In Episode 5 of 3 Body Problem, we reach Red Wedding levels of savagery. 

With the big Judgment Day showdown, we wade into uncharted waters. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen something like this on TV,” says Eiza González, who plays scientist Auggie Salazar in 3 Body Problem, the sci-fi thriller series from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and True Blood writer Alexander Woo.

“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 [and] see it done right,’ ” says Benioff. It took director Minkie Spiro a minute to grasp the epic nature of the scene. “I’ve read the [script] countless times trying to fathom, ‘How am I going to visually pull this off?’ ” she says. 

In “Judgment Day,” Episode 5 of 3 Body Problem, the San-Ti also reveal their big plan and their even bigger sentient computer, the Sophon, that covers the entire world. “I think this will be epic television,” says Jonathan Pryce, who plays Mike Evans.

Read on for more epic antics from Episode 5. 

3 Body Problem’s science consultant, Dr. Matt Kenzie, talks particle physics.

What happens to Auggie and Jin after the raid on the summit?

Auggie and Jin (Jess Hong) hide out in a safe house somewhere in the English countryside. They’re being guarded by Thomas Wade’s (Liam Cunningham) security forces. Jin is stress-eating muesli and popping anti-anxiety medication. “I have anxiety ’cause people are trying to kill us and maybe aliens are trying to kill us now,” says Jin. She reveals that her boyfriend, Raj (Saamer Usmani), is on a secret mission and she doesn’t know the details.

How’s Will doing?

Will (Alex Sharp) is chillin’ with the seashells down by the seashore when he gets news that his late pal Jack Rooney (John Bradley) has left him half of his snack fortune: a casual £20 million. Will says he doesn’t want to use the money to find a cure for his cancer. Instead, he just wants to use it to “eat some good food… before it all gets too rough.”

Ever the good friend, Saul’s (Jovan Adepo) on board with this plan. “I’d do the same thing,” he says. 

How’s Da Shi’s interrogation of Ye Wenjie going?

“You said they weren’t coming for over 400 years, so how do you know they’re gonna be nice?” Clarence “Da” Shi (Benedict Wong) asks Ye (Rosalind Chao) across the table. “Usually when people with more advanced technology encounter people with more primitive technology, it doesn’t work out well for the primitives.”

Da Shi can’t understand why Ye reached out to the San-Ti — after all, they’ve threatened to take over the world. “Because our civilization is no longer capable of solving its own problems,” Ye tells him. 

“She genuinely believes that what she did is for the best and that the world will be grateful in the long run for what she has done,” Benioff says. 

Ye explains to Da Shi that the San-Ti allowed the intelligence operatives to capture and question her, so she deduces that she’s no longer valuable to them and what she knows isn’t a threat to them either. “I don’t matter anymore,” she says. “All that matters is this: They are coming.”

Despite feeling dejected that she’s “been kicked to the sidelines by her Lord,” Ye isn’t afraid because she “still feels like her Lord has a tremendous upper hand,” says Weiss. 

Is Mike Evans actually Vera Ye’s father?

Yes, but “only in the biological sense,” according to Ye. She hid the truth about her connection with the San-Ti from her daughter because Vera wasn’t strong enough. Vera never actually met Evans; the first time he ever saw her was when she was lying in her coffin, Ye tells Da Shi. “That’s a pretty intense revelation delivered in a pretty matter-of-fact way by Ye, which tells you something about Evans,” says Weiss. 

Ye also lied about the headset belonging to Vera when she gave it to Jin. Jin was being recruited all along. “[Jin] could be the most capable physicist of her generation,” says Ye.

Da Shi wonders how Evans communicates with the San-Ti, since it takes four years for messages to reach them. Could they have faster-than-light communication? While that’s impossible for humans, Ye confirms it isn’t for the San-Ti. “I wish I could show you what the future looks like,” she says. 

Are the San-Ti still ghosting Evans?

So ghosted. Even though the followers are freaked out by the recent raid, Evans says it’s all part of the Lord’s plan. But when he returns to his microphone, it’s radio silence. “Please speak to us again,” Evans pleads. Perhaps his acknowledgment of humanity’s ability to lie has made the San-Ti abandon him and his followers.

What’s the plan to fight the San-Ti’s followers?

