 What's up guys and welcome to one take tonight. We're talking about devs episode five This video is going to be full of spoilers But no spoilers from future episodes and that includes what's shown on the next time on preview I'm Gil talking to my tech guy slash brother alone. Yo, and without further ado Let's jump into episode five of devs This episode had an interesting framing device where Katie was watching the chrono visor That's what I call the device they use to look into the past the present and sometimes the future So virtually everything we saw in this episode Was stuff that Katie was watching on that device to me That sort of resulted in a little bit of an uneven episode Because we weren't watching a straightforward narrative where we see events unfold in Sequence for watching a series of disconnected clips some of which I loved some I liked and some I didn't But we'll get into all of that It was also kind of unclear to me why Katie would be watching all this stuff especially Lily as a child talking to her father. I think some of it might have been exploring the idea Similar to an NSA agent scrolling through your private conversations that invasion of privacy Except this is sort of ten times that because you have Katie invading Lily and others privacy in the worst way possible She's watching a moment between a child and her father's dying words So I think that was some of it But also it felt a little bit like a cheap way to have an in-story explanation For flashbacks where it's revealing something about the characters. We know Jamie Lily We see a little bit about their past But there was a question looming over the episode for me as to why would Katie be interested in seeing all this Especially considering up to this point. She seemed to be a pretty closed off Unemotional character. Oh, and did you have a similar reaction or did you find it? Did it fit for you that Katie would be watching all this? I don't feel like they've developed Katie very well thus far I don't know what to think of her and even in the show when we see that flashback of her in school She just came across as kind of a jerk there, right? So and she's aware of the bad deeds that forest has been up to and it's just really hard to know Whether I'm supposed to like her or not or even understand her right in the I guess the read that I have on her I say she's unemotional You would say we don't even really know if she's unemotional just because we haven't seen her emote very much But we also haven't seen her do anything very much So it could just be that she has a little bit more of a soft spot than we realized She was clearly emotionally impacted when she watched the scene of forest watching his family die So she's not a total robot. She definitely has some emotions But moving past that the other interesting thing every time they use this device You and I always look at each other and comment on the fact that the device seems to change angles And I mean I had the impression that what we were seeing on screen was literally what Katie was seeing So this device is selecting different angles And it's it's it's just interesting to me that the device would function that way Yeah, and you know in in some shows I would look at what we're saying as a nitpick But in a show like this I'm expecting I'm expecting them to actually think through every aspect of this technology I actually want an understanding of what like maybe The programmers coded in some facial recognition software to know which angle To to face, you know to see them talking, right? I don't know Well, you could I mean they are such smart programmers They've created the most powerful computer in the world You can throw an algorithm in there that basically detects What is the clearest way to communicate what is happening? So it selects to the right camera angle and at top of that it chooses the most visually appealing camera angles Yeah, I have an establishing shot of the city before It basically just writes out a whole script, right, but I I also think that A flat screen isn't really the best way to represent these moments in time It really should be like a Br helmet or something like that where you could just stand wherever you want in the room and stare, right? But anyways, maybe a little too deep into that. Yeah that now you're getting into nitpick territory We're putting the framing device itself aside. So this episode jumped around quite a bit We saw a lot of different things So we're going to recap it by trying to take all those different clips and sort of group them by character And group them by time period So let's start out with jamie and lily. We see lily right after last episode She's in a hospital and she appears to be pretty much drugged out of her mind. She's just lying there Then we see Her in her apartment. We see her with surge. We see her with jamie and initially I thought this was her remembering old times And I thought it was just an interesting effect They were using where they were overlaying different memories on top of each other because we see multiple lilies We see lily with surge and lily with jamie all in the same room But I think throughout the course of the episode we see this multiple times And realize that this is actually a quirk of the device Now that it's been set to use the many worlds interpretation of reality I think we're seeing multiple possible realities Overlap with each other. I think did you read it the same way? Yeah at first. I thought the same as you I thought they were just different memories, but it became clear