The truth is out there: The San-Ti are coming.

With apocalypse on the distant horizon, humankind completely freaks out in Episode 6 of 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 episode opens with scenes of chaos, as people all around the world are panicking after the eye in the sky incident in Episode 5 and the revelation that aliens are on their way to Earth. Millions have taken to the streets to riot, with nations deploying their militaries in an attempt to quell the unrest; the UN secretary general addresses the General Assembly about the crises. Mandatory curfews are in place, leaving tourist hotspots like Times Square and the Eiffel Tower abandoned, and Clarence “Da” Shi (Benedict Wong) stumbles on victims of mass suicide hanging from lampposts by the River Thames. 

Ye Wenjie (Rosalind Chao) feels the weight of her decision to invite the aliens home. She now knows that the San-Ti aren’t arriving with flowers in their hands — or tentacles, or whatever. They are coming to stamp out humanity like bugs.  

“They learned the truth about us… We’re too dangerous to coexist with,” says Ye. She realizes even if the invaders are 400 years away, the end is near for her. 

But Wade (Liam Cunningham) and Jin (Jess Hong) have a plan to fight back. 

Let’s recap 3 Body Problem Episode 6, “The Stars Our Destination.”

Go inside Will’s big symbolic gesture and that Lana Del Rey song.

What happens when the world learns the San-Ti are on their way?

Well let’s just say, chaos ensues. “We were kind of struggling to figure out how to open the episode. We ultimately asked Anna Hauger, our editor of this episode: We want a new opening. We’re thinking of a montage of around-the-world events. [We] gave her a very vague set of notes, and she said, ‘OK, let me work on it.’ And a few days later [she] came back with this incredible montage,” says Benioff about the opening scenes of global panic, played out via news reports. 

Woo continues: “[Hauger] also did a lot of the voices of newscasters in it, and we wound up using her voice for some of it because it sounded better than some of the professional voice actors.”

How’s Ye doing now that she knows the San-Ti don’t want to coexist with humans?

Jin visits Ye in captivity and tells her she’s lucky to avoid the chaos that is happening around the world. Ye has been shell-shocked after listening to the San-Ti confess their distrust of humans. “You see that incredible performance on Ros Chao’s face where everything she believed in has fallen apart,” says Woo. “Yet another betrayal in a series of betrayals in her life.” 

Jin calls Ye a traitor and storms out. As she leaves, Ye asks her how she wants to be remembered. Jin replies as “someone who fought back.” 

Later, Ye tells Da Shi that her daughter, Vera (Vedette Lim), found her messages to Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce), which led to her suicide. She then convinces Da Shi to let her go, since she hasn’t been accused with a crime. He gets clearance from Wade to release her, but makes sure she is tailed and surveilled. 

When Ye returns home, she sees that the offerings she left for Vera are spoiled. Then she kneels down to pray. “I know you can hear me if you want to,” she says to the San-Ti. “I’m an old woman whose old beliefs have led us down this terrible path.” 

“[Ye] is a woman whose faith in the righteousness of what she’s doing is completely unshakable until it gets shaken,” says Woo. “And she is enough of a scientist and a rational person to realize that this was a mistake.”

With an air of humility, Ye makes one last plea to the invaders she summoned. “I still have an idea or two left in me. And centuries from now, there may well be a fair fight — or no fight at all,” says Ye.

Ye still has “enough of a belief in her own abilities and her own intelligence, that there might be some last Hail Mary she can pull off to undo all of the chaos she has wrought… So it’s a moment of redemption for her or she’s trying desperately, desperately to redeem something that seems completely irredeemable,” says Woo.

Yet, Chao says, inherently Ye isn’t a monster. “I don’t blame her,” she says about her character. “And I said that to Dan [Weiss] and the boys. They said something like, ‘Oh, what she did was so bad’… [but I think] her intentions were good.”

Ed Miller

How is humanity fighting back against the  San-Ti?

Wade has the beginnings of a plan — he just needs to find some scientists willing to believe in his out-there approach. Here’s the CliffsNotes: The San-Ti have all-seeing and all-hearing Sophon supercomputers that will know every plan the humans make. But it took them millions of years to build those omnipresent observers because their technology moves so slowly. Human tech is much faster and that’s why the San-Ti have been sabotaging their scientific research to stop humanity from catching up to them. Wade proposes that humans learn from the source by launching a probe to intercept the enemy fleet — the one that’s moving at 1% light speed toward the Earth — and find out its weaknesses. The problem with that is that even if humans launched a probe tomorrow, it would take them about 398 years to meet the San-Ti fleet. Ah, but not if we’re also traveling at 1% percent light speed, Wade argues — and that should be the goal. The experts he’s pitching say that speed might be achievable by humans in 100 years — and so Wade turns to Jin. 

“He’s incredibly confident that this war that’s going to take place will be achieved in [Earth’s] favor,” says Cunningham. “And his philosophy is very simple. It’s extraordinary. He says if the enemy can do what they’re able to do, then [humans] should be able to do it, too, because then it’s not impossible.”

What is the Staircase Project?

