Netflix’s rendition of Cixin Liu’s brilliant work, 3 Body Problem, just dropped. It is as good as it gets. If you haven’t read the novel, I strongly suggest that you do so.

The series opens with a struggle session during the Cultural Revolution, where a physics professor is being publicly tried for teaching “reactionary theories” like relativity and the Big Bang theory. The scene is almost identical to the book’s version except that instead of a tall and heavy iron hat, the professor is wearing a tall conical hat made of paper. After a brief inquisition, the 15-year-old revolutionary guard loses her patience and hits the professor with a belt. Others join in, and the professor is dead in no time. The professor’s helpless daughter watches with horror as she is held back by the crowd. Many years later, she would meet the girl who led the charge again, her short-lived power trip punished by the party by exiling her to a wheat field where she lost an arm to gangrene. Power is fickle; power is short-lived. But those in its thrall often forget that it would not last forever.

What causes people to crave power? Privilege? Lack of it? Lack of power? Helplessness or something broken inside you that has to be overcompensated with the external projection of invulnerability and power? Remember, inside these grown-up meat suits and fancy job titles, we are the same vulnerable kids who walked around holding a parent’s finger. Is power that finger’s substitute? Who is to say? But here is the next bad thing about power. It does not exist without the abuse of privilege. Without abuse, a job is just a........

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