The series follows Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist who sees her father beaten to death during a struggle session in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, who is conscripted by the military.
While meeting with her colleagues, Auggie (Eiza González) is dismayed upon learning that Jin (Jess Hong) and Jack (John Bradley) have similar VR headsets, and asks them to not play again.
On Level 3, Jin and Jack find themselves in Shangdu, where they compete with Isaac Newton (Mark Gatiss) and Alan Turing (Reece Shearsmith) in offering an explanation behind the Sun movements to Kublai Khan.
Newton and Turing introduce their "Human Abacus", a giant analog processor in which soldiers act as binary input and output, but Jin concludes that there will be a tri-solar syzygy.
The woman appears again, and tells them they advanced to Level 4, as they immediately concluded that their purpose is not finding a solution to the three-body problem, a mathematical impossibility, but ensuring the survival of the civilization.
There, they discover that the purpose of the game is to find a new home for an alien species known as San Ti, and Ye Wenjie helped them in the past.
Weiss was interested in the concept of the gravity affecting the Shangdu scene, explaining "Its such a clever conceit, the Mongol setting and the Kublai Khan of it all.
More frequently, though, I'm guessing that television-only viewers are going to find the game and a lot of the footnote-y traces of the book to be either perplexing or purposeless.
"[8] Sean T. Collins of The New York Times wrote, "Much as we dread seeing people get what's coming, there's an undeniable allure to watching the worst-case scenario play out — as long as it's happening safely onscreen.
"[10] Jerrica Tisdale of Telltale TV wrote, "Because of our investment in Jin, “Destroyer of Worlds” offers entertaining developments and the expected but still shocking moment.
"[11] Greg Wheeler of Review Geek gave the episode a 4 star rating out of 5 and wrote, "The ending, with this strange woman killing Jack, hints that there could be more deaths to come before this one’s said and done.