User Reviews

Lily and her boyfriend Sergei work at Amaya, a company involved in quantum computing. Forest, the company's CEO invites Sergei to join 'Devs' the companies secretive research department. He never returns from his first day working there... CCTV shows him departing then returning later and setting himself on fire. Lily can't believe that he killed himself and starts trying to uncover the truth. She learns things about Sergei she never imagined and later realises she is in danger too. Meanwhile we see what is going on within Devs and learn just how powerful it is with implications that would change the opinions on the very nature of existence.

I really enjoyed this series; it raised lots of interesting ideas and kept me gripped from start to finish. There may be no mystery about what really happened to Sergei, the audience is shown what really happened, but that didn't make Lily's search for the truth any less interesting. The scenes inside Devs were just as interesting; the site is impressively designed and even though many of the scenes moved at a deliberately glacial pace I was never bored. Much of what we see is clearly meant to be symbolic; Forest may state that he knows there is no God or higher power but there is frequent religious imagery. I know a lot of reviewers didn't like the casting but it worked for me; Nick Offerman stood out as the morally ambiguous Forest; Sonoya Mizuno may not be a typical lead but for me she worked as Lily Chan; Cailee Spaeny's casting as Lyndon was most interesting as a young woman playing a boy created further ambiguity. Overall I'd say that this won't be for everybody but it really worked for me; I liked the ideas, the look and the way the story was ultimately resolved.

It really annoys me that at no point no one ever even tried to not do what they saw in their prediction. That should be one of the first things a developer does with a system like this: See what happens when you try to break it.

Lily seems to be the first one ever to see the prediction and willfully decide to act against it.

Overall, the cinematography of the whole season was good, the sound design was very weird most of the time (to be expected, so not a complaint), but it felt like it lived a bit short off the potential it had.

I will not go into the details of the acting or directing here. In my view all of these are fairly average. One should be allowed only so many shots with a character staring in a distance for a protracted time after all, and it definitely feels like in this show 20% of screen time are just those. I mention this because for me it is one of these red flags predicting that the movie or show is trying to look deep, while being shallow in reality. Another flag is gratuitous invocation of Bible references. The show is also full of them.

Here I am trying to make sense of the plot, so major spoilers ahead.

The plot has a central fantastic assumption that qualified the show as sci-fi. The assumption is that a Silicon Valley company developed a computer that can model the Universe precisely. To me it sounds more like a fantasy than a science fiction. It is absolutely impossible and one of the reasons is even mentioned in the show. The most compact and precise model of the universe is an identical universe. Everything else is a model, which would behave like an original only in a range of conditions. And how did they collect the data about everything in the universe? How did they know what to collect? They have to know how everything in the universe really works to build that kind of model. As I said, this is not science fiction.

So having that out of the way, let's give the show its main premise and move on. The plot is briefly described below, so major spoilers ahead.

1. Forrest and Katie based their project on the idea of absolute determinism. Everything is determined by the prior events starting from Big Bang. If they can model the reality precisely, they can look into the future and the past as far as they want. But the images of the past generated by their computer a fuzzy and silent.

Lyndon (Cailee Spaeny), a very young genius member of the team is dissenting from this absolutely deterministic view. She creates a new model which is based on Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation and reprograms the machine in accordance with it. The multiverse theory posits that everything that can happen happens. Every event creates a new universe where this event has happened and the other one where it has not. This is, of course, not a provable theory since there is no way to observe these other universes. The machine programmed according to this explanation suddenly starts producing crystal clear images and sounds of the past. Lyndon and the team are elated by success, but Forrest, instead of praising Lyndon for her achievement, fires her. Many-worlds is a wrong explanation for Forrest. For his personal reasons he needs absolute determinism to justify himself in the tragic auto accident, where his wife and daughter were killed. He needs a certainty that it could not have happened in any other way.

>>> Does it make any sense? How could an introduction of a many-worlds model improve the predictions? If anything could happen, then the machine would not have been able to interpolate any events at all! Every run should have produced different results, but in the show it does not. The machine's projections are still entirely deterministic.

