Humanity has a plan to fight back. With some A-bombs and a frozen brain, humans will intercept the San-Ti on their way to Earth. 

In Episode 7 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, we stare down the biggest hurdle of them all: heartbreak. 

Director Jeremy Podeswa helms the emotional penultimate episode that leads to a long-expected death, a surprising demise, and a long-shot effort to save humanity.  

“Jeremy Podeswa was the only one of the directors that we’d worked with before — he shot I don’t know how many episodes of Game of Thrones,” says Benioff. “Directors can be bossy and dictatorial, and Jeremy’s got none of that. He’s a true partner in the artistic process, but also he’s quite strong and tough minded.”

By the episode’s end, only three of the Oxford Five are left. But there’s still reason for hope. 

Let’s recap 3 Body Problem Episode 7, “Only Advance.”

Go behind the final scene between Tatiana and Ye in Episode 7.

What’s going on with Will?

Will (Alex Sharp) and Saul (Jovan Adepo) lie low at the beach house, waiting out Will’s last days. Will points out the star (number DX3906) in the sky, which he bought for Jin (Jess Hong). Will makes Saul promise he won’t tell Jin that he was the one who purchased the (£19.5 million!) star. Then Will collapses. His health is rapidly deteriorating. At the hospital, Saul calls Jin and tells her to come when she can, implying she should get there ASAP. 

Later, a package arrives for Jin: It’s the star. Her boyfriend, Raj (Saamer Usmani), is suspicious of its origin, but Jin shrugs it off as someone “taking the piss.”

How does Wade plan to send someone in the spaceship?

The journey to the San-Ti will take 200 years (which would kill the occupant of the probe they’re sending), so Wade (Liam Cunningham) and a team of scientists develop a hibernation capsule. A cute chimpanzee named Kolya tests it out — he’s been frozen in a state between alive and dead for a month now. They bring him around, and it seems to work pretty well. (He only barfs one banana.) Wade reveals the true nature of the capsule: It’s not just about the probe passenger — he plans to go into hibernation and wake up for a week every year for 400 years. 

He’ll “hire people, fire people, go to Wimbledon, and then go back under.” Someone has to welcome them when they arrive, he says. He’s the only one who can execute the plan, but when Jin asks him what this great plan is, he just replies, “Only advance.”

Later, Jin and Auggie (Eiza González) team up again to design the nano-sail that’ll carry the ship to the San-Ti. It’s complicated, but Auggie can make it work. “We’re building something for everyone,” says Jin. “We’re building them a future.”

“Auggie was always reluctant to work with Wade,” says Benioff. “She despises Wade for what happened in Panama, but she did it for Jin because she does believe in Jin. She does believe this Staircase Project, maybe some good could come of it. So she goes to [Wade’s command center in] Wychwood to work with her best friend and design a nano-sail.” 

How’s Project Staircase going?

Jin’s idea to use bombs to propel the ship is in motion, but the project’s behind schedule. They needed a thousand bombs but could only make 300, which won’t get them to the San-Ti in time. So, to increase the speed of the ship, they need to skip the full-body hibernation chamber, which is too heavy. Instead, the ship can only include a payload of 2 kilograms. Wade suggests a shocking solution: Send a person’s brain, and the San-Ti will rebuild the rest of them. He’s banking on the San-Ti’s desire to understand the human race, which would propel them to rebuild, not destroy. 

“Are we talking about killing someone for this?” asks Auggie. Wade retorts, “And we weren’t before?”

Wade asks for volunteers from the room. It has to be someone smart who can learn about the San-Ti. “We need someone who knows about physics, chemistry, rocket science. Someone who’s willing to die. Likely for nothing. Which probably means someone who’s dying already.” He looks at Jin. It has to be Will. 

Wade then has a moment of clarity. He realizes that no one can tell what someone else is thinking. It’s a cryptic notion. But he immediately makes a phone call.  

Why does Auggie leave the project?

Auggie and Jin tell Wade they’ll talk Will out of it. But Wade resolutely stays on course, only advancing, if you will. “After Wade reveals his plan about using Will’s brain, [Auggie’s] just had enough,” says Benioff.  

