Devs

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colinr0380
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Devs

#1 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Apr 15, 2020 5:49 pm

Spoilers for Episode 1:

Well, Karl Glusman's character did not last long into this series! He plays Sergei, a programmer specialising in artificial intelligence who has seemingly found a way to seemingly be able to predict future movements of living creatures before they make them (though only a nemotode within a timeframe of thirty seconds or so) and this gets him brought into a highly top secret division of the San Francisco tech company that he works for. But there is something highly disturbing within the code he is given to look at, enough to make this (highlighted as non-religious) character rush off to the bathroom to throw up (it was lucky that a futuristic floaty holo-cube in the middle of a vacuum space has a working bathroom!). Or maybe it is the stress of knowing he has to try and smuggle secrets out of the organisation that causes his stomach troubles? Either way it unfortunately causes the otherwise mega laid-back boss to waylay him in a techno-forest surrounding the facility and have a minion plastic bag him to death. Then the second half of the episode follows his girlfriend Lily's increasing concerns about his whereabouts, leading to a firery climax.

It appears to be a series a bit about women left to search for men who have recklessly disappeared into, and probably met a bad end inside, facilities hidden in the middle of seemingly idyllic and isolated (yet too composed for comfort) campus-styled wildernesses. Real world uncanny valleys. So it feels pretty much in the tradition of Ex Machina and Annihilation so far! This first episode seems to suggest that there is going to be a focus on double lives (either work and home; or the world in a phone against a face-to-face relationship, especially as Lily has a current boyfriend become a computer simulation whilst at the same time having to face up to having faded out of a previous boyfriend's life through indifference), and seems to also be tackling the idea of 'deep fakes' too, as lots of things 'look' human because they are pretending to be lifelike (or acting out human behaviours) but are just off in ways both big and small.

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Re: Devs

#2 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Apr 16, 2020 5:00 pm

Episode 2

Lily cracks Segei's mobile to find out that he actually was a Russian spy all along! This episode seems to be about dual identities and people being tempted into reading too much into their relationships with others and whether even in face to face conversations they can bridge the distance between each other. Even when they are not glued to the screens of their devices. There is also a theme of characters putting on a brave face to cover up being lovelorn and rather lost. Speaking of which, I did find that moment of Forest saying that he was over the death of his daughter rather amusing considering the untouched bedroom in his home. And the giant statue of her in the middle of his campus! (If that statue does not come to life and go on the rampage at some point I will be hugely disappointed! [-( ) And that it seems the whole mysterious project is about reaching across time to interact with her again. Its a rather solipsistic project in that sense, raising ideas of Until The End of the World.

I like that we get a premonition from a distance of the events in the parking garage at the beginning of the episode and then come back to the scene where the murder actually happens later on, scored to the same track, as two minions struggle for dominance on behalf of their respective corporate interests. There are a couple of scenes in the facility in this episode but much of the action takes place not just away from the top secret facility but completely off campus and on the streets of San Francisco itself, as Lily does some extra curricular side questing.

And as for the other subplot about the mysterious device that everyone is willing to spy and murder for? Well:
Image

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Re: Devs

#3 Post by Persona » Thu Apr 16, 2020 11:01 pm

I have found this show an absolute chore to get through. Bloated and stilted beyond all reckoning. Ponderous and ultra-moody but with inelegant writing... not a good combo.

I quite liked Annihilation but this seems to be yet another Garland project similar to Ex Machina where he takes a tried-and-true sci-fi concept and presents it like it's the most novel and profound shit ever. Difference being that Ex Machina is a concise couple hours, whereas this is an interminable TV series that gets to waffle around with several pointless threads, a terribly clunky plot structure, and literal hours of dourly delivered exposition, read off scripts by actors that Garland seems to have dosed with sedatives before shooting.

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Re: Devs

#4 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Apr 17, 2020 3:19 am

I don't know, I found there have been at least a couple of amusing moments in each episode so far, mostly involving Jamie, the ex-boyfriend: being approached for help in unlocking the current boyfriend's password protected phone and then refusing and telling Lily where she can stick it in the first episode. And the second episode Jamie gets interrupted by Lily again in the middle of playing Dark Souls(!) and then has that conversation with the amiable Dude-like homeless man when first hanging around outside Lily's apartment waiting for her to return and again when he leaves until he offers money to have the guy stop talking to him!

And I really like that scene deepening the relationship between Forest and his bodyguard/fixer Kenton.

I'm most concerned that this is going to end up going into the same areas as Michael Crichton's Timeline! I'm also having flashbacks to Dennis Potter's Cold Lazarus too (the quantum computer here could just be a more technological version of Albert Finney's deep frozen disembodied head having its memories probed into in that series! And with thanks to the Castle Superbeast podcast for highlighting it, the premise is quite similar to the Isaac Asimov story The Dead Past) Though more positively and more related to Alex Garland's work I do also get the sense of The Tesseract from the idea of a central horrible event that is fixed in a particular moment in time and then refracts out through a group of different characters and their reactions to that moment (I think as much as Forest might be searching for contact with Amaya, his lost daughter, with the use of this technology we might also be preparing for a contact between Lily and Sergei across time too in future episodes), as well as a bit of a feeling of The Beach from the way that the Forest character is in the process of searching the world for tangible answers and for a comfort that really should be coming from within himself and his relationships with those around him in the present, rather than a fantasy of an idealised figure of a lost daughter, no matter how motivational it has been in his work so far.

