This 8-Part Sci-Fi Masterpiece Has 1 Shot You Can’t Look Away From

Science fiction often tackles themes of free will and evolution by exploring those concepts through the lens of artificial intelligence, resulting in many a compelling story. Whether it’s the heart-pounding thrills of The Terminator or the truly outlandish exploits of the M3Gan franchise, we can’t get enough of machines that feel like they’re human or stories where technology ends up pushing humanity into a new frontier. Alex Garland dug deep into this concept with his sci-fi miniseries Devs, which is currently available to stream on Hulu and features a singular shot that wound up defining the entire story.

Devs takes place in the near-future, where Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno) works as a software engineer for the tech giant Amaya. Her boyfriend Sergei (Karl Glusman) is invited to the mysterious “Devs” program by Amaya’s CEO, Forest (Nick Offerman), but things quickly go south when Sergei is murdered on Forest’s orders. Lily starts investigating Sergei’s death and slowly starts to unravel the mystery surrounding Devs, which thrusts her into a world of mindbending science and corporate sabotage. It leads to the aforementioned shot, which takes place in the series’ fifth episode.

In A Single Shot, ‘Devs’ Explores The Concept of Free Will

Image via Hulu

While Devs carries the careful pacing of Alex Garland’s film work, it ends up revealing just exactly what Amaya is working on, and why Sergei lost his life, in its second episode. The Devs team are working on a machine that can project any point in the past, more or less throwing the entire concept of free will into question. “Episode 5” takes it a step further by having Katie (Alison Pill) utilize the Devs projector to view events in her life, along with the moments that shaped Lily and Forest. There’s one moment in the episode where Lily enters the Dev projector, and for a moment, literally everything lines up. The camera says perfectly still on her face, while the gold-hued circuitry that powers the Dev system forms a strange alignment. Even the music has stopped, practically demanding the audience’s attention.

What makes this shot stand out isn’t just the stunning imagery being put on display. Rather, it’s a statement about the nature of free will and how it’s being challenged by this very machine. That Lily, who up until this point has served as a disruptive force in Forest and Katie’s true plans, is utilizing a machine that apparently shows the direction of the universe is fixed is the very definition of a paradox. Yet in choosing to frame the shot this way, Garland hints that time may not be as fixed as the Devs team believes, and sets the stage for the back half of the series to fully explore that idea.

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‘Devs’ Showcases Alex Garland’s Gift For Tackling Existential Horror

If the shot in “Episode 5” feels unsettling, it probably was meant to be. Alex Garland has a history of using the science fiction genre to explore existential questions, and deliver plenty of existential horror along with straight-up horror. Ex Machina took the “machine becomes human” trope to terrifying new levels. Annihiliation contains scenes of pure nightmare fuel while exploring the different paths that life could take as it evolves. With Devs, the question whether or not you have free will, or whether you’re just simply acting out a script that the universe has already prepared is the kind of stuff that could keep somebody up at night. It turns out that Garland did spend some time thinking about the concept, as he discussed how Devs came into being at New York Comic Con in 2019:

“I read more about science than anything else, and it started with two things. One was getting my head around this principle of determinism, which basically says that everything that happens in the world is based on cause and effect…That has all sorts of implications for us. One is that it takes away free will, but the other is that if you are at a computer powerful enough, you could use determinism to predict the future and understand the past. If you unravel everything about you, about the specifics of why you prefer a cup of coffee to tea…then five seconds before you said you’d like to have a cup of coffee, one would be able to predict you’d ask for it.”

By using a single shot to set up the themes of free will vs determinism, Alex Garland proved that he could bring the same heavy themes from film to television with Devs. It also continues his gift for bringing strange, often disturbing, and often compelling imagery to life.

Release Date

2020 – 2020-00-00

Showrunner

Alex Garland