The Netflix adaptation of author Liu Cixin’s science-fiction series, Remembrance of Earth’s Past — titled 3 Body Problem, after the first novel — is a gripping thriller with a compelling and original premise. It is also a cautionary tale of what happens when communist radicals are given any semblance of power.

In an opening scene that peeved the Chinese government, the first episode sets the backdrop for the series, depicting a moment from Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in 1966, wherein a group of young Marxists publicly beat a physics professor to death over his reluctance to denounce Einstein’s theory of relativity (American propaganda). It is here that his daughter, Ye Wenjie (Rosalind Chao), witness to the brutality, becomes radicalized herself, but not against communism or Mao’s regime.