Similar to the main character in The Beach, Forest seem to be in the process of externalising his internal trauma and projecting it out onto the real world, and in the doing so he is kind of ruining the good parts of the fantasy setting or the positive aspects of the ambitious project for the others around him. It is like he is making everything much too personal and injecting the flaws of his psyche directly into an otherwise exciting situation. I am particularly thinking of the aspect in Garland's book of The Beach that was dropped for the Danny Boyle film (or rather got exchanged for a more obvious and slightly cheesy "he's so immature that he is seeing life as a video game!" moment) where our 'hero' sees an outdoor screening of Apocalypse Now and it kind of inflects how he approaches his 'one man guerrilla war' with the drug gang on the island later on. Whilst everyone else on the beach is just trying to have a fun holiday and co-exist with the potentially violent gangsters he just has to get too involved in escalating the situation, almost compulsively so. Really that character needed to have gone on an 'extreme adventure' holiday instead, leaving everyone else to just get high and sunbathe (and tend their crops) in peace! Or ironically it might have been better to have waited around until Ubisoft put Far Cry 3 out!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Wed Apr 29, 2020 4:24 am, edited 7 times in total.

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Re: Devs

#5 Post by alacal2 » Fri Apr 17, 2020 6:46 am

"Bloated" seems a strange description for a series that feels to me very pared-down and quite disciplined in its structure and reference to the 'big ideas' its about. I'm enjoying this. There is a real 'otherwordly' feel to this emphasised by the brilliant score and the shots of San Francisco that seem totally alien. I think the apparent 'lifelessness' of the charactors and actors playing them, mirror Forest's overarching view that the world we inhabit is deterministic. Its amusing that he refers to us as being on "tram lines" in the city in which his company is based (and I may be wrong but I don't think we see a single actual tramline)! To Colin's list of (darkly) comic moments I would add the slo-mo hand-to-hand combat scene at the end of Episode 2 which seems both amateur and deadly. All in all, an unsettling ride.

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Re: Devs

#6 Post by Persona » Fri Apr 17, 2020 5:51 pm

I don't know how far you guys are into watching, but my comments might make more sense once you have finished the series. I was relatively with it up through the first 3 or 4 episodes. And if this show had been boiled down to 4 episodes it probably would have been far more effective. It is a sci-fi short story concept that Garland blew up into half a dozen hours of tedious plotting and awkward dialogue.

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Re: Devs

#7 Post by alacal2 » Sat Apr 18, 2020 4:57 am

I'm only up to Episode 2 and I guess Colin will be providing one of his excellent ongoing commentaries so we shall see.

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Re: Devs

#8 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Apr 18, 2020 5:51 am

I'm also just following along with the television broadcast rather than binge watching. Even two episodes a week feels a bit too much of a commitment! So I'm open to Persona being correct, though perhaps some things are made to have a gap of a week between episodes and an eight hour television series is inevitably going to have more space to fill than a two hour film. I mean nothing enormously groundbreaking plot-wise happened in episode 2 (except for breaking into somebody's phone, grainy Jesus and the introduction and swift apparent removal of a Russian state spy subplot), but I really liked all of the dynamics going on between the characters in their various scenes.

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Re: Devs

#9 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Apr 22, 2020 5:17 pm

"You want to watch the man you left me for burn himself to death...together? That's transcendently weird, Lily"
"I know"

I really liked that instead of a pre-credits significant song that episode 3 starts off with a static-y hum as whatever this machine is cycles up from Jesus, though Joan of Arc (not particularly stoic in this version of events!) and into the events of the previous episode. I particularly liked the way that the image seems clearer the closer in time that we get, suggesting it is harder to piece together the imagery from the grainy chaos the further away in the timeline it is from the present (a bit like an inverse of the opening shot of Contact). Maybe it all becomes conjecture and extrapolation at a certain point, like seeing ghostly images in the static of an untuned in television channel that might just belong to the eye of the beholder and the hand of the coder to join up the dots into the most pleasing and tantalising forms for their audience.