Auggie leaves and faces down her intensely grumpy former boss, Denys Porlock (Adrian Edmondson). “All our favorite British comedians got to be in the show,” says Woo, of Edmondson’s casting. “I think if you watched the show as an American, maybe who hasn’t seen his previous work, you wouldn’t guess he was a famous comic actor [from the ’80s sitcom The Young Ones] because he’s so incredible,” says Benioff. 

How did Auggie leave things with her nano-fiber company?

While her boss is threatening to take her work away, Auggie picks up her phone and types something out. “All of our research, the specs and our equipment, our work on upscaling in applications, all on WikiLeaks and arXiv and a dozen other open-source platforms,” says Auggie as she uploads her work. Porlock threatens her with prison. “They better arrest me fast. My flight leaves in three hours,” says Auggie before exiting the room. 

“We had a good conversation when we were deciding how Auggie was going to get her revenge on Porlock,” says Benioff. “We called [venture capitalist] Scott Stanford, who was friends with us, and we were trying to talk this through because we had a lot of solutions.”

Adds Weiss: “[Our solutions] were, first of all, dumb. Second of all, they took a long time to say. The idea of open sourcing all of her work, of putting it out there into the world in a form that anybody could basically steal and use, was what Scott and his friends put out there for us, for which we are grateful.”

Macall Polay

Wade is up to something, isn’t he?

“All that we are is up here,” Wade realizes, pointing to his head. The San-Ti can see everything, but they can never know what’s inside the mind. Later, Wade makes that strange call to a mysterious someone, asking for help on a new project. “Have you ever heard the term Wallfacer?” he says.

“There’s no depths that Wade will not sink to get what he wants,” says Woo. 

Why does Will choose to join the Staircase Project?

Jin tells Will all about the Staircase Project, the San-Ti, and the countdown. Will says they all sound like fairy tales, but it’d be a historic accomplishment to travel across the universe. Will also guesses that Jin doesn’t have any other backups. She confirms.  

“You tell Wade you’re not going to do it,” Jin says. Then Will confesses his love for her. Jin breaks down.

“She came into the scene to convince him not to be a part of this, but he’s giving her permission to do the thing that she feels terrible about wanting to do,” says Weiss. “And as the scene unfolds, he sees an opportunity to tell the woman that he loves how he feels about her. Will probably was in love with Jin from the moment he met her.”

The creators knew [the scene] would be an emotionally climactic point of the series even before production began. “That’s the scene that Alex and Jess read together on Zoom on three different continents,” Woo says. “Alex was in the UK, and we were in LA, and Jess was in New Zealand.” There was “emotion, pouring her tears all over the Zoom machine,” adds Weiss. 

Woo reveals: “And you know, that got her the role.”

Chris Baker

Does Will accept the mission?

Wade tries to make Will sign a pledge of loyalty to the human race. Will refuses because the San-Ti could actually be better than humanity. “Jin thinks it’s what I should do. And I trust her,” Will says. He’d sign an oath to her, but not to humanity. This only encourages Wade more, and he deems Will “perfect for the Staircase Project.”

As Wade leaves, Jin catches up to him and asks why he still wants to use Will for the mission. “He’s our man because he’s not our man,” says Wade. “He really might not be. That’s why they’ll go out of their way to pick him up.”

What happens in Will’s last moments?

Saul stays with Will at a hospice as he’s connected to the euthanasia apparatus. Saul runs down all the possibilities for what the San-Ti could do to him. What if they reanimate him and run experiments on him to explore the limits of human beings? Will is undeterred. “Maybe it would be like I’m a pet to them,” he jokes. In his last moments before the final dose, Will thanks a tearful Saul for being such a good friend.  

While Jin grinds away on the project, Wade nonchalantly tells her that Will gave her the star. She leaves to see Will one last time. But it’s too late. She arrives after Will has passed. And she sees them place a container holding his brain into a freezing device. 

“She’s put the rest of her life on hold,” says Benioff. “She’s put meaningful, deep relationships on hold because she doesn’t have the bandwidth for it.”

Who’s in the photograph in Ye’s home?

Back at Ye’s (Rosalind Chao) home, we see Ye going through Vera’s room, looking through the books on her shelf. She sees a book about the Fermi Paradox, a concept that inspired Ye’s original idea to amplify the message to the aliens. Then we see a photograph of a younger Ye (Zine Tseng) alongside a young Vera, who looks identical to Follower (Eve Ridley), the little girl in the VR game.

