3 Body Problem Bosses And Rosalind Chao Tease What Really Happened to Wenjie

Warning: The following contains spoilers from 3 Body Problem Season 1.

There is an unspoken rule that you don't see a body after someone has died on a TV show, you can't say for certain that they are dead. It is soap opera logic, but it has been used to bring beloved characters and actors back to their TV shows for decades. The question is: Would 3 Body Problem pull the same trick the high-profile apparent death of Wenjie?

Wenjie (Rosalind Chao) travels back to China in the Season 1 penultimate episode, overwhelmed with guilt that the San-Ti have turned on the humans and she's the reason they are still en route to invade. We're not sure what she expected to happen when she invited a more advanced alien race to come visit, but the weight of her unilateral decision really hit her at the end of this first season.

The implication was that Wenjie returned to where she first made contact with the San-Ti to end her life. When she arrives at the deserted mountain top military base, she encounters Tatiana (Marlo Kelly) already waiting for her. Tatiana was raised by Wenjie and Michael Evans to be an assassin and mercenary for the San-Ti, eliminating threats that would make it more difficult for the alien race to arrive. Wenjie knows immediately that Tatiana was sent to the Red Coast Base to kill Wenjie and even tells her protege that it was a waste for her to travel all that way to do something that Wenjie was planning to do herself.

Still, Tatiana stops Wenjie from jumping off the cliff and offers to kill her in a more "beautiful" way. The two sit on a nearby bench and watch the sunset together. Wade (Liam Cunningham) "confirms" that Wenjie is dead in the finale, but we never actually see a body. So did Tatiana actually kill her?

If it were up to Chao, she would love to leave room for Wenjie to return to the show in later seasons. "If I had not worked with Dan, David and Alex, and loved them so much I would have said, 'Yes, she's dead. She's not coming back,'" she confessed to GameSpot at a recent press junket. "But because I loved working with them so much I'm saying, 'Yeah, you didn't see a body. Why can't she make a triumphant return?'"

Before her travels to China, Wenjie told Saul (Jovan Adepo) a joke about God kicking Einstein in the balls that ended with the punchline, "You don't play with God." It was a coded message about how to defeat the San-Ti, which we know Saul hasn't fully figured out by the end of the season. Were the San-Ti able to decipher what Wenjie was saying? If they weren't wouldn't they want her alive? It feels strange that they would allow Wade to freeze himself and stick around for the San-Ti's arrival while he's actively trying to plot their demise, but they sent an assassin after their most devoted follower. It would be smarter to keep Wenjie alive and figure out everything that she knows.

According to the 3 Body Problem creators, the San-Ti wanted to eliminate the threat though. The ambiguity surrounding Wenjie's death was a creative choice.

"I don't want to kill people's enjoyable conspiracy theorizing because that's always fun to read people's ideas," executive producer D.B. Weiss told journalists including GameSpot during a roundtable interview at the same press junket. "Tonally, we didn't want her death scene to be an old lady getting her--we don't know exactly what happens to her. Whatever it is, it's probably not that pleasant to watch. The tone of the scene was exactly what we wanted the tone of the scene to be. Having an epilogue to that scene which involves some act of violence just didn't make sense to us. The intention was that her body was found in some state or another by the Chinese authorities, and that information found its way to Wade."

Weiss' creative partner David Benioff added that fans shouldn't have trusted that Tatiana's idea of a "beautiful" death may not have been objectively pleasing. The producers preferred that fans use their imagination for whatever Tatiana meant.

"Tatianna says that she’s going to give her something beautiful to kill her. We had a lot of discussions of exactly what that meant, but Tatiana in general seems to be a person of her word," Benioff confirmed.

Still, the conspiracy theorist in us hopes that Wenjie was smart enough to outwit the San-Ti one more time.

3 Body Problem is now streaming on Netflix. For more, check out our deep dive on the horrific and memorable boat scene.