I like that the first half of this episode appears to be where Lily, after travelling San Francisco and tracing contacts outside of the organisation, rather naively returns back to the campus to tell colleagues, friends and trusted members of staff about her concerns over Sergei's death. Which is a terribly bad move, even if for now the bad guys appear to be content in hoping that she will self destruct rather than having to do the destructing for her. This is not really helped by Lily unfortunately revealing that she has a past history of seeing patterns in data in her previous job 'in Brooklyn' and gets rather upset about nobody taking her concerns seriously, ending up having a panic attack and seeming suicide attempt occurring in front of Forest schmoozing a visiting high profile Senator (oops!). It kind of ties Lily in with Jesus and Joan of Arc I guess as people who 'see the patterns' and pay the price for it (and maybe with Sergei too, as the manufactured faux Joan of Arc, or Buddhist monk, figure)

But then we get the reveal (on leaving the campus back for the city) that Lily's friend Jen has been in on it all with her and they have faked Lily's mental breakdown and previous history of schizophrenia (I guess somebody else saw Pi!) so that while Lily was being talked down from the ledge Jen could download the raw footage of Sergei's self immolation to pore over for evidence with Jamie, who himself notices the repeated flame effects on the footage to suggest it has been faked. Then we get the beautiful third person perspective (or rather the perspective of that giant statue of the daughter which presumably has CCTV cameras for eyes) looking down on the scene on the night of the burning as it reverses Irreversible-style to show the small army of technicians it takes to create such a situation coming in to tidy up the scene back into its unsullied state.

So we have one group of characters creating an illusion of stability playing off against another set of characters also creating a fake situation, but one of being mentally unstable, both doing so in order to hide their true motivations! I just hope that Lily has not too easily provided all the motivation that Forest and Kenton need to destroy her (and also that nobody remembers that Jen was probably looking directly at Lily edging her way past on the window ledge from her perspective inside the office but never reacted to it until Forest made his phone call!). I also really like the idea that 'seeing something' appears to be giving people an insight into other people (like getting to see Marilyn and that hot stud Arthur Miller in flagrante), but that does not really get at what is really going on at any more than a superficial, manipulatable level, whether that is spying through time at famous figures of history (which would frankly be easier to just create fake CGI'd fan fiction imagery of rather than trying to search for an 'absolutely true' image. That feels like the ultimate irony of the show at the moment: it feels like incredible hypocrisy for Forest and his team to go through all this murderous fakery in order to hide their research into trying to capture a 'true' image, that can never be truly verified one way or the other as being anything more than wish fulfillment and the product of a great team of CGI animators working on the code behind the scenes!), or presuming that seeing a CCTV image, or witnessing an apparent suicide attempt is giving someone a complete handle on the lives of others.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Fri Sep 25, 2020 3:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Devs

#10 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Apr 23, 2020 5:03 pm

"Deterministic because everything that can happen will happen"
"And that's as deterministic as it can get!"

Episode 4 is interestingly interior focused. Lily's outburst (for practical spy shenanigan related reasons) gets her mind probed by an employment mandated meeting with a psychiatrist. You did not really need to be a psychic to realise that it was really a bit silly to hand all that ammunition over to superiors to do what they wish with it. And even more unfortunate to believe that state police have an existence separate from a technology company's private security forces...

Meanwhile the team has a breakthrough with the sci-fi device, but Forest is not impressed. Multiverse Jesus, not the Jesus from this reality? That's not acceptable to Forest because he's not wanting a general view into the past but a specific 'true past' and even more specifically an exact figure from this exact past timeline...

... which maybe plays into that scene of Forest and Katie debating the ethics of viewing future events (foreseeing Lily's death in 48 hours time, or rather Lily crawling somewhere. It is all open to interpretation, I think!) and whether seeing that future events appear to be set in stone absolves someone of the moral responsibility for then enacting (re-enacting?) them out in the present. That applies just as much to Lily's foreseen death as it does to being able to guess that a highly visible mental breakdown will more than likely be used as an excuse to get rid of someone. Maybe Forest's extreme reaction means that he is scared that there is a real possibility that both the past and the future are not deterministic but instead we are all living in a universe of innumerable possibilities that only get concretised by our present, often impulsive and half-considered, actions. Chaos theory in action. Perhaps he's afraid that someone will wrest the steering wheel out of his hands one day, and change everyone's fate. But then as we have seen with Sergei that is hypocritical of him in tinkering with visions for his benefit whilst at the same time being more than willing to ensure everyone else around him follows their predesignated 'tramlines' without deviation. Maybe that means somewhere among the infinite universes that there is a universe in which Sergei was never murdered, or one where Amaya never died in the first place. Speaking of which, and I may have missed it, but have we been told how Amaya died as yet? Surely she was not plastic bagged in the woods too, but maybe (like Lily) guilt for allowing something to happen to a loved one is motivating Forest as much as grief is?

