Devs debuted its eighth and final episode this week, bringing the first television miniseries from visionary writer-director Alex Garland to a close. The sci-fi tale undoubtedly played with fans’ emotions – and expectations – throughout its entire run, and the series finale was certainly no exception. It’s safe to assume that viewers will interpret Devs‘ moments in a wide array of ways, which is something that Garland has been expecting all along. Obviously, spoilers for all eight episodes of Devs below! Only look if you want to know!
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The final episode highlights the conflict between Lily (Sonoya Mizuno), Forest (Nick Offerman), and Katie (Alison Pill), just as the Devs system’s predictions of the future seem to be headed towards a proverbial doomsday. Thanks to the Devs system, Lily has been told that she is destined to march into the Devs facility and kill Forest, seemingly confirming that she doesn’t actually have free will. After heading into the facility, Lily and Forest get into a fight in Devs’ magnetic lift system, and Lily seemingly changed her fate by throwing aside her gun. Unfortunately, she and Forest ultimately head towards their destinies anyway, as Stewart (Stephen McKinley Henderson) destroys the lift’s technology and kills them both.
If that wasn’t shocking enough, Lily then wakes up in an entirely new, albeit familiar, reality. In this new world, the events of the series – namely, the death of Forest’s daughter Amaya, which causes him to create the Devs program to begin with, and the apparent suicide of Lily’s boyfriend, Sergei (Karl Glusman) – haven’t actually happened. As Lily gets her bearings in this new reality, Forest is happily reunited with his wife and daughter, and he tells Lily that this is an opportunity for themselves to start over and be happy. Lily proceeds to do just that, reconnecting with her ex-boyfriend Jamie (Jin Ha), who died in the real world helping her investigate Devs. The series ends with the two of them hugging — along with a title card revealing that the program isn’t actually called “Devs”, but “Deus”, meaning God.
ComicBook.com got a chance to chat with Garland about Devs during Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo earlier this year, where we asked him about the series’ ending. As Garland put it, he’s used to having endings that are both finite and open for interpretation,
“It’s part of the territory. I learned years ago — my writing life began when I wrote this novel, The Beach. The Beach is about backpackers in Thailand. It was intended as a criticism, in some respects, of backpacker culture. When it was published and it came out, I learned that lots of people saw it as a celebration more than a criticism,” Garland explained. “And I realized that I’ve got very little control, in some respects, of the way in which things are interpreted. And actually, retrospectively, it’s kind of obvious. Because I’m sure you’ve got a book or film that you really love, and someone else might love it or dislike it, but you can also disagree fundamentally about what the thing’s about or why it’s there. So I just try to embrace that.”
“And in fact, when I said that thing about the viewer stepping forwards to [a story]… that’s part of my way of conceptualizing stories, which is that about half of the story is provided by the person receiving the story,” Garland continued. “That life experience you were talking about, and their own feelings about the world. And so I tried to almost accommodate it. Now, some people don’t want that, and that means that they find the stories I write kind of cold or impenetrable or empty. My personal feeling is that that emptiness comes because, in a way, they haven’t provided the half that is needed. I’m only doing half the job. But of course, that varies story to story. Some people want everything. They want all the answers, and they want it clearer and faster, and other people don’t. I guess I work for the people who don’t want that.”
All of Devs is available to stream exclusively on FX on Hulu.
