My recent two posts on UFOs and the possible existence of life emerging on other planets in the universe generated quite a bit of interest. Those interested in this topic may enjoy the new series just released on Netflix that deals with this. I recently finished watching all eight episodes (each roughly an hour long) of this show.

It deals with a group of five friends who were together at Oxford University and were all the proteges of a physicist Vera Ye who herself was the daughter of an accomplished Chinese physicist Ye Wenjie, whose father, also a physics professor, was murdered by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution for teaching Einstein’s theories. While remaining good friends, the careers of the five have diverged. Two of them (Jin Cheng and Saul Durand) are hotshot physicists, one (Auggie Salazar) is the chief scientific officer of a nanotechnology company. One (Jack Rooney) dropped out to start a snack company that has made him very wealthy, while the fifth (Will Downing) became a physics teacher, feeling that he did not have what it takes to be top-rank research scientist.

Suddenly, one by one, the best scientists all around the world start killing themselves, seemingly driven mad by seeing a personal countdown clock before their eyes that no one else can see. Then all the major physics accelerator laboratories around the world start producing inexplicable results that result in them being shut down. And then everyone in the world suddenly sees the night sky exploding with stars that blink on and off. It is clear that the Earth is being sent some sort of message by an extra-terrestrial civilization that has a vastly superior technology to ours. They are from a solar system that is four light years away but have been able to achieve interstellar travel speeds close to one-hundredth the speed of light so will arrive here in 400 years. But they have also developed the ability to communicate instantly over this distance and also to monitor anything that happens on Earth that they wish.

Do they come in peace or to take over the Earth? They have been able to recruit followers on Earth who call the leader ‘my Lord’, just like people in a UFO cult. The followers have enormous faith in the goodness of their ‘Lord’ and that they will be looked after and taken care of even after their fellow believers are killed in large numbers in raids by the government security agencies. These followers think that the arrival of the aliens will herald a new and glorious era because they will solve all the problems that we have created here and seem unable to deal with. Everyone else views their arrival with alarm, since their goal seems to be destroy science by having the best scientists kill themselves, and governments begin to take steps to deal with them when they do eventually arrive. One plan is to develop our own probe that can also travel at one-hundredth the speed of light so as to meet them half-way in 200 years.

Benedict Wong plays Clarence Shi, an investigator for a shadowy British intelligence agency headed by Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham), who is ruthless and single-minded in his mission to combat the invaders to the point of being a sociopath.

The creators use this premise to dazzle the viewer with impressive CGI effects and they throw in many of the greatest hits of speculative scientific theories like higher dimensions, quantum entanglement (that, along with ‘higher-dimensional protons’, enable their instantaneous communications), advanced nanotechnology (that can produce wires that are so thin as to be invisible while strong enough to slice through even steel as if it were butter), cryogenics, highly advanced AI, and so on.

The aliens have also created virtual reality headsets far superior to anything that we have now that, when wearers put them on, create what looks like games, but are also used to communicate with selected people on Earth. These headsets take wearers Jin and Jack to various eras in the past where they are presented with apocalyptic climate disaster scenarios that they must overcome in order to move to the next level. This device allows for some whimsical touches. In one joint trip, Jin and Jack are taken back to the court of Kublai Kahn were they compete with Isaac Newton and Alan Turing to see whose theory correctly predicts when a period of benign climate stability will emerge. Newton and Turing have devised a complex theory whose solution will give an answer but to get that answer requires a computer to run the algorithm, something not available in the 13th century. So they set up a human-based computer with millions of soldiers lined up in an orderly fashion with binary black and white flags that indicate the bits one and zero. Once the program starts, one sees those flags shifting back and forth all over the vast plain as the ‘computer’ runs the program until the result is obtained.

There are plenty of plot holes, improbabilities, inconsistencies, and dropped storylines but the production values are excellent and the whole thing is fast-paced and entertaining, if at times gory, no surprise since this by the same people who brought Game of Thrones to the screen. Another positive feature is that the creators have resisted the temptation to be only about gee-whiz science and technology and have developed appealing characters who have interesting relationships and motivations.

Be warned that this is just the first season so that it ends with many issues unresolved, to be presumably addressed in the next season.

Here’s the trailer.