Back at the Black Palace, Wade is marveling at some medieval Mongolian metal stirrups. “Genghis Khan’s army used metal stirrups before anyone else,” he tells Da Shi. “They fought better on horseback than the enemy. They conquered the world… That’s why I’m 1% Mongolian.” Technological mastery helped the Mongols create a vast empire. Da Shi shares the new intel about Evans’ communications, surmising that there’s a record of all those communications on the tanker. Something like a Bible, says Da Shi, that can give insights about the San-Ti before they party-crash the Earth in four centuries. “We need to find out what kind of stirrups they got,” says Da Shi. The only way to get that information is to locate that data stash on the Judgment Day. 

What’s their plan?

Da Shi says the Judgment Day will be traveling through the Panama Canal. Since a missile strike or an invasion of the tanker would likely destroy the data before they could get to it, they find a different alternative: nanofibers. Remember Auggie’s insane technology from Episode 2 that diced up a synthetic diamond cube like it was butter? Yep, you guessed it: They’re going to julienne the ship. 

Da Shi tries to convince Auggie to use her nanofiber technology on the Judgment Day. “Sometimes I think it would be hard to believe a character being persuasive on a page,” says Benioff about Wong’s approach to this scene. “Then you see Benny doing it and you’re like, ‘Well, I would trust him.’ Benny is one of those actors… any page of dialogue is better after he’s read it.” 

The plan raises a moral dynamic, says Woo. “The most violent, horrific thing that [humans] do on the show is done by ostensibly the good guys.”  

Da Shi and Auggie return to Auggie’s lab to restart her manufacturing machines. This time, her countdown doesn’t reappear. She’s elated at first, then suspicious: Why are the San-Ti no longer trying to shut down her work? “The Lord stopped protecting his flock,” Da Shi says. 

With the help of Raj, Wade assembles a crack team of Royal Navy engineers to build a network of nanofibers that will slice up the ship as it passes through, leaving the data they need untouched. 

What happens to the Judgment Day?

“Auggie is a genius, and I employ her to use those skills in a very questionable way,” says Cunningham about his character’s approach. “When you’re dealing with a drama that affects all of humanity, things may not be as black-and-white.” 

As Wade’s engineering team builds the trap in the Panama Canal, Auggie laments that her life’s work will be used for death instead of benefiting humanity. But Wade prioritizes “defeating an enemy coming to our world to take it for themselves” over everything.  

Auggie confronts Raj about his complicity in the impending slaughter: “They are telling us to kill people we don’t know, for reasons that we don’t know. And you’re just like, ‘Yeah, cool’?” 

Then it happens: The Judgment Day takes its final voyage. Slowly passing through the nanofibers, the ship is carved up into slices, along with its passengers. “That’s one of those sequences that I hadn’t seen before: a supertanker sliced into 2-foot sections by nanowires and everyone on it,” says Weiss. At the end, even Evans is dissected while holding a red hard drive in his hands.

“It’s terrifying. It’s utterly terrifying,” says Spiro. “And that’s the feeling I wanted to create, that you’ve been literally blindsided [by] this massacre.”

How did they pull off that Judgment Day scene?

Minkie Spiro had the biggest job of all the directors of the series, says Woo. “She directed three episodes, including Episode 5, which is a massive, massive episode in terms of set pieces. She was used to entrenching herself into something, and [she] brought a real warmth and dedication to the project, a real passion for it.”

Spiro says, for something as epic as “Judgment Day,” “It began with months of prep and it started with the science.”  

Dr. Matt Kenzie, the series’ science consultant, collaborated with the team to conceptualize how the nanofibers would work. “When we were trying to design the nanofiber cutter in Auggie’s lab, something I realized quite quickly was that if I was really doing this experiment, I would want to be observing the properties of these fibers,” he says. “So you would probably want to avoid moving the fibers. You would want to keep the fibers static and move the block through the fibers.”

Instead of relying entirely on postproduction, Spiro explains that scenes like chopping up the corridor were created without special effects. Says Weiss, “The massacred people were added in later with visual effects, but up until the point when they get sliced and diced, they’re [played by] human beings.”

The wreckage was also an epic undertaking. The show’s construction manager, Keith Perry, used neoprene (a type of synthetic rubber) to represent the aftermath of the ship. Production designer Deborah Riley, the Emmy winner who designed Game of Thrones, explains: The neoprene “was rigged onto a very simple rig, but whereby those strips could be pushed and pulled and angled up or down, and it made these strips look like they had been mangled.”

While physical elements helped establish a sense of realism in the scene, visual effects played an important role too. “For us creating that [scene], it’s very important to make it very organic,” says visual effects supervisor Stefen Fangmeier. “So we want to pull off something which looks hyperreal, but [also bring it] to a point of realism that is really quite interesting and compelling.”

