- Warning: Spoilers ahead for the series finale of "
Devs ." - In the finale of
FX 's sci-fi series "Devs," we see a similar scene between Lily, Forest, and Stewart play out twice: First in a projection created by the quantum computer, and then for real. - The first version makes it seems as though Lily is to blame for her and Forest's fate. But if you look closely, Stewart intervenes in the exact same way in both scenarios.
- "Devs" creator
Alex Garland confirmed this reveal in an interview with Insider. - "It's Stewart that kills them both times," Garland said. "It looks like Lily the first time but it's not."
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Alex Garland, writer and director of the new FX on Hulu series "Devs," knows his complex narratives appeal to the type of
This is precisely why many people might not have noticed a key detail in the series' finale, when we see Forest and Lily fall to their deaths not once, but twice (thanks to the future projection we see in the Devs system).
"It's Stewart that kills them both times," Garland told Insider over the phone in a recent interview. "It looks like Lily the first time but it's not."
The scene was carefully staged to not give away Stewart's role in Lily and Forest's death the first go-around. Garland explained Stewart's key role in the series, and much more about the underlying theme of love and connection at the heart of "Devs."
The subtle editing of both death scenes reveals Stewart's key role in the finale's events
In the series finale of "Devs," Lily (played by Sonoya Mizuno) finally enters the mysterious quantum computing building on the Amaya campus. She's greeted by Stewart (Stephen McKinley Henderson) on her way inside, where he warns her ominously that this place will not be good for her.
Lily then confronts Forest (Nick Offerman) inside the viewing room of Devs, where their prediction algorithm had been perfected. The Devs system could now accurately visualize events from the past and the future. Lily asks Forest to show her what she's going to do next.
So Lily and Forest watch as a version of the future plays out on the screen, which is when the audience finally understands what Forest and his Devs cocreator/partner, Katie (Alison Pill), believe Lily will do inside Devs.
In the projection, Lily makes Forest enter the eerie "floating" capsule while holding him at gunpoint. They travel horizontally across the vacuum-sealed barrier between the Devs entrance and the main labs.
She shoots Forest through the eye while the capsule is still in motion, and the glass cracks where the bullet strikes it behind Forest's head. Soon the entire capsule starts to tilt.
Eventually it crashes to the ground, and Lily and Forest are both left dead.
What you likely didn't notice was how, in the wide shot of Lily and Forest watching themselves on the screen, Stewart can be seen moving toward the capsule control panel before Lily fires the gun:
The rest of the projection-version of their death scene doesn't show Stewart's actions. It's only when the alarm goes off, and Lily looks frantically out at Stewart, that you see him clearly right next to the control panel.
Lily firing the gun didn't cause the capsule to fall. Stewart did.
A few minutes later, after we see the projected version of events, we watch what really happens unfold. The scene happens in precisely the same way right up to the point when Lily and Forest enter the capsule.
Then, at the last second, Lily chooses to throw the gun back into the labs and lets the capsule doors close, preventing her from being able to shoot and kill Forest. The two of them are left in the slow-moving capsule, with Forest reeling in shock after Lily has shattered his belief in determinism.
But then this time we clearly watch as Stewart moves toward the operating screen for the capsule's system.
He punches in an emergency code, disabling the electromagnetic field keeping it afloat. The capsule crashes to the ground again, leaving Forest and Lily both dead.
"It was something in the edit [room] we discussed a lot — how clear should we make this," Garland told Insider. "Because things like that are a delicate balance. I tend to pitch these things towards a particular kind of viewer, I suppose. Partly one who is patient, and just sort of drifting through imagery and ideas and music and stuff like that. But also one who will maybe watch it again and discover things the second time around."
"It's actually quite an important story point, and we debated about [whether] this be obvious immediately or if we should hold it back," Garland said.
Stewart has a very specific role to play in 'Devs' when it comes to uncovering the dangers of what Forest was doing
In the show, Stewart offers up his own explanation for his actions when Katie, watching in disbelief from the other side of the Devs chamber, tearfully asks him why he disabled the magnetic field.
"Because I've realized what we have done," Stewart says. "Someone has to stop this. Don't blame me, Katie. It was predetermined."