I do like Forest firing an employee in a scene that felt similar to Steve Jobs getting rid of Wozniak in the Danny Boyle film. Lyndon is not being fired for being a failure but because they were too good at their job in creating applications for the technology that benefit everyone not just the Creator, making that character similar to Lily in that they are being removed like a glitch in the system just because they are not doing what Forest specifically wants them to. Similarly one of the turning points of the whole series might be Kenton deciding to push things further and remove Lily following the psychiatrist's meeting, which collapses the tense ambiguity of the situation and causes her to go on the run. Maybe that choice to concretise the relationship was done without consultation with Forest either (was the Russian spy?), as yet another person doing their own thing (often with Forest's best interests at heart!) rather than just 'following the tramlines', and I have a feeling that there might be an uncomfortable conversation between Kenton and Forest at some point in the future. And I wonder if Lyndon might somehow return, because once you have gotten a taste of the machine's visions I cannot see it being easy to go cold turkey on it, even if you get a multi-million dollar severance package and your continued existence in return for leaving quietly. Maybe Lyndon, the homeless guy and Jamie will team up as a dev support team for Lily, if they are not picked off first?

I also really liked Jamie's topless apartment clean up scene, preparing for Lily's inevitable return (his version of seeing into the future and preparing for it, all done without the benefit of a sci-fi device?), only for it all to fall apart at the end of all that effort, both immediately with the shelf falling off of the wall just after he leaves the apartment, and a bit more upsettingly in the long term when the wrong guest decides to stay the night instead.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Mon Apr 27, 2020 4:59 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Devs

#11 Post by Kat » Sat Apr 25, 2020 2:23 pm

it all makes sense
i think
hmmmm

but I did really enjoy it, didn't mind binging, needed to
what is that tower in SF, never been there sadly, it was in The OA s2 I think and I think also Vertigo, I know google is a wonderful thing, but I quite like it being mystery to me

oh and how anyone can be as cool as this with the thingamycguffin i do not know

just thought is the series more about mcguffin than anythign else? oh no, i need to quantum compute that, yes and no . . .

(crikey, is that true in some degree of all sf? if so someone must have said it)

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Re: Devs

#12 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Apr 29, 2020 5:20 pm

“What’s my place in this trial?”
“You’re a witness”
“No, I’m your lawyer for the defence. I’m going to make my opening argument. Are you ready?”

I really like that the whole of episode 5 is fully Katie’s episode, as Forest’s senior partner in the project uses the machine to explore events both present (Kenton torturing Jamie) and the past (both of herself and Forest, Forest losing his daughter, and then Lily’s relationships). Everything is going on inside the visions that the machine, under her direction, is throwing up onto the screen here. It is perhaps a neat way of suggesting that the process of creating any narrative is like building a time machine out of your character's experiences: you stretch and elongate moments to emphasise their importance; you edit and choose significant events (which might only be significant because they have been picked out); or you skip over whole chunks of a person's life to get the 'important parts'. Maybe everyone has a multitude of different stories within them, based on how they get focused on by the author? What timeframe is used, what gets included or left out (like, say, a murder!), and what perspective is brought to bear on them might be the difference between being a hero and a villain of the story.

The theme of this episode, along with deepening Katie’s character wonderfully (that smile at the end of the episode is perfect!) seems to be about people creating a coherent, present satisfying narrative by selecting ‘explanatory’ past moments from the timeline of everything that came before and using that information to begin to make plans about everything that could possibly occur in the future.

That moment of Katie leaving the lecture with her pink handbag and splitting into multiple possibilities of what she might do upon leaving the lecture in frustration is a kind of homage to the Come Into My World music video! And it contrasts perfectly with Forest losing his daughter in a car accident, as a multitude of different possibilities of how events could have played out happen all at the same time. Maybe it all comes down to the life lesson that you should be patient and not distract a person with a telephone call whilst they are driving (and what about the, almost entirely ignored by Forest, wife/partner/mother figure who starts appearing here, associated strongly with, yet always overwhelmed by, the daughter in the flashbacks?)

I like that the extrapolation experiments have the trinity of initial coders at their lecterns like priests, with Forest both with his back to them into the room and yet simultaneously suddenly appearing in out of the ether in front of them as the machine's energy is increased and expands outwards. I get the impression that the initial ‘purity’ of these experiments that we see at their very start in the ‘flashbacks’ in this episode is what attracted the three key members of staff to Forest’s project. And then the traffic accident occurs that drives Forest away from the idea that there are a multitude of different possible outcomes to every action in the universe and, in his grief, towards the idea that there is only one true timeline that can be explored instead (from the Everett theorem that he hired Katie to pursue and towards the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation that the lecturer was putting forward instead, if you like). Because it is perhaps too painful for Forest to realise that he is playing the version of himself in the universe where his daughter tragically and senselessly died, and maybe he is upset at the idea that there are versions of himself in different universes blithely continuing on their own timelines untraumatised? It is the kind of traumatic backstory that ends up creating a supervillain. And, oh God, in his single-minded quest does that mean he "cannot see the forest for the trees"? 8-[

I guess that this probably explains Katie’s ambivalence towards Forest now, as she has so much to be grateful to him for but he has twisted the project in harmful directions (and ones which go completely against the proven successes of the machine, that have validated her own beliefs but have been forcefully ignored by Forest) even before he murdered someone and covered it up. I get the feeling (especially after the firing of Lyndon being the last straw) that Katie will be glad to see the project fail. I also think that Katie probably knows that the image of 'Lily's death' is vague enough that it could mean anything at this point in time, but is letting Forest assume the worst (best?) outcome of the vision. But has the whole project gone too far to be easily shut down now?

