Netflix Series: 3 Body Problem

I've heard a lot of buzz about this new sci-fi series, but never looked into it until tonight.

High-budget sci-fi mysteries can tend to get pretty far up their own asses, but so far (episode 2) it's not too anal. The premise is this: simultaneously all the particle colliders around Earth start returning nonsense results.  Scientists are baffled.

At the same time, a number of high-profile physicists start killing themselves.  Nobody knows why.  The failure of the colliders to return the expected results hardly seems like a logical reason to kill yourself.

Of course, most of the main characters, the world-class physicists, happen to be attractive young women in this series... This is TV afterall. But the development, the unfolding of the plot, has been intelligent enough so far to not scare me off.  I'll keep watching. There are eight episodes in Season One.

Just starting episode 5.  Not much of it makes sense -- in fact it's a jumbled mess, almost as if each episode had a different screenwriter.

But it's not boring.

One sequence in particular was startlingly original.  So much so that I dreamt about it last night.

One of the scientists in this series has developed a nanofiber, a string so thin and strong that it can be used to slice diamond like so much cheese. The scientists need to stop a ship as it sails through the Panama Canal. They attach these nanofibers to two erectable booms, and as the previous ship passes, they raise the booms to catch the bad guy's ship.  It drives through the nanofiber grid, at first looking like nothing happened. But as the ship gets mid-point through, stuff on deck starts falling over. People on deck tumble into pieces.  Clocks and gauges inside the ship suddenly fall in half. As the bridge is destroyed the ship drifts into the shore, and as it hits the shore the whole hull separates out into one-foot layers, like a layer cake pushed sideways.

The whole ship collapses into a pile as its momentum overcomes its structural integrity.

Weird, visually arresting, and dream worthy.

Finished the first season, and I guess there's a second in production.

Overall impression: some hard science, a lot of nonsense, and a plot that only makes sense if you squint. I dunno, it was entertaining enough.  I didn't turn it off.