'Devs' creator Alex Garland explains 5 references and details you might have missed in his new series

• Warning: Spoilers ahead for all of FX on Hulu's series "Devs."
• Insider spoke with Alex Garland, the writer and director of FX's new sci-fi show "Devs."
• We asked about various details throughout the whole season, like Lily reading a book of apt Sylvia Plath poetry or Jamie playing "Dark Souls" in scene that foreshadowed his fate.
• Garland also spoke to the significance behind Stewart's recitation of the poem "Aubade" by Philip Larkin, and why one of the lines was changed ever-so-slightly for the TV show's script.
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

FX on Hulu's new sci-fi series, "Devs," tackles enormous philosophical and scientific questions about the state of our known world and how advances in technology could change it. The show was created by Alex Garland, whose recent movies "Annihilation" (2018) and "Ex Machina" (2014) also tackle sci-fi themes through the lens of intimate character-driven stories.

As Garland said in an recent phone interview with Insider, he created this project partly with "a particular kind of viewer" in mind.

"One who is patient, and just sort of drifting through imagery and ideas and music and stuff like that," Garland said. "But also one who will maybe watch it again and discover things the second time around."

To that end, we did our own careful rewatch of "Devs," and called up Garland to ask about some of the details and references made throughout the series. Garland explained the desire for including three strands of study (science, philosophy, and theology) in the show, plus why the video "Dark Souls" made a small but importance appearance and more.

Keep reading to learn more about Garland's ideas behind some of our favorite references in "Devs."

In the first episode, Lily is reading 'The Colossus' by Sylvia Plath, which fits thematically with her and Forest's story

The very first detail we asked Garland about — Lily's book of poetry by Sylvia Plath — cut right to the heart of the conversation around references and Easter eggs you can often find in movies and TV shows.

"From my point of view, what you're talking about is something that goes to the heart of filmmaking, or at least in the way I do it," Garland said. "That book was not suggested by me; it was suggested by Michelle Day, who's in charge of props. It's typical of the kind of details that often gets attributed to me that weren't my idea."

There's a thematic reason Day would have chosen that particular book of poetry. The poem for which the book is named, "The Colossus," is told from the perspective of someone speaking to a giant statue. This person is trying to piece together someone they've lost, and eventually seems to surrender to the incompleteness of their efforts. It feels both very apt for Forest's story in "Devs," but also Lily's journey.

Here's just one section of the full poem:

"I work with the same group of people again and again and again, and one of the beauties of that is we all get slightly telepathic with each other," Garland said. "We're very in sync with each other, we understand each other. So actually Lily was reading 'The Colossus' because Michelle suggested that, and it was a beautiful idea. I'm glad you got the connections."

Jamie's death is foreshadowed with a bit of dark comedy in the second episode when he's playing 'Dark Souls'

In the second episode, we see Jamie playing a video game called "Dark Souls." After a few intense seconds of battle, his character dies. "Dark Souls" is a game series known for its difficulty, and the "you died" notification screen is even a common meme.

Jamie defeatedly saying "I died" was, upon first watch, just a fun nod to anyone watching who is familiar with the game. But upon a second viewing, it also works as a bittersweet nod to Jamie's own deadly fate.

"That is a foreshadowing but it's a tongue-in-cheek one," Garland said. "It's partly because I absolutely adore that particular video game, and it does have this strange ruthless quality about it. Whenever you're playing, you know that shortly ahead you're about to die. So it was partly a reference to that atmosphere of when you play that game. It's got an embedded mortality. But also just that it's a funny foreshadowing joke with Jamie."

"The show is absolutely packed with things like that," Garland continued. "Personally I think the way to look at a lot them is in a gently humorous way. There's a soft sense of humor that runs through the whole thing, and that [video game] is an example. It's the kind of thing that you know as you put it in that for 99 viewers out of 100, it will just be a thing that has happened and passes by, but you put them in there for the people who will notice."

The 'deus' reveal is a meta tie-in with Garland's other sci-fi story about a tech company founder gone amok

Speaking of the gentle humor in "Devs," the entire show's name was a joke-in-waiting. Garland's 2014 movie "Ex Machina" was named after the phrase "deus ex machina," which is literally translated to mean "a god from a machine." In "Ex Machina," a powerful tech company founder perfects an artificial intelligence design.