Whilst Katie is the primary focus of this episode I really like the opening of various iterations and permutations of Sergei, Jamie and Lily all wandering around Lily’s apartment at various stages of their relationship(s). And Sergei and Lily declaring their love for each other for the first time in the suspended moment of a paused Alan Watts lecture was very cute! (Which reminds me that that recent video game Everything tackled some of Watts’ philosophies and tries to make them graspable on a visual, tactile level from micro to macro-scale).

Also Lily as a child playing a game of Go with her father, a game where there are innumerable different possible moves to make, some of which involve trying to predict and account for future moves, is probably the ‘old world’ version of the concepts being explored by the sci-fi machine. Much as the way that the game was used as a metaphor in Darren Aronofsky's Pi?

(By the way I just had my own moment of weird serendipity watching this as in this episode the description of the Double-slit experiment turned up simultaneously at the point in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Moon book that I was reading on my train commute just this afternoon, in the chapter (the longest in the book) where two of the main characters are trapped inside an apartment for weeks on end and eventually they both get so bored that the character who is a Quantum Physicist ends up trying to explain superposition through recreating the experiment!)
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Re: Devs

#13 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Apr 30, 2020 5:13 pm

"It's an amazing thing, where love'll take you. The roads you'll travel... the lengths you'll go to".

Episode 6 is a kind of a re-cap episode but it is the best kind of re-cap, as Lily and Jamie instead of going on the run, decide to go directly to Forest's home and confront him. Only they find Katie there too, and the majority of the episode is Lily and Katie at the dining room table intercut with scenes of Forest and Jamie outside (on the same porch that Forest and Kenton previously had their heart-to-heart on, which I could only see making Kenton feel even more betrayed!)

The discussion between Lily and Katie, with Katie bluntly laying out the details of Sergei's death and the purpose behind Devs is the kind of intimate, intense pared down scene about big issues that I wish there were more of in the culture generally. I was thinking of other similar scenes and the main one that came to mind was the discussion between Michael Ironside and Stephen Lack about their shared history and divergent paths at the end of Scanners, before the special effects climax (Also the scene at the end of The Matrix Reloaded, although I sometimes hear that people - wrongly - don't like it for how verbose it gets!). It takes some nerve to strip an episode of a series back to almost just one location, bookended by the motel room at the start and returning back to Lily's apartment at the end, as Jamie and Lily move from one shared bed to another, in different circumstances.

I also like that, to match the lecture scene in the previous episode, now we are getting Katie giving her own lecture for an audience of one, who themselves scoff at its implications (I also love that Katie and Lily lean in and move backwards at various points in the conversation, and then the rolling pen gets brought up by Katie as an example of being able to predict its own rolling movement. They are already living out their own analogy in the bigger world of the room that the pen itself is inside of!). And I still think that as much as Katie is espousing the 'single world' theory here, and more intimate with Forest than we may have suspected, that she is holding back her true feelings from everyone else here, content to let the clock run down on the perceivable future. She even acknowledges that everything going on in that quantum computer is a 'simulation', so she acknowledges that for all the cheese that an onscreen mouse eats in a different projected timeline, the physical body of it in this one remains a dessicated corpse (which is arguably the most important part!). Which will be the same in Amaya's case, no matter how good the machine gets at pulling imagery up from the static realm.

I really like that for both Jamie and Katie (even Forest perhaps) that there is a kind of exciting pleasure in the thought that the future might be unknown once again. Although that involves dumping all of the burden of predestination upon Lily's shoulders, to save/stop them all!

I also love that as the scenes between Katie and Lily get to be about bigger and headier themes, that Jamie and Forest are reduced to just playing Frisbee to pass the time! Although it seems that all of them have forgotten to factor Kenton in as being a rogue agent now, driven by his own feelings of betrayal after having gotten his hands dirty on Forest's behalf many times over at this point (Kenton's appearance near the end of this episode is pairing with Lyndon briefly returning at the beginning of it. I presume that one or the other of them, or both, are going to put a spanner into the works soon).

I think this is the most perfectly structured episode so far, and love how intimate it feels. Maybe people can be allowed to be a bit more relaxed about their differences in the middle of the night when their obligations to their daytime roles are not so intense.

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Re: Devs

#14 Post by colinr0380 » Wed May 06, 2020 5:19 pm

"Uh-oh"

So we get a lot of the sideplots neatly closed off with episode 7, as side characters die freeing others up to pursue violent revenge themselves and somehow that long ago dropped thread of Russian spy stuff turns up again to save Lily's life. Maybe that was only the case in this reality though?

