This is a review for the first two episodes of limited series Devs, which premieres Thursday, March 5 on Hulu – as part of “FX on Hulu.”
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FX on Hulu kicks off this week with a new streaming oasis which will see Hulu become home to all of FX’s past and present programming (Terriers, finally!) as well as some new original FX content that will only exist on the streamer and not its cable counterpart.
The first streaming-only release on the FX roster is Alex Garland’s Devs, a modest, but masterful, murder mystery set in the Bay Area’s top-secret tech world. It’s a haunting and dark tale that’s nicely juxtaposed by blue skies and lush greenery; a modern-day tech-noir, centered around a project that’s presumably world-changing. (And judging by the slow-building tension of the series, which dabbles frequently in ominous tidings, it wouldn’t be a change for the better.)
This is the first foray into TV for Garland, who’s been providing us with pristine and heady sci-fi, like Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, and his own directorial efforts, Ex Machina and Annihilation. Here, we see the director flexing new storytelling muscles he’s never quite used before. It’s handy for genre fans that, at the same time HBO’s The Outsider is wrapping up, Devs uploads, with both shows delivering supremely “atmospheric” and methodical murder cases nestled among larger, fantastical genres. For The Outsider, obviously, it’s horror and folklore. For Devs, it’s that “five minutes from now” science fiction that fuels A.I. stories like CBS’ Person of Interest (or even Garland’s own Ex Machina). The setting is steeped in those “dangerous in the wrong hands” breakthroughs humanity might be capable of achieving in a few years, if they don’t already exist in secret.
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Though Devs’ story is built upon a murder, it’s not a “whodunnit?” The show, for the most part, lays its cards on the table. We know what happened. We know why. We just don’t know what the larger secret is: What did the murder victim discover? Devs starts off making you think that genius coder Sergei (Karl Glusman) is its POV character, when in fact the driver of the story is Sonoya Mizuno’s Lily, Sergei’s engineer girlfriend. Both work for tech giant Amaya, run by Nick Offerman’s frumpy gazillionaire Forest, but everything changes for them after Sergei gets a new position in Devs – an isolated project team working on clandestine creations.
The overwhelming existential dread sets in on Sergei almost immediately as he starts having a meltdown while sifting through the Dev team’s code. It’s almost Lovecraftian, in a way, as Sergei goes mad after being exposed to such powerful and forbidden knowledge. What in the hell could they be trying to unleash upon the world? “If this is true, it changes everything,” Sergei relates to Alison Pill’s fellow Dev, Katie. To which she responds, “No, if it’s true, it changes nothing.”
That’s quite a monumental vagueness to (hopefully) pay off, for sure, but Devs is so moody, and solemnly confident, that us not knowing, and perhaps never knowing, is almost a better position. Also, the quieter the show remains, and the more it sticks to its overall moodiness — with compellingly haunting music — the more we’ll all just enjoy being within the world of the show itself more than being invested in whatever revelations remain.
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After horrible things befall Sergei, Lily is left to pick up the pieces. With a cover-up in place, Lily will have to decide whether or not to try and uncover what went wrong inside Devs – though by the end of the second episode, it certainly feels like she’s been talked out of moving forward. I don’t know where that leaves the show, since you kind of want a hook, or a stinger, to close things out so we’ll know whether or not she’s going to seek out the truth. (Since there are still six episodes left in the season, it’s a fair assumption that she will.)
That being said, Devs is still pulsing with danger. As other limited series, such as USA’s Briarpatch and AMC’s Dispatches from Elsewhere, attempt to achieve something tonally different and captivating on TV, Devs is the most successful in capturing that patience-required, off-kilter Mr. Robot tone that holds within it both beauty and brutality.
This next part is for those who’ve already seen both debut episodes, so spoiler warning: Digging into some of the things shown in episode 2 regarding the Devs project…it sure seems like the machine is meant to be a God’s Eye device. And not in the Fast and Furious God’s Eye sense, in that it can see “wherever,” but in the sense that it can see “whenever.”
Sergei had previously been working on something tethered to the prediction of living things. The scene the Devs team witnessed was, we assume, the actual crucifixion of Christ two thousand years ago. It’s not time travel, but it is time witnessing. And if it can go backward than one can assume it’s also meant to go ahead, into the future.
Also, it’s all right there for us, built into Forest’s own story. There’s no way a tech maestro, who’s named his company after his own dead daughter, who he still grieves for, isn’t out to upend all reality in order to just see her, or be with her, again. It’s a tale as old as Frankenstein.