From the start, Garland's FX series "Devs" was linked to "Ex Machina" in its title. In the final episode, Forest reveals to Lily that the "v" is really a Roman character, meaning it's pronounced "u."

The section of his company is Deus (God), not Devs. Which means it completes the phrase "deus ex machina" in Garland's body of work.

"The whole thing is one huge private joke," Garland said through laughter. "That is exactly what it is. Well, semi-private joke now. Because now people will go, 'Oh right, dues ex machina' and then hopefully chuckle to themselves."

Stewart recited 'Aubade' by Philip Larkin in the seventh episode, and the script purposefully had him skip a key word

In the seventh episode, just as Lyndon is falling to his death over and over across the Many Worlds, we hear Stewart reciting a poem.

Eventually, we see that Stewart is standing in the entryway to Devs as he speaks, and Forest walks up to him to hear the last stanza. Stewart tries to get Forest to guess who wrote those words, but Forest doesn't even try. Later Katie tells Forest it was "Shakespeare or something," but it wasn't.

The poem was "Aubade" by Philip Larkin.

"It's an incredibly useful and unbelievably meaningful poem," Garland said. "And I approach poetry a bit like the way I approach music, which is what we used to put a label needle drops in movies and TV shows and I just thought you can approach poetry exactly the same way."

A key detail in the use of "Aubade" is how Stewart recites the poem imperfectly. He skips a few lines early on, and then at the end of the section he's speaking out loud, he changes a word.

Here's the section of the poem as Larkin wrote it:

But, for that final line, Stewart (played by Stephen McKinley Henderson) takes out the word "may."

"I just preferred it being completely definite," Garland said. "Stephen and I discussed it a lot, and the point we go to on it, or at least the argument I was making, was that when we remember songs and poems we sometimes adapt the lyrics or the words. And in my mind, that's how I remembered the line of that poem."

Since Stewart is speaking the poem from memory in the show, Garland took creative license to match it to his own memory.

"I was surprised after I'd written it out and was checking it against the text, that I'd got it wrong," Garland said. "And then I thought, 'No, that's legitimate, because Stewart can get it wrong too, because that means that's the one that feels right to him.' And it's something we always do, and it's because of the intrusion of our imagination."

Stewart killed Lily and Forest in both versions of their deaths, even though it looks like it's Lily's fault the first time

For this one, you might want to read our full breakdown of Stewart's role in the finale and how Garland helps explain it.

But the short of it is simply this: While you might have thought Lily was the one who causes the capsule to crash to the ground in the Devs projection of her and Forest's death, it was actually Stewart. In both scenarios, Stewart was the one who disabled the capsule's magnetic support.

"It was something in the edit room we discussed a lot — how clear should we make this," Garland said. "Because things like that are a delicate balance. It's actually quite an important story point, and we debated about [whether] this be obvious immediately or if we should hold it back."

As for why Stewart would take such drastic action, Garland says it comes back to the way he's "deeply scared" by the Devs system.

"He's got a role to play, which is that people in technology obsessively interested in looking forwards a lot of the time," Garland said. "And what Stewart does is look back. It says something about the value of looking back and the danger of not being open to lessons from history."

For more on Stewart's role, and how "Devs" is "essentially a love story," read our full finale analysis here.

Why religious themes, mainly Judeo-Christian, are peppered into 'Devs' from the very opening scene

"I was brought up where on one side of the family there were scientists and on the other side there were Communists and there wasn't a lot of room for religion between them," Garland said. "I was out of school before I'd ever read, for example, anything that Christ is alleged to have said in the new Testament. I'm not religious at all, but I do find the thinking behind it and the language very interesting. I also find it very problematic, but it's always interesting."

While the presence of religious themes in "Devs" is clear, Garland has a specific reason for making it such a prominent part of the show. The method of weaving in multiple themes is something he carried over from "Ex Machina."