This feels like the jaded episode. Maybe this is what Persona meant about dialogue feeling 'stilted' as we get to the final day which both Katie and Forest appear to have endlessly pored over for every possible action, and that sense of just playing out predestined events makes everyone begin to feel like puppets being marionetted about than being able to act with any sense of free will. I really like that quote that Garland made in an interview about tech companies being like monarchies, feeling accountable only to Higher Powers, and this episode in particular is suggesting the flaring up of unchecked monarchical power as it reaches its height of feeling able to do anything to anyone without consequence but with the ever present fear/foreknowledge that it will only be that way until the inevitable revolution occurs!

That makes Katie and Forest (and Stewart) feel like the King and Queen (or 2001-style post-humans after contact with a mind expanding obsidian monolith) of the piece, because they are aware of everything that has been and will follow, so remain unsurprised by it, while the characters we have come to care for (even Kenton and particularly Lyndon illustrates this, getting his own splitting off into multiple possibilities, but they are all multiple minute variations on a single inevitable death plunge as he reaches his terminal moments which do not allow any possibility of an alternate action any more) are still human (and acting as such, playing out their human-scale dramas) because they are existing within their little created narrative bubble as actual characters should, rather than gazing out of their story and aware that they are just on their own tramlines in someone else's narrative. This isn't exactly a world that has disproved the existence of God through the use of technology (as should have been obvious by grainy Jesus), but instead is one where our 'post-humans' have almost gotten to the stage of being able to discern the patterns of the divine workings of the universe, and they might not like what gets reflected back at them (probably Alex Garland himself. It also makes me think a little about the 'twist' author self-insert character in The Dark Tower series). Mostly that they do not appear to have any free will even in a universe full of many worlds, and especially because without their magic box to light the way (even losing it just for a moment, as Lyndon did), they will eventually return to being as blind to future possibilities as anyone else. That is probably a blessing in disguise though.

(I was also thinking that this is also quite similar to Never Let Me Go, adapted into a film by Garland from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel back in 2010, in that we have a centrally ominous 'lab' location that our central character only fully explores near to the end of the drama, with the strange feeling that they already are pretty much aware of what they will find when they get there)
Last edited by colinr0380 on Mon Nov 30, 2020 12:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Devs

#15 Post by colinr0380 » Thu May 07, 2020 5:45 pm

"It was just a private joke"

So events reach the crunch period of intense late night outside of normal working hours activity as nobody can escape from their timeline even if they can tweak the details a little. Only after life on the physical plane stops is there the possibility of other worlds with other choices, but it really seems like too big of a leap of faith to take, unless you get pushed into it!

I really like the idea of someone getting the chance to ask their killer why they did it from beyond their death, only for there to really be not satisfactory answer. It made me think a lot about the character in either version of D.O.A., when dispensing justice and understanding motivations for a crime eventually feels hollow whatever the outcome.

And I love that Stewart is the fail-safe mechanism to ensure events run smoothly!

It was amusing in the light of how events unfolded that at that early meeting scene I really wanted Lily to interrogate Forest more about his onscreen daughter. Sure she might be 'real' and 'present' but she cannot be touched, held, interacted with like a real person (social distancing to the max!), so all you have is a window into another world to torment yourself with. And in the process Forest is reducing the 'real world' into just being a fixed flow of emotions and actions in order that they match the images from the screen - reality is reduced to the level of simulation; simulation therefore becomes the equivalent of reality, or so near as to be functionally the same. Representation trumps actuality in the mind of a controlling megalomaniac. He has reduced the world (turning it stilted, fixed and fake feeling) in order to fulfil his desire for a world where things worked out differently. One where he was happy in the literal sense of being entirely fulfilled (back to the Garden of Eden, pre-original sin), so never needed or had the drive to create (And in turn does that cheekily suggest that the God of the universe(s) is similarly mentally broken? Forest and Lily are literally so at the end).

And that itself made me think about Videodrome. Forest as the Barry Convex figure, everyone enamoured by the onscreen world and wanting to merge with it to live out their deepest desires, and our main character ending up being both the pre-determined terrorist and the figure who brings the situation to an end (with a subplot about a mysteriously lost lover and a shady espionage cabal swirling about them), given the promise of a new world beyond this one as a kind of consolation, or payment for a job well done? The only thing Lily needed to have done was to have pulled the gun out of her stomach rather than just out of the pocket of her hoodie!

I also liked that in the 'many worlds' ending there is the sense that you (or at least those privileged to have an awareness of the truth of their existence such as Lily and Forest) cannot just explore the same events over and over again (although that possibility is open to them) but instead are better off learning from each event loop like a self aware A.I. and can maybe make adjustments in the narrative to see if that affects anything. Such as a pre-awareness of how your rebound boyfriend probably wasn't worth all the effort of either revenging or killing! Forest seems pretty ecstatic about the situation, but then he was suicidal anyway - I feel more for both Katie and Lily in this. Katie because Forest turns away from the new relationship and way of being in the world that she represents to live in a fantasy world with a long dead wife and daughter; Lily because she has been forced into a simulacrum of an existence where she might be able to patch things up with Jamie but she knows its all fake. And that's just in the optimistic 'good outcome' version of the world, let alone the hellscape versions of the universe that Forest and Lily get thrown into where they presumably have little else to do but duel to the death!

