) and Will (Alex Sharp) visit Jack’s house before his family arrives for the funeral. Saul tries to find a suit for Jack to wear for the funeral, but Will says it’ll be a closed casket. There are still blood stains on Jack’s bedroom floor. “When we see Will and Saul mourn Jack’s death we thought it was important [that] when someone who matters a great deal to these guys gets taken from them abruptly, and horribly without any warning, that they respond to it in a way that feels real to us,” says Weiss.

In Jack’s room –– filled with movie memorabilia –– they discover a simple Transformers lunch box. Saul jokes that it’s filled with sex toys. Instead, it contains photos of Jack as a kid and a Manchester City FC shot glass. “When they opened the box, they did a beautiful job sinking the hook on how horrible and inexplicable it must feel to have this happen to you,” says Weiss. “This guy who had a very kind of brash outward face ends up with pictures of himself during his happy childhood and the things that he loved when he was a kid.”

Series set decorator Andrew McCarthy tells Tudum that when they were curating the memorabilia in Jack’s room they wanted to create the impression of “a young man who came into money very quickly after making his fortune from his company, but didn't do the wise thing and invest it — but rather had a lot of fun with it.” The team wanted to show that Jack is “a carefree spirit” who’s “obviously brilliant but loves his toys and gadgets in every sense.” If you look closely, you’ll find characters and collectables from Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, Gremlins, Alien and Star Wars. “I would be interested to see how many pieces the audience can spot and name,” says McCarthy.

Meanwhile, at the Black Palace, Da Shi and Wade (Liam Cunningham) reveal the footage of Jack’s death and confront Jin about her invitation to the summit. Instead of telling her not to go, she will be their mole. “I’m not a spy,” she says, but eventually agrees to go. Da Shi tells her to pack a bag with clothes for a few nights, in case she can’t return home right away. 

Ed Miller

What happens at the summit?

Jin later arrives at the remote location of the summit, while Wade and his team track her. There’s a chic party for the new members. The blank-eyed, creepy killer Tatiana (Marlo Kelly) welcomes Jin and says she’s sorry to hear about Jack’s death, which is weird because she totally stabbed him very recently. Jin plays along with the “Our Lord” talk, and Tatiana reveals that she’s been a part of the organization since she was young. “Our Lord is real,” she says. Then, the founder of the movement arrives with great fanfare: It’s none other than Ye Wenjie (Rosalind Chao)!

Jin is completely stunned to discover that Vera’s unassuming mom leads an alien invasion welcome committee. “Jin, who previously felt like this was a pseudo mother figure to her, feels instantly betrayed,” says Hong.

Director Minkie Spiro very deliberately created a party scene that didn’t detract from the big surprise. “When you’re tasked with having to reveal a bombshell, you want it to land with the audience. So that also includes how you choose your camera work,” says Spiro. “It was exciting to find a language for that moment.” 

Ye tells the crowd her story: She saw her country torn apart, her family destroyed, and she was sent to hell. She says she saw human beings cut each other to pieces without a thought, all in the name of progress, and that nothing’s changed: We continue to destroy each other and the world around us. We cannot save ourselves, but we are not alone. Four light-years away, the San-Ti have achieved miracles in spite of the chaos that plagues their world, and now they are coming to share their knowledge, to teach us how to survive and thrive. It’ll take them four hundred years to get here, but we must prepare the world for the San-Ti’s arrival. “We will give them the gift of our world, so that they can do with it what we could not, so that they can mend what we have broken,” says Ye.

“I saw Ye’s decision as being a combination of being impulsive and logical, because when you’ve lost everything, I think there’s the tendency to be drawn to what you sense is a greater good,” says Chao. 

Sadly for Ye, the party doesn’t last long after her big speech. Wade’s SWAT team bursts in and a firefight ensues. After trying to shoot Jin, Tatiana escapes, and Ye is apprehended and brought back to the Black Palace. 

“Filming the entire sequence in the equestrian center was a week’s worth of shooting, with a heavy action sequence and a lot of extras and quite a few stunts. It was a challenge, but a really, really fun one,” says Kelly.

Ed Miller

What does Wade’s team do with Ye?

The apprehended Ye faces down Wade and a panel of inquisitors in the Black Palace. She says they caught her because the San-Ti let them. Wade pushes back, saying that the death count of the followers was high, and questions whether they’re really being cared for. 

“They certainly don’t feel the need to protect their human followers anymore, [and] that allows the giant raid that happens at the end of the episode,” says Woo. “Before that, they were protecting everyone.”

But Ye doesn’t lose faith. 

“You have no idea what they can do. You think you do, but you don’t,” she says. “They are coming and there’s nothing you can do to stop them and when they arrive, you will be so grateful.” 

Will we? Have the San-Ti really broken up with humanity? Will they ever call Evans back?

Keep watching 3 Body Problem on Netflix for more answers.