Devs (1.8) Episode Recap: Deus

Story telling is a precarious art. It is something that I focused on weeks ago in one of the other episode recaps, specifically the episode that centered around the guiding force of the Everett interpretation. It is also something I found myself thinking about as Devs comes to an end. The idea of foretelling how a story ends and still progressing through that ending is hardly a novel concept, but the way Alex Garland pulls this off in the finale made it one of the best episodes of television in recent memory.

We have known about Lily’s death for a few episodes now. We even knew where she was going to die. What we didn’t know was how. The final episode gets this out of the way soon after its start. This is because Lily asks to watch it before it happens. Which means we (and she!) have to watch her die before she actually dies. This is a difficult moment to pull off. And it worked precisely because Garland – and subsequently Lily – pulled out one last card from their sleeve. Lily makes a choice. She changes the projection. As Katie eventually notes, Lily commits the original sin: disobedience. Perhaps the most interesting part is not just Lily’s choice, but that her choice still doesn’t change the outcome. Stewart decides to take matters into his own hands and causes both Forest and Lily to die. These moments alone create a terrific finale. One in which Lily plays the last card she has, the most important one, and completely disrupts the fabric of the universe as Forest and Katie understand it. As she throws the gun outside of the chamber as the doors are closing, the camera cuts between her, Katie, Forest’s faces in a beautifully cathartic moment. She did it. She made a choice. Her life was not always guided by a path she couldn’t see, and for the first time in eight episodes, a character made an independent choice.

Normally, all of that might be enough. In fact, I thought it might be the end there as Forest and Lily plunged to their death, but it was not. Their stories weren’t over. As it turned out, they were both then made part of the machine at Devs. Or what we now know was actually named Deus. Lily is suddenly back with Sergei and the timeline is before all of the events happened at Amaya. It’s a new beginning. It is a new beginning with all the knowledge of her previous ending. It doesn’t take her too long to realize this and as she goes to see Forest, she finds him out in the field near Deus playing with Amaya. It is only as Forest explains himself that it all starts to make sense. Forest had Katie take their memories up to the point of their death and implant them into this simulation whose timeline exists before everything happened. In this world, Amaya, her mother, and Forest are once again reunited. So are Sergei and Lily. Near end of their conversation, Lily says “I don’t know what to do” and Forest replies, “You do what you always do. You follow your own path.” It is a moment that frees itself of the established rules of the universe. It breaks the chains of determinism. It doesn’t foretell what will happen next. The moment belongs to Lily. So, she seeks the one true constant she has ever known: Jamie. In a moment of joy, bliss, and relief, they just embrace after she calls him from afar. It is this imagery we are left with.

I often think about payoffs in storytelling. Something happens to establish the groundwork for a climactic action to happen later. It is a sort of weird, mechanical way of looking at storytelling as formulaic instead of trying to get at what makes stories special. It also feels like an apt way to approach this show considering Forest and Katie’s entire belief system and the governing laws of the universe. But as those laws blow up in this episode, so will mine. The heart in this story is Lily. It is her journey that guides and ultimately upends each part of the story. Through death, grief, and explanations of the multi-verse, the audience has one constant: Lily. As her journey ends, we are not left with some parted wisdom but the imagery of a life truly lived.