Devs collection
Devs is an American science fiction thriller miniseries created, written and directed by Alex Garland. Its eight episodes premiered on FX on Hulu between March 5 and April 16, 2020. Lily Chan, a software engineer at the quantum computing company Amaya, becomes caught up in the death of her boyfriend, who died on his first day working for Amaya's secretive Devs division.
24 total · 7 choice · 13 major · 4 minor
| Theme | Level | Motivation |
|---|---|---|
| coping with the death of a child | choice | It was eventually revealed that Forest's obsession with perfecting the quantum computer, brokering no pesky variances, began with the death of his wife and child in a fluke car accident. |
| coping with the death of a lover | choice | It was eventually revealed that Forest's obsession with perfecting the quantum computer, brokering no pesky variances, began with the death of his wife and child in a fluke car accident. |
| digital afterlife | choice | Somewhat incongruous, the story concluded with the Devs/Deus quantum computer which could see into the past and the future with ease, somehow being used to simulate a digital afterlife for Forest and Lily in a version of the universe in which their respective loved ones hadn't brutally perished. The conciousnesses of Forest and Lily were apparently transported into a simulation of that reality from their original one at the moment of their deaths. How and why the computer was able to simulate the unique new reality that emerged from such an intrusion, was quietly left as an exercise for the viewer. |
| obsession | choice | Forest's unusual zeal for running his tech company was ultimately revealed to be the creation of a quantum computer that had the power to recreate his dearly departed wife and young daughter, or else join them in a digital afterlife. |
| speculative prediction of the future | choice | A premise of the series is that Forest and Katie had built an extremely powerful quantum computer which was able to see into the past and predict possible futures. |
| what if I caught a glimpse of the future | choice | A premise of the series is that Forest and Katie had built an extremely powerful quantum computer which was able to see into the past and predict possible futures. The key future event on which the series turns is whether Lily would show up at the Devs facility at a predict time and shoot Forest in the head. |
| what if I saw a glimpse of the past | choice | An extremely powerful quantum computer that reconstruct grainy video-like reconstructions of possible past and future events is key novelty of the series. In Episode 2, the Devs team reconstructed a grainy video of the crucifixion using an extremely powerful quantum computer. In another, Forest viewed a similar grainy video of his young daughter blowing soap bubbles. |
| Big Tech in society | major | The series invites the viewer to ponder whether Big Tech companies have too much influence over society. In Episode 8, this culminated with Lily confronting the tech CEO Forest, telling him that people like him become "fanatics" and end up thinking themselves as "messiahs". |
| boyfriend and girlfriend | major | The series starts out following Lily and Sergei, a young coder couple who live together in a San Francisco apartment. Lily became convinced that something bad had happened to Sergei when he didn't return home from work after accepting a position with a secretive quantum computing team at the Amaya corporation. Lily's worst fear was seemingly confirmed when she was shown security camera footage of what appeared to be Sergei taking his own life by the simple expedient of self-immolation. Lily responded by taking concerted efforts to get to the bottom of Sergei's suspicious and inexplicable suicide. In the process of sorting that out, Lily rekindled her relationship with her old flame, Jamie. |
| coping with a loved one being missing | major | For a good part of the story, Lily was trying to find out the fate of her boyfriend Sergei after he went missing under mysterious circumstances. Lily became convinced that something bad had happened to Sergei when he didn't return home from work after accepting a position with a secretive quantum computing team at the Amaya corporation. |
8 component stories
| Story | Date |
|---|---|
| devs2020e1x01 | 2020-03-05 |
| devs2020e1x02 | 2020-03-05 |
| devs2020e1x03 | 2020-03-12 |
| devs2020e1x04 | 2020-03-19 |
| devs2020e1x05 | 2020-03-26 |
| devs2020e1x06 | 2020-04-02 |
| devs2020e1x07 | 2020-04-09 |
| devs2020e1x08 | 2020-04-16 |