The Three-Body Problem Episode 5 Now Available On YouTube For Free

It took a few days, but the fifth episode of The Three-Body Problem is now free to stream on YouTube. This is on Chinese streamer Tencent’s official YouTube channel. When the series premiered on January 15th, the first four episodes were released for free. Subsequent episodes would be uploaded daily on weekdays but were locked behind a subscription paywall. They become free to stream on the same day the episodes are broadcast live on Chinese television. Subscribers get to see them four days in advance.

We already reviewed Episode Five a few days ago. It’s probably the best episode of the show so far, arriving at a point that you could say marked the end of Act One. Hopefully, this means Episode Six will probably unlock for free tomorrow. Episode Ten unlocked this morning behind the paywall. The Three-Body Problem follows Liu Cixin‘s first novel in his epic Science Fiction trilogy, which won the Hugo Award in 2015 and has been praised/recommended by President Obama. He told The New York Times that the novel going from an initial earthbound mystery to covering the fate of the universe, “was just wildly imaginative, really interesting… The scope of it was immense. So that was fun to read, partly because my day-to-day problems with Congress seem fairly petty — not something to worry about. Aliens are about to invade.” You can watch episode five below:

The Chinese TV series The Three-Body Problem is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the book, broken up into thirty episodes that will see their final on Valentine’s Day, February 14th. It starts out as a mystery: nanotechnology engineer and physicist Wang Miao (Edward Zhang) and homicide cop Shi Qiang (Yu He Wei) has been recruited by a secret Chinese Military taskforce to investigate the apparent suicides of dozens of scientists worldwide, including a young physicist in Beijing and whether a private scientific think tank called The Frontiers of Science might be involved. What they uncover is a threat to Physics itself and the fate of not just Earth but the whole universe.

Netflix is currently preparing its own adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, probably premiering sometime this year, but the Chinese version is already the more faithful. It still cuts some narrative corners, including leaving out some of the harder-edged depictions of the Cultural Revolution and the hardcore Science, but the series still manages to teach Basic Theoretical Physics to viewers along the way, which is impressive. Fans of the novel in China and the West have praised the show for how closely it sticks to the book and expecting the Netflix version to water down or radically change the story and what it says. Meanwhile, the Chinese version recreates most of the character dialogue scenes faithfully from the book.

You can stream episodes of The Three-Body Problem on Tencent’s YouTube Channel.

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