While Wade orders every particle accelerator on the planet (all 2,000 of them, plus the one they might build on the moon) to start up again and run 24/7 to keep the Sophons busy, he also challenges Jin to get a probe to 1% light speed or faster, utilizing existing technology. “Jin comes up with an idea that would allow [humans] to kind of leapfrog…and skip ahead… actually by taking an idea from the past, from Stanislaw Ulam,” says Benioff.  The Staircase Project, her adaptation of this old idea of Ulam’s (called nuclear pulse propulsion) involves using a series of 1,000 nuclear devices evenly spaced in distance, stretching from Earth toward the San-Ti fleet, and a probe with a mass of under 1,000 kilograms. The probe would be propelled by a radiation sail. As the probe passes the first bomb, it detonates, accelerating it toward the second and so on until they reach 1.12% light speed after 1,000 explosions. “Like steps on a staircase, each bomb brings us closer to our destination,” concludes Jin (hence the project’s title). The other scientists balk at the idea: It would cost trillions of dollars and violate treaties. But Wade’s on board and finds Jin an office. 

And now for the fun part: That probe Wade wants to send into space? It’s not just a ship with cameras to spy on the San-Ti. It’s a human being, and Wade expects the San-Ti to pick that person up. Yikes.

What is the Stars Our Destination?

The Stars Our Destination is a fundraiser for the war effort aimed at the world’s wealthiest who can afford to buy ownership rights for a star. 

“The Stars My Destination is a great science-fiction book by Alfred Bester that has nothing to do with the project in the show, but it was a fun shout-out,” says Weiss. “The war effort is going to be long and hard and multigenerational. And as with any war effort, it’s going to be immensely expensive.”

Owning a star seems like sort of a silly thing at first, says Woo. “How many people are going to buy one? It’s an enormous amount of money and seems like a complete waste of money and resources.”

Will (Alex Sharp) calls the Stars Our Destination a “bake sale for billionaires.” 

Ed Miller

Will Auggie help in the mission?

Jin visits Will’s beach house and asks Auggie (Eiza González) to design the ship’s radiation nanosail, but she refuses to help Wade after her nanofibers enabled the massacre of San-Ti followers in Episode 5.   

“From Auggie’s point of view, you know, they’re not going to be here for 400 years. Everyone you know and love — their kids, their grandkids, their great-grandkids — will be gone by that point,” says Benioff. “[She’s] not going to be complicit in the slaughter of any more humans.”

Auggie can’t believe that Jin wants to work “for that fascist fuck again. He’s a murderer.” Jin retorts that at least Wade wants to help, which is more than most people can offer. “Despite the fact that she kind of hates him, there’s also this weird, playful relationship that they form, and they do end up having to work together to figure things out,” Hong says about her character and Wade. 

In watching that scene, Benioff says, “It’s always fun when you have an argument where you can understand both sides, where you understand why Jin wants to fight back against these aliens who are coming to invade our planet.”

Cautious about technology’s potential for harm, Auggie brings up the Robert Oppenheimer/atomic bomb reference that flows through the series: “The last time we gave the best physicists in the world insane resources, they gave us Hiroshima.” Will becomes the voice of reason as usual, telling Auggie that Jin wouldn’t have “come all the way down here if she didn’t need you… I know that she wouldn’t do anything if it wasn’t right.” Auggie starts to come around and heads to the operation’s headquarters at Wychwood Manor. 

“The family that you have is the family you choose,” says González. “And even when they agree to disagree, it’s this common ground that keeps them going as a family, as a team, and supporting each other even through really hard stuff.”

Auggie’s not the only one getting involved. Elsewhere, Raj (Saamer Usmani) is joining the war effort too — but on the moon, since that’s where the agency is assembling its ships. 

Does Will ever tell Jin about his love for her?

Will and Jin have a tender moment on the beach.  She folds two origami boats to represent the two of them, but Will still can’t muster the courage to tell her his feelings before she leaves to work on the project. 

“Jin’s relationship with Will is critical,” says Benioff. “And so we asked our various Jin contenders to read with Alex Sharp [who’d already been cast]. And I remember talking to Alex after this had been done and we said, ‘What do you think?’ And he said, ‘Well, for me it’s always been Jess.’ And when you watch them now performing on-screen, it’s like, ‘Well, of course it had to be these two. They’re so good together.’ ”

Saul (Jovan Adepo) and Auggie convince Will to follow Jin back to London to confess his love for her. 

But when Will arrives, he sees Jin and her boyfriend, Raj, embracing, and he ends up leaving again without telling her how he feels. Instead, he goes to the headquarters of the Stars Our Destination. 

Will buys Jin a star. Maybe it’s not just a bake sale after all. 

“[Will’s] been in love with one person in his life and she didn’t love him back. You combine all that with the fact he has pancreatic cancer and he’s not going to make it,” says Benioff. “It’s a fairly depressing mix, but he realizes in this episode that he can do one thing.”

Will’s arrival at the headquarters is accompanied by an uninterrupted stretch of Lana Del Rey’s melancholy hit “Video Games,” underscoring the emotional scene, while subtly nodding to the series’ VR plot. “I think the combination of our composer [and] music supervisor just brought together this beautiful soundscape for this hugely romantic gesture that Will does at the end,” says Woo. “Enjoying that from a sensory perspective is really satisfying for me.”

Sharp says he was really drawn to Will’s understated power. “He has a level of humility one can only really aspire to, which is perhaps why he doesn’t have such a competitive edge [that] other people might. But there’s a perspective that he has, which is astronomically huge.”

Adds Benioff: “It’s just the kind of the hopeless majesty of this, you know? ‘Here’s a star. I love you. Goodbye.’ ”

Keep your eye on 3 Body Problem on Netflix for more interstellar intrigue.