“We’ve got a reveal of young Vera as the model for Follower in the game,” says Weiss. “That’s actually in a picture in Evans’ office all along…. And we realize that the little girl that needed to be protected was her own daughter, which tells you a lot about what it means to have failed her daughter in this way and then found out it was all for nothing.”

Why does Ye call Saul?

Then Ye makes a phone call to Saul. “Remembering her daughter… she makes the final determination that she’s got to call Saul,” says Weiss. “She needs to tell Saul whatever she’s figured out that she thinks might be helpful to him and everybody else going forward.”

They meet by Vera’s grave. Ye tells Saul everything. Saul says it never made sense that Vera (Vedette Lim) killed herself, unless she uncovered Ye’s communications. Ye says she tried to hide it from her daughter, but Vera was too smart. “You failed her,” he says. Ye replies, “I failed more people than anyone ever.” 

What’s the Einstein joke all about?

Ye tells Saul a very long and convoluted joke about Einstein trying and failing to play music with God in heaven, and she ends with an unfunny punchline: “An angel comes over and says, ‘We warned you. Never play with God,’ ” says Ye. “Humor is a very personal thing. Some people understand it, and some people don’t. Some jokes are so private, they only make sense to two people. But jokes are important. We wouldn’t survive without them.” She gives Saul a meaningful look and adds that she hopes her joke doesn’t cause him any trouble.

“The ‘Einstein in heaven’ joke makes you wonder what the hell Ye is talking about,” says Weiss. Adds Woo, “She’s trying to send a message to Saul, but it has to be encoded in such a way that the cell phones can’t make heads or tails of it.”

Saul seems to understand that the intentional language and framing of the joke must mean something. Weiss says it’s like trying to tell a secret in front of prison guards who are watching your every move.  

Whatever happened to Tatiana?

In the woods, Tatiana (Marlo Kelly) hides out in an RV. Then the avatar from the game (Sea Shimooka) shows up on her television. The San-Ti have broken their silence. “We are not done speaking to you. You are a part of something much larger than yourself. You are part of us. And we need you,” says the avatar.   

“Unlike Evans and unlike Ye, Tatiana grew up with knowledge of the San-Ti and that they were coming and that the world is going to be a better place,” says Benioff. 

Maria Heras

Why does Ye return to the Red Coast Base in China?

An operative follows Ye through the airport and, knowing she’s being tailed by Wade’s men, she asks him to sit with her on the plane. She’s visiting her old home at the Red Coast Base. Once there, Ye asks the operative to let her walk up alone to the now-ruined radio dish. On her way, memories flood back to her. Then she walks to the edge of a cliff and stares into the ravine below. Suddenly, Tatiana appears. Ye asks what happened to Officer Collins (Gerard Monaco), and Tatiana implies she killed him. 

“I thought the Lord was done with us,” Ye says. “Not all of us,” Tatiana responds. 

“Ye has come to learn the truth about the San-Ti’s intentions, she sees this beaming face of the true believer, and it’s a kind of heartbreaking moment for her, but not for Tatiana,” says Benioff. 

Does Tatiana kill Ye?

Tatiana tearfully hugs Ye, who once led the organization that raised Tatiana. “I’m sorry you had to come all this way to do something I was going to do myself,” says Ye. Tatiana looks over the cliff and tells Ye she can provide a better death — “something beautiful.”

“She’s going to help this woman that she admires,” says Benioff. “And I believe Tatiana when she says, ‘I’ve got something much more beautiful for you.’ ”

“You fulfilled your purpose,” Tatiana says as together they watch the last sunset of Ye’s life. “You deserve a rest.”

Production shot that scene on a cold and windy day at an old military base in Spain. “We were losing the light in a very dramatic way at the very end there,” says Benioff.  “When you see them silhouetted and you see the sun going down… it was just a race to get those last shots off before it was total darkness.”

Adds Chao: “[When Ye dies,] I thought it was going to be horrific. And yet it turned out to be really a highlight of this entire shoot.”

Keep watching 3 Body Problem on Netflix for the season finale.