2. Katie suggests Lyndon a weird test of her belief in many-worlds theory. She says that if Lyndon would make a dangerous trick of standing on the edge of bride, she will get her back in DEVS. If Lyndon really believes in many worlds, Katie says, she should not be afraid to die because in some other world she definitely would not and getting back to DEVS is, in fact, a certainty. Lyndon fails and falls from the bridge.

>>> This is one of most non-sensical things in the plot. First of all, it is not clear why Katie wants Lyndon dead. Katie also believes in many-worlds theory and she either should facilitate taking her back or not. What was the reason for killing her?

>>> The test suggested by Katie does not make sense either and "smart" Lyndon is unable to see through it. Following Katie's own logic in some other universe Lyndon has always stayed in DEVS and this conversation between them has never happened. Does it make this Lyndon in this universe any happier? Is it relevant to her in any way? The only result of the test is that she dies, there is no other. Basically pure suicide for no reason.

>>> During this conversation Katie also tells that she knows what exactly would happen to Lyndon, whether she survives the test or falls. She says that she saw the prediction from the DEVS machine. This does not make any sense either. If many-worlds theory is true, which of these worlds machine has predicted?

3. Lily and Jamie decide to thwart the predictions by staying all day at home. Loose canon Kenton comes to their apartment in the last ditch attempt to contain the spread of information about his crimes. He kills Jamie, but gets killed himself. Lily survives, picks up Kenton's gun and goes to DEVS campus.

>>> It is not explained why she decides to do that. We can only guess that she wants a exact a revenge on Forrest for exterminating all her boyfriends and attempting to kill her. Nevertheless, she follows the prediction she was eager to break earlier and prove Katie wrong. This is sort of trope in sci-fi exploring the determinism when a protagonist is forced to do something predetermined even when he is aware of a prediction and wants to break it. Typically this involves some other actor or series of events which limit the choices of the protagonist forcing him into fulfilling the unwanted prediction. In this show the author does not even bother to make it believable.

4. Lily arrives in DEVS lab, where Forrest shows her a machine's prediction of how events are going to unfold further. Machine predicts that Lily would kill Forrest and die herself as well because her bullet will breach the containment and she would be exposed to near vacuum. Everything unfolds exactly as predicted until a moment when Lily is supposed to pull the trigger. Instead she just drops the gun out of her reach. The fated outcome still occurs thanks to one of the DEVs, Stewart, triggering the breach of containment himself. Both Lily and Forrest die by asphyxiation. Katie understands that the machine's predictions were failing past this point because Lily used her free will to thwart them.

>>> Another plot move which completely defies any logical explanation. Why only Lily was capable to behave in way not predicted by the machine? Why anyone else could not? It seems pretty easy to behave in way contradicting a prediction. Why machine was unable to predict the move made by Lily while succeeding in predicting everyone else? What was so special about this decision that made it so unpredictable?

5. Lily suddenly finds herself in the scene which opened show in the first episode. She and Sergei are going to work. Lily perceives this as a massive deja-vu until she meets Forrest, who provides the explanation of her life-after-death existence. They are both not a real people, but just a simulations inside the machine, which modeled a better universe for them. One where Forrest's family is still alive, as well as both of Lily's boyfriends. They are the only people in this simulation who know about the existence of the real world and have a memory of it. Everyone else in this simulation think that it is a reality. Despite knowing that the only choice they have is to enjoy the rest of their lives in the simulation surrounded by the people they love and it is a great outcome to be appreciated.

>>> Did not expect that. Why would Forrest arrange for such a thing? Did he just liked an idea of a computer running a simulation of him after he dies? What difference did it make for him? His own family is still dead and now he is dead as well. The whole upload thing makes as much sense as caring about other universe in many-worlds interpretation. Yes, there might be some other world or a computer simulation where things are different, but why would one care? It is not you who is in them. If you die, you die and that's it. Some hypothetical guy like you in another universe is not you as well as a piece of software is not you.

>>> It is quite an ethical conundrum as well. The people inside the simulation are sentient entities indistinguishable from humans. Does one have a moral right to create them and make them play by the rules one defined at his pleasure?

As you can see, I was not able to make much sense out of the DEVS plot. It seems to me confused and full of logical holes. I am very disappointed with these shortcomings. I think that stories must make sense in some way to be satisfying. But that's just me.