Sci-Fi DEVS

[Persona]

At one point in ep 6 there is like a minute of exposition about something that both the audience and all the characters know! It gets that bad!

Garland has some cred as a writer but he really schlubbed his way through this one. Whole show feels like a rough draft he wrote in one week that went straight to production. Parts of it remind me of a screenplay I wrote in college, and that most definitely is not a compliment.

 

[Monsieur Xavier]

I'm watching it but it's soporific and to be frank borderline boring but I want to know how it ends. It tries to hard to be profound and deep.
The premise was nice thought.

 

[Persona]

Yeah, at this point it feels like Garland had an idea for an interesting premise and a couple cool aesthetic ideas for how to present that premise and then tried to make a whole limited series out of it when it probably would have been better off as a 2-hour movie or a short story.

The plot in this is unwieldy and elongated and the character development has been lacking or done in ways that aren't economical. Really nothing so far has justified the structure or time spent.

 

[MagnarTheGreat]

updated after series finale:

Personal episode ratings (out of a max of )
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Episode 7
Episode 8
overall average: (37.5 + 10 + 2.5 / 8) = 6.25

I liked the Lily stuff and the thriller stuff, didn't like the repetitive explaining of stuff I already knew because characters were behind the curve. Overall above average for me (5 is used as average on my scale) could have been better as a movie.

 

[antsman41]

...this show is magnificent and I love how it breaths, lets things fester and slowly sprout.

It’s utterly beautiful.

 

[flickchick85]

I'm still very much enjoying it. Can't wait for the finale.

 

[terry78]

I pretty much spoiled myself on the ending and yeah it's about in line with everything else Garland has done. The entire concept of the machine is interesting yet creepy all at once.

 

[MagnarTheGreat]

I liked the thriller aspects of the show. When the explanations got repetitive it was always a drag on the show.

Spoiler: finale

Like looking into the past, little details were subject to change in the future (shot versus not shot), but the general outcome was the same. I.E. Forest and Lily die in the vacuum-sealed (no air) room.

Forest did say to Jamie in the Frisbee episode that Jamie would end up with Lily. They did in the sim.

The epilogue kind of reminded me of Lost a touch, except inside a computer. LOL

 

[antsman41]

That finale, and overall show, was stunning.

 

[Persona]

This one feels like a missed opportunity to me. The finale was okay even if it was telegraphed to the point of being a foregone conclusion. I kind of have a problem with how ostentatious the show presents itself while the basic writing is often cheating things or just straight up clumsy in how it delivers its ideas. I also feel like the final shot of this show is trying to give us an emotional pay-off on something that never really worked in the first place.

Obviously I watched it all so that says something for it. I just wish Garland had done another hard revision on his scripts and boiled this thing down to half the length, there are a lot of unnecessary plot threads here. And the Lily character really needed more development.

 

[flickchick85]

I really liked the ending and felt it delivered a satisfying payoff to pretty much everything it set up.

 

[Dr.]

An interesting little article that addresses many of the topics -- Laplace’s Demon, quantum computing, determinism vs. free will -- raised in the series.

Making Sense of the Science and Philosophy of ‘Devs’

 

[StarLord]

I just finished this. I found it be fine overall but frustrating. Great ideas and maybe should have been fine tuned a bit more by Garland.

I agree with @Persona about Lily. What was so special that she had two guys pining over her? Barley any personality whatsoever.

Some odd decisions for other characters too. Katie could have been a robot with her dead eyes look constantly plastered on her face. Forest was interesting but every opportunity that had to give him more, they resorted back to him explaining things for the umpteenth time.

 

[elgaz]

So 4yrs later, I finally discovered this show . I happened upon it after watching Garland's Civil War, googling it and noticing a lot of the same cast were in this earlier series.

I thought it was very good overall. It is slow moving, but I found the philosophical discussions interesting and some of the uses for the tech fascinating. Great performances from all the cast. I liked the musical choices and some of the eeriness the show projected. Some very obvious biblical allegories too but within the overall context of the show - featuring a man who thinks he's developed a God-level tech - it made sense. There were some odd character choices which were obviously made to advance the story, and the writing occasionally clunky, but nothing bad enough to harm the overall experience imo.

I wonder how much Garland was inspired by the Arthur C. Clarke/Stephen Baxter novel 'The Light of Other Days'. I read it many years ago but about halfway through Devs it popped back in my mind. It features very similar concepts with people being able to view the past remotely (albeit through wormhole technology rather than quantum entanglement) and possible uses of that for resurrecting those who die. Fantastic book.