So what’s in that little red hard drive?

Back at the Black Palace, the data team crack into the hard drive and find recordings of all of Evans’ interactions with the San-Ti. There’s also one truly enormous file labeled “Sophon.” Wade shares Evans’ big blunder — namely, the moment he revealed to the San-Ti that human beings lie — with Ye. She listens as the San-Ti say they are afraid of humans and to the moment where they cut off contact with Evans. Slack-jawed and horrified, Ye realizes that not everything is going according to plan. 

Later, Wade picks up Jin from the safe house and brings her to the Black Palace where he shows her the Sophon file. Jin thinks it could be another level of the game, so they put on VR headsets and enter the urban wasteland contained within. An avatar approaches them and tells them what’s up. Wade asks what the San-Ti look like. “You wouldn’t like it,” the avatar replies. 

The avatar goes on to explain that the San-Ti will indeed reach Earth in 400 years, but humanity’s rapid acceleration of technological advances means humans will have long surpassed the San-Ti’s capabilities before they arrive. “We’re doomed,” says the avatar. “How long do you think it took us to get from hunting to farming, and farming to industry, and industry to atomic power?” Jin responds that it must have taken them much longer because their chaotic eras wiped them out over and over again. 

Ed Miller

What do the San-Ti look like?

When Wade asks if the San-Ti look like humans, the game avatar responds: “We don't look anything like this. This is all for your benefit.” Wade pushes, “What do you really look like?” To which the avatar only responds, “You wouldn't like it.” Yep, that’s not unnerving at all. 

What is the San-Ti’s plan?

When the San-Ti arrive on Earth, the avatar says humanity will have developed the means to destroy the fleet and then their entire world too. “This is not a conquest, it is a funeral procession,” she says. So the San-Ti have only one option: They must destroy humanity’s progress. “We are going to kill your science,” she tells Jin and Wade.

The avatar explains that they’ll use Sophons to achieve their mission. 

What’s a Sophon? 

A Sophon is a proton that the San-Ti have turned into a sentient computer. The San-Ti have the technology to unfold other dimensions (beyond the three that humans occupy). When they summon energy to fire at a single proton, they can enlarge it to cover the entire Earth. According to the avatar, “We make a mind as large as the world” — aka, a Sophon. That’s how the San-Ti are able to control what humans are seeing, through images and computers.  

The San-Ti made two pairs of Sophons, which are entangled on a quantum level. They have one pair of Sophons with them, and the other pair is on Earth. “Everything they see and hear, we see and hear at the same time, even when they are four light-years apart,” the avatar says. They also sent them to the particle accelerators to jumble the science that could usher humankind to victory. “We will destroy the science that could defeat us. The answers to your questions will become chaotic and meaningless. The universe will remain a mystery to you forever,” says the avatar. In place of truth, the San-Ti will give people “miracles” and “illusions,” she says.

What does “you are bugs” mean?

“We make you see what we want you to see,” the avatar says. “We are everywhere. Anywhere. Whenever we want. Always watching. Learning all your secrets. Uncovering your lies. And we will teach you how to fear again.” Wade and Jin flip out and yank off the headsets. All of a sudden, from London billboards to street kiosks in Russia, screens all around the world show the phrase “you are bugs.” In an earlier communication with the San-Ti, Evans compared his enemies to bugs, “annoying, inconsequential creatures” that are easily squashed. And the San-Ti really took that to heart. Now they’ve identified another bug in the universe: all of humanity. 

“It’s just sort of a shock-and-awe fear component [with] ‘you are bugs,’ ” says Weiss.  “We knew [we] would create some really fun, great shots of, like, all of Piccadilly covered in screens saying ‘you are bugs,’ the Buddhist monk’s phone telling him that ‘you are bugs.’ ” 

What’s that big eye in the sky all about?  

After the global broadcast, a wave of darkness crawls across the sky. People around the world look up to see the Earth beneath them reflected above — yes, we’re talking upside-down skyscrapers reaching down toward the ground. Then, an enormous eye appears in the sky. 

 The message is clear: They are watching. Everything. 

“Once you see the eye in the sky, it’s hard to deny that there is a superior power out there that is coming for us,” says Benioff.  “And then we saw Marlo [Kelly, who plays Tatiana] give that great smile as she’s looking up at the eye. Having that as the final shot… she’s such a great actress to watch. This is someone who does not believe she is evil.”

What will happen next? 

Keep your eye on 3 Body Problem on Netflix for more answers.