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

any talk about his new show Devs? just starting it

― just sayin, Saturday, 14 March 2020 10:35 bookmarkflaglink

Devs is getting a little more interesting. It feels like a cross between Ex Machina and a few others, with a slow roll-out

― mh, Saturday, 14 March 2020 17:06 bookmarkflaglink

I’m really digging Devs. The camera work is gorgeous, and I think some of it is shot at UCSC. Don’t want to spoil anything though.

― DJI, Saturday, 14 March 2020 17:27 bookmarkflaglink

two weeks pass...
We just binge watched the first 5 episodes of Devs, and it's pretty good, yeah. Some of the themes feel maybe a bit too well-trodden in sci-fi, but the look and sound of the show is consistently great, Salisbury and Barrow have done as great a job with the music as with Annihilation. And some of the visual details they've put into creating an eccentric tech geek's paradise are neat, love those ring lights around the trees, and the Dev team headquarters look amazing.

― Tuomas, Saturday, 28 March 2020 23:51 bookmarkflaglink

I also like how they don't try to make the Devs' mission into some kind of mystery to be cracked, and instead reveal it early on, which allows them to focus on the characters and their motivations for taking part in the whole thing.

One thing that bugged me though...
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SPOILERS!
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Are we really expected to believe that Jesus's death in real life happened exactly as it's described in the Bible, right down to words he spoke? What's the point of having those scenes to show how accurate the quantum computer is, when they could've chosen some more historically credible event to illustrate the same point?
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SPOILERS END.
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― Tuomas, Sunday, 29 March 2020 00:20 bookmarkflaglink

if they're able to view all possible pasts then, sure, one of them could have real Jesus

― mh, Sunday, 29 March 2020 00:32 bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, but they saw very Biblical images of the crucifixion even before the kid added the parallel universe algorithm to the code.

― Tuomas, Sunday, 29 March 2020 01:31 bookmarkflaglink

Started a separate thread on this so the Annihilation thread wouldn't have spoilers for the show.

I've seen some people complaining about the most recent episode, that the actions of Alison Pill's character don't make much sense: why would she be so interested in using the machine to see fairly mundane stuff in Lily's and Sergei's past? But we don't really know what personal motivation she has for working in Devs to begin with (aside from Forest having paid for her education), and the final scene has her watching Jamie break Lily out of the psychiatric ward, which makes her smile... So I'm guessing there's gonna be some revelations about her coming up, and maybe she isn't as loyal to Forest as it seems?

Watched all of this over the weekend and really enjoyed it - I'm a sucker for chilly sf that keeps stopping to deliver lectures but this was more likeable or sympathetic than most in that zone. Looked great, sounded great, a good or well-used cast. Dug it more than Annihilation, which I found ok at the time but then just slid off me.

I binged this over the weekend as well, thought it was pretty good. The security guy was too cartoonishly evil, sometimes the tone seemed too serious or full of itself or something... but overall an A-.

I would have liked to have seen Allison Pill's character fleshed out a little more, and I really wish SF would stop using dead kids as a quick emotional shorthand for loss, but overall I liked this a lot.

lowlightmixes has thrown together a mix you can download here featuring the music from the show (and some other similar styled tracks):

http://lowlightmixes.blogspot.com/2020/04/devs-real-unreal-soundtrack.html

sometimes the tone seemed too serious or full of itself or something

ya think??!

I really wish SF would stop using dead kids as a quick emotional shorthand for loss

as soon as i saw the giant sculpture of the kid i was like 'i get it'. same plot as 'into the spider-verse' more or less

zach galifianakis was great though

the only show I've been able to watch! yes heavy handed but at least smart about it, more than made up for how brain-eatingly stupid westworld s3 has been

points for using (what sounds like a re-performed version of) this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_WWbJo_1mc

it was full of shit and itself but looked gorgeous and engaged me much more than most of its ilk.

lol @ "FX/HBO"
Disney + Warner Media merger "first mentions"

I thought this was fairly good up until the very last episode, but it kinda kinda blew the ending by going all Matrix instead of something more original or interesting. I would've preferred to see more exploration of the many-worlds concept, since the bits about that were the most interesting in the show, but I it seems that was never within the reach of Garland's imagination? I guess we'll see something like that in the third season of Dark, which will hopefully be better.

I agree that the characters' motivations should've been fleshed out better, and not just for Allison Pill's character, but for pretty much everyone else besides the hippie tech guru. Like, for example, why did the old programmer dude decide to do what he did in the finale? It's maybe sorta implied that the death of the kid programmer was the last straw that made him realise the Devs project was wrong, except that we never see if he even found out about the kid's death. And if he thought Devs is wrong, why did he only kill the hippie guy? Shouldn't he have also sabotaged the computer? Yet at the end it's still running and given to government, which would multiply the risks of misuse the programmer was afraid of.

Similarly, in the last few episodes multiple characters shill the protagonist, saying that she's so brave and resilient... But we never really find out what makes her tick. She remains mostly a cypher, whose function in the story is just to react to the craziness around her, not a fully fleshed character.

This was bad. I watched the whole thing, but still bad. Characters were boring, cinematography was boring, ideas were boring. I kept thinking of prior work that was better: Mr Robot, "The Dead Past", La Jetée kinda a bit,...

Most thought-provoking part was the choice of "Menergy" to score the scene where Jamie spruces up his apartment/himself, thinking that he might have a chance to get back with Lily.

I liked the wide trouser styles.

pls no claiming Mr. Robor is superior to anything else

Mr Robot was a lot of fun to watch and I liked a bunch of characters so

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?