"It's a bit like 'Ex Machina,' where on one level you've got a story which is about artificial intelligence and sentience whether it's in a human or a machine," Garland said. "But there's another story which was running in parallel, which is about gender and objectification. And they sit concurrent with each other."

"In 'Devs' really what it's doing is layering various kinds of landscapes of problematic belief systems," Garland said. "There are three definite strands of science, philosophy, and theology. Actually the very, very first moments of episode one are supposed to be setting the landscape of the show. We use this old choral devotional music as the first thing you hear. And then there are many, many religious references and illusions. Not exclusively Judeo-Christian, but mainly those."

When the Devs system first starts working, Stewart and Lyndon use it to see Christ on the cross. Later, we hear Jesus speaking in Aramaic. And of course, in the end, Lily is compared to the Biblical story of Eve.

"It's really leading up to the dovetailing of the scientific-philosophical issue and the theological issues about the nature of free will," Garland said. "Which is basically that humankind has been punished, in some senses since Eve, for the way they manifest their free will. If you have something alongside the free will which is all-knowing, it creates a problem. In 'Devs', it's a machine, a computer, which is also Dues. And in Christianity that's God."

"There's a problem which is that the two things are mutually exclusive," Garland continued. "Either you know everything or you don't. If you know everything, then there's no free will, because you would accurately predict what someone would do. And if they do have free will, then you don't know everything."

The scene where Forest and Katie discuss determinism can be seen as an expression of faith between 'priests'

"Everything we do is predicated on the idea that we live in a physical universe, not a magical universe," Forest says to Katie in the fourth episode.

"Are you doubting that?" Katie asks.

"Not the physical universe. But I am scared we might be magicians. What if we project one minute into the future, right now. What if one minute into the future we see you fold your arms. And you say, 'F--- the future. I'm a magician, my magic breaks tramlines. I'm not going to fold my arms. You put your hands in your pockets and keep them there until the clock runs out."

"Cause precedes effect. Effect leads to cause," Katie tells Forest. "The future is fixed in exactly the same way as the past. The tramlines are real. In 48 hours Lily will die. There's no magic. Effectively, it's already happened."

The question Forest poses to Katie, about what would happen if someone watched their own future and decided to contradict it, is the exact struggle many people have when it comes to trying to think about determinism and the presence of an all-knowing entity like Devs.

Garland walked us through not only why Katie and Forest's conversation in that episode is so key, but why the potential paradox of the Devs system can be hard to square.

"With Katie and Forest what you have is two priests," Garland said. "That's the way I used to see them and that's the way I would describe to Alison [Pill] and Nick [Offerman]. Forest is like a priest with doubts, and Katie is a priest with no doubts at all. And the priest with doubts is often kept on the straight line by the priest without doubts."

"There's a certain point in the series where Forest asks exactly the question that Lily follows through on," Garland continued. "He says, 'But why don't we fight against it? Why don't we do the opposite of what we're predicted to do?' And Katie shuts him down. For me, that's part of the theological side of the debate. Because what often happens is people ask exactly the right question, but then they're prevented from being able to get to the answers and are denied the debates that they might be able to have. I wanted to demonstrate that."

In other words, Katie and Forest were so determined to believe in their "tramlines" that they never allowed for experimentation once they watched the projection of the future.

"In a sense, what's happening is Forest and Katie were operating with faith," Garland said. "And what Lily does is approach it without faith. She approaches it as an agnostic or an atheist and just simply ignores the prediction."

"Now there's a secondary thing that could blow from that, which is as soon as you have seen the prediction, and then decided to do something else, it is possible that then you would immediately fold back into a deterministic state," Garland. "So you would need to be continually being shown the thing that you were about to do in order to avoid doing it. That's where determinism and the ability to make a future projection starts to get into the funny paradoxes that time travel stories get into almost immediately."

The decision Lily makes to throw away the gun is significant not necessarily because she's the first person to ever make a true choice, but because she wasn't blinded by the same religious devotion to the Devs projections as Forest and Katie.

Later, in the Devs simulation, Forest tells Lily that the way she follows her own path is specifically what is special about her. She was able to do what he couldn't, even in the face of Devs, or "God," itself.

"Devs" is streaming now on FX on Hulu.