A thread for Devs, the new Alex Garland show on FX/HBO (with SPOILERS)

I agree with you if you stick to the first 5 or so eps

at any rate I thought there was lots of cool shit to look at here and it didn't overstay its welcome. I also dug the more casual vibe of some of the stuff around the edges of the plot, like the sidelined male characters tossing a frisbee around

I like to think this show is a reduction ad absurdum of determinism. If you'd told be before I watched it that it was about determinism and free will and referred to the pilot wave and many worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics i'd have been all 'this is the content i crave!' but it didn't really engage meaningfully with those ideas. Every time I saw them do something they knew had been determined I'd think 'why not do something else?', as Lily eventually did, with no rhyme or reason as to why she was able to when they were not. In contrast, Dark does a good job of showing people falling into the predetermined patterns even as they try to fight against them. And as Tuomas says it didn't really do anything with many worlds either; Lyndon supposedly makes the choice to die in some in order to get back into devs in others but we never see those others.

Its other main crime was that it was slooooow. Episode 6 was the worst, with Lily's plot-free drugged up memories taking up most of the run time. "Menergy" was pretty lol though, especially with subtitles on.

Another plot niggle: why did they do such a shoddy job with photoshopping the flames, especially as they burnt the body anyway so had a full man-sized bonfire to work with?

I didn't think it was dreadful - yeah it looked and sounded great and I did watch to the end, but I didn't find it very gripping or give it my full attention.

Oh and when Katie asks Lily for an example of something that happens without a reason, she should have said the decay of a single atom of uranium.

yep the whole "very clever engineer whose specialism is largely about probability struggles with the concept of true randomness just so they can be a proxy for the viewer" conversation was very forced

"Tech genius knows nothing of art, therefore life" somewhat forced too, specifically the bit with Stewart reciting Larkin.

I think it ends up making an argument for many worlds. Forrest is willingly blind to the argument because he doesn't want to come to grips with his actions.

For me, the idea that you could see your future actions and then go forward and replicate them perfectly, even if you WERE trying to, always seemed crazy to me. They hand-waved it a bit by saying you fall into this sort-of dream state, but I still had a hard time with that.

Also, the displays never got good until they relaxed the system to display one possible past rather than the "true" past. I like the symmetry of having the same trouble seeing clearly into the past as into the future. Memory as its own backward-running stochastic system.

Got through two episodes of this with my partner, and she couldn't get past the dialogue being slow & bad.

Seems like people on Twitter are mostly into the visual style of the lab/machine.

that's a big part of it.

I'm not going to pretend like Nick Offerman had a great wig and is the greatest or most believable dramatic actor. Or that Sonoya Mizuno is a good actress. But I still liked it.

I liked them both tbh

This is totally my thing and seduced me up to a point until I got bored of the sloooow pace and it not really getting anywhere. I predicted the 'event' where everything goes static would then show a female computer voice going 'simulation 8912 ends. reboot' so I'm kind of glad it didn't do that (or did it? with the senator woman pointedly eliding the statement that the simulation and reality would feel identical?). I also thought the homeless guy would end up being Christ or a Guardian Angel/Ultimate Coder Janitoring The Matrix, so bog-standard Russian Spy was quite refreshing.

I don't really buy Nick Offerman as anything other than Ron Swanson, sorry, but Alison Pill is unsettling AS HELL (I've also recently watched Snowpiercer so that compounds it).

The stuff about the many worlds theory and Lyndon ending up experiencing the world where he doesn't fall was too brief, I thought. Earlier eps put me in mind of the OA but less wild, fun and exciting (also set in SF, huh). The final ep was more Black Mirror.

Another plot niggle: why did they do such a shoddy job with photoshopping the flames

I got really pissed off at the end that Lily was inexplicably Neo, like hey you're The One, you made a choice, guess you're just a cool kinda chick!!!! If I was Lily I would simply not go to Devs, fuck you etc.

is there a difference between 'reason' and 'cause' - iirc they explained once using 'cause' and then moved to 'reason'?

Philosophy might differentiate between them but here they were basically used interchangeably, though 'cause' would be the more appropriate term.

For me, the idea that you could see your future actions and then go forward and replicate them perfectly, even if you WERE trying to, always seemed crazy to me. They hand-waved it a bit by saying you fall into this sort-of dream state, but I still had a hard time with that.

I don't recall anything about a dream state, the idea is that you just act as you would have done, nothing feels different. Devs just 'knows' what you are going to do. This is what I think the show is actually a reductio of (unintentionally) - not determinism, but if the universe is deterministic, the ability to predict its future states. Devs can apparently make a prediction of the future, which itself includes the prediction and any reaction to it. It's an infinite regress problem.

Yeah I think they just said it feels weird to be doing what DEVS has shown you to be going to do but you still do it.
The other thing that pissed me off was that they sort of presented the multiverse hypothesis visually as having the same characters doing the same things a bit differently or sitting somewhere a bit different in the same room without making the point that they've filtered out the ten trillion versions where Nicky Wire in a banana suit is playing Twister there, and that the DEVS machine would be infinitely large to hold all of these multiverses.

This was pretty crap really, the script felt very patchy and underDEVeloped and accordingly none of the characters really came to life. Could've been refined into a decent tight feature with a lot of work maybe. Obviously fantastic visuals and soundtrack, which is what kept me watching till the end.

Another science-y quibble; how did the magic box know how to show future/past events from dramatic, aesthetically pleasing camera angles?

I thought it was pretty funny that Forrest was all-consumed by this need to resurrect his dead daughter but seemed to barely give two shits about his dead wife.

Yeah me too! that professional camera angle on Jesus was the first thing i properly scoffed at, I think later they mentioned something about positioning at particle or something, but pfft

I know a show is ultimately good when the marks against it include the most absurd nitpicking imaginable

Yeah, lazy writing. None of the characters fleshed out much beyond bare plot function.

xxpost

I know a show is ultimately good when the marks against it include the most absurd nitpicking imaginable

― k*r*n koltrane (Simon H.)

I'm also nitpicking at fundamental stuff! The characters and plot were rubbish.

for a second at first i thought lily was being played by sara giraudeau from bureau des legendes and got v excited

https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/comedian-sara-giraudeau-is-photographed-for-self-assignment-on-may-20-picture-id689311658?s=612x612

> the music from the show

the two minutes of Reich's Come Out was a highlight

but then i was always going to say that 8)

Thought this was good. Surprised people didn’t like Sonoya Mizuno‘s performance

Also highly offended by the idea that mr robot is a better version of this lol

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2020 season is nominated in the 2020 ILX TV poll:

ILX's Best Television of 2020 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 29, 2021

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

Did anyone else find Lily extremely unlikeable?

How did they pump air into defs? No cleaners, so was there a rota for cleaning the toilets there?