That philosophical dilemma/nightmare scenario is pretty much the same as the ending of the video game Soma (which I wrote up a bit here), but just as beautifully expressed in this show, as Lily and Forest become shared explorers/antagonists in every possible world. One can only hope that now the government knows about it that they do not start proposing the joys of killing yourself in the real world to exist in the next one (because presumably there cannot be two copies of yourself, or that would be too confusing?) as a form of population control!

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Roger Ryan
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Re: Devs

#16 Post by Roger Ryan » Fri Aug 28, 2020 10:38 am

colinr0380 wrote:
Wed Apr 29, 2020 5:20 pm
... And Sergei and Lily declaring their love for each other for the first time in the suspended moment of a paused Alan Watts lecture was very cute!...
Not an Alan Watts lecture, actually, but the Ferris wheel scene from The Third Man ("Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?").

Yes, it's four months later, but I just finished the series last night and I found the summaries/speculations provided by "colinr0380" far more intriguing than most of what filled up the eight episodes. Once the predictive algorithm of the computer program was revealed, the drama just screams for the characters to attempt to defy it by making different choices, but no one ever does.. until Lily simply tosses the gun aside in a manner that is quite underwhelming. As a viewer, I wanted to see the consequences of attempting to alter a predicted future, but the multi-verse aspect (teased in a very appealing manner in episode five) turns out to be a "red herring". Great soundtrack, some nice visuals, and a whole lot of under-developed plotting.

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colinr0380
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Re: Devs

#17 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Aug 28, 2020 12:35 pm

Ah, sorry about that! I must have just had Alan Watts on the brain whilst watching! And whilst I liked the show I did still want that giant statue to have gone on an autonomous rampage at some point!

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Re: Devs

#18 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Mon Jan 17, 2022 7:22 am

Zach Grenier leans so hard into his trademark grumpiness it makes me wonder if the man has ever smiled

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therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: Devs

#19 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Sep 17, 2023 8:35 pm

colinr0380 wrote:
Thu May 07, 2020 5:45 pm
SpoilerShow
I really wanted Lily to interrogate Forest more about his onscreen daughter. Sure she might be 'real' and 'present' but she cannot be touched, held, interacted with like a real person (social distancing to the max!), so all you have is a window into another world to torment yourself with. And in the process Forest is reducing the 'real world' into just being a fixed flow of emotions and actions in order that they match the images from the screen - reality is reduced to the level of simulation; simulation therefore becomes the equivalent of reality, or so near as to be functionally the same. Representation trumps actuality in the mind of a controlling megalomaniac. He has reduced the world (turning it stilted, fixed and fake feeling) in order to fulfil his desire for a world where things worked out differently. One where he was happy in the literal sense of being entirely fulfilled (back to the Garden of Eden, pre-original sin), so never needed or had the drive to create (And in turn does that cheekily suggest that the God of the universe(s) is similarly mentally broken? Forest and Lily are literally so at the end).
SpoilerShow
I was wondering the same thing - Lily is smart enough to offer the “Well you can’t engage with her” retort to his silly “What’s the difference?” faux-philosophical checkmate, but of course the final act shows us that he can indeed interact with her once inside. What feels cheap about this little script elision is that it elides the ‘strong, intelligent’ characters’ capacity to think of an easy answer just so they can pull off the deus ex machina twist to keep them alive… Did I miss something, or was Offerman unaware of this as the plan or a feasible possibility until it happened and he pivoted once realizing the occupancy? If so, that would mean he wouldn’t have a good answer to the obvious question, but that would be out of character, so let’s all look and feels stupid for a bit until the answer we’re all thinking manifests for us..
colinr0380 wrote:
Thu May 07, 2020 5:45 pm
SpoilerShow
I also liked that in the 'many worlds' ending there is the sense that you (or at least those privileged to have an awareness of the truth of their existence such as Lily and Forest) cannot just explore the same events over and over again (although that possibility is open to them) but instead are better off learning from each event loop like a self aware A.I. and can maybe make adjustments in the narrative to see if that affects anything. Such as a pre-awareness of how your rebound boyfriend probably wasn't worth all the effort of either revenging or killing! Forest seems pretty ecstatic about the situation, but then he was suicidal anyway - I feel more for both Katie and Lily in this. Katie because Forest turns away from the new relationship and way of being in the world that she represents to live in a fantasy world with a long dead wife and daughter; Lily because she has been forced into a simulacrum of an existence where she might be able to patch things up with Jamie but she knows its all fake. And that's just in the optimistic 'good outcome' version of the world, let alone the hellscape versions of the universe that Forest and Lily get thrown into where they presumably have little else to do but duel to the death!
Colin, your impressions are so much more interesting than what we get! I was extremely underwhelmed to find that the show seemed to have zero interest in exploring any of these deep ideas in the end. It postured at being about a bunch of half-baked themes and concepts many times, but never went anywhere with them. Determinism has a tough risk of being boring if you don’t do anything cool with it, and this show gave us a long windup of re-explaining the same thing over and over, around a relatively predictable (fitting, I guess?) dystopian sci-fi neo-noir plot, only to deliver a dud pitch that the pitcher is confident should be ruled a strike. I feel like the show has to be doing more than it is and I just missed something, but I’m pretty sure it blinked and turned left every time anything interesting was threatening the necessity of being explored.

