The Quarantine Diary 5
Day 5 – A review of “Devs” from FX on Hulu
This isn’t so much an entry on the quarantine itself as it is about something I did during the quarantine.
A few weeks ago, our family started watching the “FX on Hulu” miniseries “Devs”. Brilliant, difficult, engrossing, intelligent –– so many other positive adjectives could be placed here. Exploring the nature of reality, of free will, of choice, of life, the show sticks with you long after the credits roll.
Tonight was the last episode. And this is where you stop reading, if you don’t want spoilers.
For much of the show, we’ve known we were building to an important final moment. Exactly how that would play out –– and what it would reveal about series creator and director Alex Garland’s beliefs –– is one of the many reasons we kept watching.
So the moment arrives when Lily (Sonoya Mizuno) sits down at Devs headquarters to confront Forest (Nick Offerman) on just WTF is going on. She seems to have no free will, and doesn’t understand how that can be. Forest, on the other hand, happily accepts this reality, as it means there may be a way for him to be reunited with his dead wife and daughter.
It’s during the course of this conversation that Forest reveals a secret he says he’s been wanting to tell someone for a long time: the “v” in “Devs” is Roman, meaning it’s really a “u”.
Deus.
As in ex machina (which just happens to be the name of another Garland creation). It’s also a plot device which comes into play in this last episode, a self-aware inside joke about how when all is lost, there’s a force that saves our protagonists.
Now for most viewers, this sends our brains reeling, because we immediately try to determine what is intended by this. Does it mean that Forest has met the mind of God? He has created the mind of God? He is the mind of God? All of the companion questions follow quickly on the heels of those: so is the Devs/Deus system a sim? Does that make our reality a sim? Would we know the difference? Does it even matter?
All fantastic questions worthy of extended discussion. But my mind also went in a different direction. If the “v” is Roman, could some other things be as well? Specifically, the name “Lily”?
I’m not normally one to stretch into long, unfounded alternate theories about movies or TV shows, but this one just hits too close to the mark for me on several fronts, meaning I don’t think it’s unfounded.
The first letters in Lily’s name, L-I-L, as Roman numerals, would be read as fifty-one-fifty. Or 5150. If you’re not yet following me, 5150 is the well-known California legal code for the (temporary) involuntary psychiatric commitment of individuals who are considered to be a danger to themselves or others due to signs of mental illness. The show plays loose with Lily’s psychiatric history in the early episodes, and as a result of her actions out on a ledge at Amaya, she is involuntarily committed in episode four. California is the obvious setting for this story, so that law would have been the one used to commit her.
I could let this slide as a coincidence if it weren’t for that reference to Roman letters that Forest makes shortly before he’s reunited with his family. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a very careful writer would just let happen accidentally.
Furthermore, there’s the final conversation between Forest and Lily in the field (where the Devs building was in the “real” world). During that exchange, Forest tells Lily that he and she are the only ones who know the truth. Such thinking is a classic symptom of paranoid schizophrenia.
Lily might have had problems with “reality” from the beginning –– or at least from the moment Sergei died. A very complicated and confused brain could have constructed everything in the show –– would be assassins, Russian spies, top secret projects –– to explain away a reality she just didn’t want to live in.
But if I really wanted to take this concept further, I could argue that Forest himself is the one who had a psychotic break the moment his wife and daughter died in that car crash. Devs/Deus was all in his head, as was Lily, who was merely a manifestation of his schizophrenia. She embodied the necessarily disobedient part of his personality that allowed him to succumb willingly to living in a self-contained world only he could enjoy. It’s a very good explanation for why he was so intent on protecting a person whom he knew was going to kill him.
A hallmark of great writing, as Stephen King once said, is that it starts in the author’s imagination, and finishes in the reader’s.
Or in this case, Forest’s.