Devs is a show created by Alex Garland about a secretive tech company that has developed a way to predict the future. Nick Offerman plays a lead role in this story about free will versus determination. Does free will exist, or is everything predetermined?
I will be spoiling the entirety of Devs in this article. If you haven’t seen it and don’t want to know if you are free to make your own choices then you could choose to read something else instead. Or maybe you were always going to read something else.
Devs has a great premise with a fairly clunky presentation. It centers around a secretive team working on a way to predict the future. Believing that everything is predetermined, they have developed an algorithm that can show all of history and all of the future.
In the first episode Sergei, a Russian developer working for the company gets moved to Devs, the name of the team working on the special project. After learning what the project is, he steals information about the project and tries to escape. Forest, the company’s CEO, catches up with him and has him murdered, proclaiming “This was always going to have happened”.
Our main character is Lily Chan, the Sergei’s boyfriend, who starts to investigate the disappearance of her boyfriend. It’s here where the series starts to fall flat for me. She’s not well cast, and not well written, so her performance falls flat.
When she turns to her ex-boyfriend Jamie for help, he exposition dumps their entire history to her. It feels unnatural and is made worse when things that happen between episodes are also exposition dumped at the beginning of an episode.
It’s a strange choice, especially when the same information is provided to us multiple times. As an example, in episode 1 we see Sergei getting murdered. In episode 2 we see obviously faked footage of Sergei’s “suicide”, but Lily realises by the end that Sergei was murdered. At the end of episode 3 Lily and Jamie find proof that the suicide footage was fake, and we are shown all over again how the footage was faked. Three times we are given the same information, and it starts to feel like the plot doesn’t want to move forward.
Kenton is a character that seems to go nowhere. He is working for Forest, willing to murder and torture in order to achieve Forest’s goals. He starts to get an arc where he feels betrayed and is almost set up as an antagonist to both Lily and Forest, but then he just disappears from the plot and it goes nowhere.
Eventually the show comes to a conclusion, and it’s one that contradicts itself. At a couple of points in the show, Forest is violently opposed to the many worlds interpretation. We learn he is trying to resurrect his deceased wife and daughter, and he won’t accept anything that takes into account “many worlds” because it needs to be his family from this universe.
In the end he and Lily die, but they are resurrected inside the machine they developed. The machine simulates the real world except Forest’s family, and Sergei are still alive. Forest, the man who was obsessed with having the real family from his specific universe seems fine with this result. It contradicts everything his character previously stated, and is an ending that falls flat on a premise that could have really led somewhere.
Despite the show’s flaws, Nick Offerman’s performance as Forest is brilliant in every scene, including the flawed ending. Alison Pill doesn’t get as much of an opportunity to shine, but when she is on screen she is perfect as the slightly creepy believer in Forest’s cause. The cinematography is on point, including some great sequences showing how many worlds worked.
It’s almost a great show, but I feel like the script could have had a bit more work, taking out parts that are repetitive and allowing us to see more of the relationship between Jamie and Lily, or follow through on Kenton’s arc. I also feel a bit more focus on the premise of free will vs. determination, and being forced to face the many worlds interpretation could have also led to a more interesting conclusion.
