Once again, I turn to a series that focuses predominately on philosophical matters. It’s the kick in I’m until I get tired of it and return to My Little Pony and Frasier.

This is yet another recommendation based on my love of Severance, and until I dove in I thought it was a half-hour comedy! Oh, how wrong I was. This show is dreadfully unfunny.

The Premise

The Amaya company is owned and operated by a burly bear of a man named Forest (Nick Offerman). The top-secret “Devs” project, Forest’s baby, is headed by Katie (Alison Pill) and comprises a small team of the best minds of the Amaya company. Devs follows Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno), an unwilling participant in a conspiracy following her boyfriend’s death at the hands of the Amaya company after he tries to record and steal code from the Devs computers. All sorts of shit starts happening, mostly because head of security Kenton (Zach Grenier) is a ruthless motherfucker who just decides to kill people kinda for no reason. He considers Lily a threat to Devs and Amaya. Lily just spends the majority of the series hyperventilating.

My Half-Baked Thoughts

I’m really torn on this. I think Devs builds a fascinating concept — that the future and the past can both be resolved essentially as a filmstrip that can be viewied in the present with the right equipment and code. The theme of determinism is hit over your head constantly, constantly, constantly, specifically making a point to disregard free will as a option. They make a pretty strong case for it until Lily throws that gun out of the transporter and all hell breaks loose! And then the show fails to explain that moment with its own internal logic, but I digress already! I love the plot. It’s a really cool idea. And I spent the entire show fascinated by what I was watching. And I didn’t feel like any of my time was wasted.

Just make a right at the giant girl statue. You can’t miss it.

The acting was disappointingly substandard almost across the board. Everyone had two settings: calm and monotone, or freaking out and crying. I’m biased and gave Sonoya Mizuno somewhat of a pass because she’s cute as a button and she had a super-hot haircut, but goddamn was her performance the most abysmal pile of warm turds I’ve seen from a lead in a long time. Maybe they shouldn’t have forced an American accent on her. And speaking of that, Sergei, Lily’s boyfriend (played by American Karl Glusman), was obviously faking his Russian accent like a faking faker and it bugged me. Alison Pill’s performance was annoying and pretentious, with not much room for an emotion or reaction of any kind during every sentence she spoke and every sentence spoken to her. Even Nick Offerman was woefully underused to his potential, but he carried the show with what little freedom he was given beyond answering every question asked of him with a simple, stoic “yes” (Pill did this too). My props go to Stewart (Stephen McKinley Henderson), the guy on the Devs team who was the only good actor in the whole series. Congratulations, Stewart, you didn’t sound like you were reading your lines straight from a script. Have some cake.

Set a course for a show with better acting. Warp speed. Engage.

The storytelling was frustratingly slow at times, too. Here’s some dialogue for you:

“Is this Devs?”
“…yes.”
“Is this where the Devs team works?”
“…yes.”
“On Devs projects?”
“…yes.”
“And the goal is to go back in time to kill Hitler?”
“…not exactly.”
“The goal is to go back in time and bone Jesus?”
“…yes.”

Characterizations also seemed to be off. Lily is supposed to be an incredibly smart software engineer, and the only display of incredible intellect was her rattling off Fibonacci sequence numbers to her friends. I was hoping at the beginning that they would put a lot of focus on her abilities to weave through the mystery, but she spends the entire series helpless and clueless. She needs her ex-boyfriend Jamie (Jin Ha, who had the worst beard I’ve ever seen on TV) to do everything for her with respect to software, i.e. cracking the password-protected fake Sudoku app on Sergei’s phone, or finding fakery clues in Sergei’s self-immolation footage.

“There’s only one thing I hate more than lying: skim milk. Which is water that’s lying about being milk.”

Storytelling and acting aside, some real and interesting questions arise from whole determinism vs. free will philosophy. Forest’s entire motivation is to somehow, in any way he can, “resurrect” his dead daughter, Amaya. He’s lost between the blind hope and the logical realization that whatever happened had happened, and it’s the only thing that happened. And he’s a bit of a sociopath about it too, sacrificing others in pursuit of his own interests (and repeatedly apologizing to them for it). But the bulk of what we see in Devs involves resolving these fuzzy, static-laden images of the past — and the future, in some cases, when the rules are broken. I see it as Forest trying to maintain complete control AND determinism allows him to avoid accountability for some of his awful actions. This is why he freaked the fuck out at Lyndon when his contributions gave strong support toward the multiverse theory, aka “free will is a thing, actually.” No determinism. No control. Many universes where Amaya didn’t die.

I want to talk about Lyndon for a moment. I found it abundantly distracting that Lyndon was portrayed by a woman for several reasons. 1) Lyndon didn’t have to be male at all. Make him a girl genius prodigy instead. We needed another female character in the cast anyway. 2) If the idea was to make Lyndon be some pre-pubescent boy genius, then they shouldn’t have had Stewart call him a 19-year-old. Weird. 3) They not only didn’t allude to a transgender situation (which they obviously didn’t have to, but that’s not the point), Alex Garland specifically during an interview said that Lyndon isn’t transgender. The only explanation I have that would sit well with me is that Garland chose a woman to play Lyndon due to child labor law restrictions, but Lyndon is a fucking 19-year-old. Suck my dick with that shit.

Good series overall, though!

Or maybe not. Watch Mr. Robot instead.

Worth the Watch?

Hold on, I didn’t get to talk about ME. MEEEEEE. What do I believe, determinism or free will? Since I don’t pretend to be a philosopher except all the other 900 times that I did for money, I can’t speak on this subject with any sort of intelligence or poise. I do have a hard time believing in free will, though, considering what I know about science and physics and entropy. I do believe that every cause has an effect, and that every effect is just an event that happened because of a prior cause. This repeats indefinitely. And if you are the camp that believes that time is just the fourth dimension, and that fifth-dimensional beings are able to see the entirety of time from beginning to end, then it stands to reason that that string of time from beginning to end is fixed. Even if there are branches jutting out from the string of time, they are still fixed and pre-determined. Even if there are an infinite number of strings all jumbled up in a big mess, it’s fixed. The string of time would have to observably grow before the fifth-dimensional being’s eyes in order for free will to exist. I don’t think I believe that.

Put the gun down, I’m not done talking about the 5th dimension yet!

Even the multiverse theory doesn’t support the idea of free will the way that Devs professes. You’re just talking about an infinite number of separate jumbled messes of string. They already exist! Determinism wins again!

Anyway, the show is thought-provoking enough to be worth it. Get past the bad acting and the clunky pacing of the storytelling and you’ve got a good show on your hands. If nothing else, the visualizations and the soundtrack are both pretty. Did I mention Sonoya Mizuno’s really attractive pixie cut? Ooh baby.