Earlier in the season, Stewart and his friend Lyndon (Cailee Spaeny) discussed Forest and Devs. Lyndon is the one who calls Forest "crazy," pointing out that he's nothing more than an entrepreneur who is trying to resurrect his daughter.
Despite his presence in nearly every episode, Stewart's pivotal role in the finale isn't expected. Which is precisely why it works so well as an underlying revelation when you rewatch the series.
"I remember when I was talking to some of those actors like Alison [Pill] and Caliee [Spaeny] and Stephen [McKinley Henderson], and I used to say to them, 'Look, read all the episodes,'" Garland said. "With some characters ... it's like I'm playing a game with Katie where people make assumptions about Forest that he's a tech genius, and it's not very late in the day that Lyndon corrects it and says he's not a genius, he's an entrepreneur. And really it's Katie and Lyndon and Stewart that are the geniuses."
"That's some of the patience involved," Garland said. "Just allowing characters not to always arrive with a fanfare but to gently feel it out and then take their rightful important place in the narrative."
With Stewart, he was always particularly focused on using Devs to look back at historical events, and had a literally poetic sensibility about the world. In the final two episodes, he recites lines from "Aubade" by Philip Larking and "The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats.
"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."
Not only does Forest's lack of interest in the past (or poetry) bother Stewart tremendously, but he believes the power of the Devs system is something to be feared.
"He understands the problem with it," Garland said. "Forest is blind to being scared by it. But Stewart is deeply scared by it."
Garland says 'Devs' is 'essentially a love story,' even for Stewart and Lyndon
Though Forest and Lily both die, Katie makes sure they live on inside the Devs system itself. Inside the simulation, they are conscious and aware of their lives and the events that led up to their deaths. They've effectively entered a pseudo "afterlife," a variation of their lives on Earth in which they can now be with their loved ones.
For Lily, this means leaving Sergei to be with Jamie. For Forest, it means having his daughter and wife back. And for Stewart?
Well, in the Devs simulation Lily wakes up in, she goes to the Amaya campus just as she once did in the real world. But this time she walks past Stewart and Lyndon sitting outside and talking closely with one another.
"They're still buddies [in the simulation]," Garland said. "Because at the end of it, 'Devs' is essentially a love story. Let's say we are in a deterministic state — it doesn't actually stop us from feeling things, you know? We care about things whether we're predetermined to care or not. The care is the main constant between the two. And I'd say ['Devs'] is about Jamie's love for Lily and Lily's love for Jamie and Forest's love for his daughter and Lyndon's love for Stewart and Stewart's love for Lyndon. That's what it all falls into."
Lyndon, who died after falling from the ledge of a dam (in an effort to prove his faith in the Many Worlds theory he used to make the Devs system work) is alive in the simulated world Lily finds herself in. He's there, with Stewart, just enjoying being a teenage genius.
For Garland, this notion that love is just beneath the surface of the greater 'Devs' narrative also gives Katie and Forest a bit of moral absolution
"All the way along they're not actually building a prediction machine," Garland said. "They're building a resurrection machine. Forest says to Jamie at a certain point, 'It's all gonna work out OK,' because he knows the machine is going to work to a sufficient degree, and then Jamie will be resurrectable."
This is also in part why Forest finally reveals that the project known as Devs is actually using a Roman "v" — which means it's really the letter "u."
Deus, not Devs. In other words, God.
"In some respects, in the Deus system, what they have there is an afterlife," Garland said. "Which makes the morality surrounding mortality much vaguer, and it makes Forest and Katie much less cruel and self-centered than they appear to be."
By the end of the series, Lily, Jamie, Forest, Lydon, Sergei, and the others are still dead; casualties piled up in the wake of the Devs system. But that same system grants that there is something on the other side of death. It provides a relief from the dreadful fate so beautifully described in the poem, "Aubade" by Philip Larkin, which Stewart recites to Forest in the seventh episode:
That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anesthetic from which none come round.
Stewart couldn't change Forest's mind about the dangers of the Devs system. But he at least ensured Forest wouldn't be the one left in control of it.
All eight episodes of Alex Garland's "Devs" are streaming now on Hulu.
Read the original article on Insider