There's more to the Einstein bit than meets the eye.
The issue with a show as mysterious as Netflix's 3 Body Problem is you want to know the answers now — and that feeling gets amplified with the knowledge we may have to wait another year to get them. One of the biggest cliffhangers David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo's sci-fi epic leaves us on is actually a two-parter: What was the real meaning behind the "joke" told by Dr Ye Wenjie (Rosalind Chao) to Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo) on the park bench in Episode 7? And in what way could it help with Saul being made a "wallfacer" in the finale, one of three people tasked with plotting their own secret, internal scheme to best the approaching aliens? We've poured over the clues to try and work it out. The first part of this article analyses the show itself, while the final part contains spoilers from Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past novel trilogy, on which the show is based (we'll mark it with a spoiler warning in case you want to bow out then). What's the "joke" that Dr Ye Wenjie tells Saul? In episode 7, Wenjie is released from custody, exposed as the spiritual leader of the alien-worshipping Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO). Now that she knows the aliens she initially contacted all those years ago aren't coming to play nice, Wenjie contacts Saul and tells him a long, strange joke about Albert Einstein and God. Here's the joke, in full: "So Einstein dies. He finds himself in heaven, and he has his violin. He's overjoyed. He loves his violin more than physics. Even more than women. He's excited to find out how well he can play in heaven. He imagines he'll be pretty damn good. So he starts tuning up, and the angels rush at him. 'What are you doing?' they say. 'I'm getting ready to play.' 'Don't do that. God won't like it. He's a saxophonist.' So…