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colinr0380
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Re: Devs

#20 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Sep 18, 2023 1:31 am

I don't know if this will particularly tie into your comments but since this time I have finally worked through that puzzle game The Witness which struck me as mining extremely similar thematic territory to Devs. That's set on an entirely created island which in all ways is subordinate to the perspective of the player and constantly throws out quotes both in the form of audio tapes scattered around the landscape with philosophical quotations from everyone from Lao Tzu to astronauts looking back on the Earth and noting that everything is contained in one sphere that from the astronaut's perspective can be covered with their hand; and more pointedly in six unlockable video clips. Those video clips span a range of different approaches to the subject of being, from a BBC programme that makes a case for the primacy of science over 'secondhand' sources like art, through the ending of Tarkovsky's Nostalghia, and clips from speakers about the importance of self abnegation into just existing without worldly needs. Which all seem to be tackling the issues of existing in a world from their specific, and specifically limited perspectives.

For the majority of the game that seems to be pushing towards an idea about becoming the master of your domain, learning the 'rules' of how the world works and thereby moving close to being a God-like figure. Although even here that only really works in a world that has been micro-managed to such an extent that everything is still and dead, from the statues of humans dotted around the landscape which look to have been people transformed into stone in their supreme moments of reaching for their impossible goals, to the way that even the clouds in the sky or sounds in the landscape only exist in specific patterns which when perceived from different specific angles or with an ear to their significance have a meaning. This world is artificial and created, and after the 'Heaven' first ending, the post-game completion starts throwing the most interesting material in the game at the player, as the quotations start having the people reading them then philosophically debate if they believe in them or not, or whether it makes sense to include particular quotations in the 'world' because they don't fit either aesthetically, politically or from a religious perspective (i.e. they can't find a good quote from an Atheist perspective!), and most amusingly they start revealing the constraints of the entire project itself where even if the mind is 'unbounded' there are still constraints from the perspective of time and money (i.e. they want to include a Carl Sagan quote in the game, but he's both copyrighted and too expensive, so they have to drop him! Which might be the funniest thing in the whole game!)

If you don't want to wrestle with the puzzles there is a fantastic playthrough by Keith Ballard that works through it. The main thing that makes me think of Devs in particular is the second ending which breaks the fourth wall into a game developer waking up at their desk (love the urine bottle next to the couch, which is the second funniest thing in the game!) before seeing patterns from the game everywhere around them and having to wander out into their own artificially created water garden to decompress from the experience of 'entering the Island'. Is Jonathan Blow the real-world equivalent of Forest? Braid, The Witness and Indie Game: The Movie suggest some parallels, just without the Elon Musk-style multimillions to back up the flights of fantasy!

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Devs

#21 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Sep 18, 2023 8:30 am

SpoilerShow
Yeah to detail what I’m talking about a bit more:

The multiverse concept that Forest initially squashes and Lyndon champions isn’t really explored or even acknowledged in a manner that stresses the dramatic consequences. It’s just left as surface level ‘cool’. The ending would’ve been a lot more effective if Forest’s mention that versions of them are in variations of ‘hell’ was fleshed out even slightly. Instead he says something like, “Smile, we’re the lucky ones” and it’s left at that - I do think there’s a hint at darkness here but it’s not really left tonally ambiguous. The characters seem to take the attitude of Garland and just zone out the deeper implications to focus on what’s in front of them. That’s a good mindful life attitude of gratitude, but it’s frustrating in a show that recognizes serious concerns and then escapes into solipsism. Questions of ethics around being allowed to exist in heaven while versions of them are trapped in other existences, or that moral rot of knowing there’s countless versions of ‘you’ suffering right now, all in the service of this you enjoying an optimal existence, are fascinating with endless potential to mine for substance. But I don’t think the show even sat with the solemnity for a beat.

Even though I didn’t like the miniseries, I’d love to get a sequel where this was explored. For instance: Lily enters into the plateau stage of her new relationship with Jamie, and begins to sober to these philosophical implications, creating a real (this time!) psychological breakdown. The idea of an unshakable moral guilt in heaven is a cool high concept, I think, and it goes further when she goes to the only person she can share this with - Forest - spoiling his heaven and initiating his own (in the opposite direction) moral elasticity as he taps into the selfish (vs Lily’s empathic) side and wonders how to essentially murder or contain her in heaven! There could be multiverse travel or something too, but I dunno, there’s just so much untapped potential there - and it may actually feel like 10-episodes worth of material too.

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