especially during the scene with Forest and his family which I love this is one of my favorite aspects of the episode every time they went back I think they did it three times To this device of having multiple realities layered on top of each other creates a very cool visual effect Then we see what happened with kenton and jamie when kenton showed up to jamie's apartment Basically, he drowns jamie in his own bathtub Doesn't kill him but just scares him and then tells him a story about his old days in the cia He saw how china Crushed the beginnings of an uprising and now he no longer fears the cascade when things start to go wrong China showed him you can stop that from happening even as it begins to spread And in case we didn't understand that metaphor Kenton explains it to us. He's the tank jamie is the dissident And jamie appears to get the message Now I think they were going for an interesting effect here We started the scene with jamie already terrified and already basically complying with whatever kenton wanted We didn't see any struggle from jamie But that didn't work that well for me because it came off as sort of silly I didn't understand from that scene why jamie was so terrified and so willing to do whatever kenton said I assumed that right before the scene kenton beat him up or kenton did something to really scare him In fact in the background on the toilet you see blood over there But jamie has no marks on him. He looks unscathed So the only thing that can sell to us that jamie is in this terrified state Is his acting in that moment and it just didn't work on me. It came off as silly I kept saying I I need to see jamie struggle Even for a second, but he just sits there and takes it Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. It looked like he was not fighting back at all and I mean Kenton he doesn't look like that strong a guy I mean he's definitely got a little bit of muscle there, but I mean jamie's this young guy Right, you should be able to put up some fight at least. I don't know He just he looks like he's just letting him like dunk his head under the water Now if I were to read the scene charitably One thing I could say in j in jamie's favor is maybe he's just done the mental calculation of It's not just kenton in that bathroom Kenton is a representative of a much larger force If amaya decides we're gonna go after jamie jamie's finished So he might just figure i'm gonna comply with whatever kenton wants. I'm not gonna fight back I'm just gonna cross my fingers that he doesn't kill me if it gets close to that point Maybe then I'll start struggling and then afterwards. I'll see what I can do If I were to read the scene charitably. Yeah, I don't know if I were in jamie's position I would assume there's a likely chance kenton's going to try to kill me And I would fight that especially after you saw that Jamie or that kenton killed surge. Yeah, I wouldn't be I don't think he should be thinking about the potential consequences at that point of fighting back Right. It's it's your life. You would think the fight or flight instinct would kick in and you would just fight back So that scene didn't work that great for me And I think overall the acting on the show is pretty solid But I will say there are some weak spots. I think this was one of them I think the show is at its strongest acting wise when they're trying to sell a big emotion Lily when she sees surge's body and she freaks out. I think in episode one That was a great moment even in this episode when forest sees his family get killed in front of him And he starts yelling no nick offerman killed it in that scene So I think the big emotions they do a really good job with the quieter moments here Later in the episode some of the moments between surge and lily. They don't work as well for me Anyway moving on from the nitpicking Later in the episode we see the aftermath of jamie's run in with kenten We think jamie got the message from kenten, but he didn't He calls his family comes up with a fake story about the nsa Basically tells his family to go away going to hiding Why is he doing this because he's not going to go quietly into the night? He is going to fight back. He sneaks into the hospital and breaks out lily And it seemed really easy to do that Especially considering the reason lily was brought to the hospital was reckless endangerment. She's a dangerous person And it seems like jamie was able to just open the window jump in grab her and jump out and it's funny because Sometimes it feels like this show really takes its time. I mean take this episode for instance Episode four the plot's moving forward here. They took a break to show us these flashbacks Which some degree they moved the plot forward But I think a lot of it especially the lily surge stuff was there for a character and emotional development So sometimes the show takes its time and sometimes it feels like we got to get lily out of the hospital Let's just come on. Let's just get to it jamie goes in he takes her out and it was it was fine So it's okay Move past that But I'll say uh I have one more negative thing to say then I have a lot I do have a lot of positive things to say about this episode But I've been finding myself this episode in the last episode Less and less invested in the lily character Last episode it happened because it felt like the power that she is up against amaya Is so much greater than what she is capable of right now That it's no longer an underdog story to me. It's uh, she doesn't stand a chance She's just a pawn in this game. She doesn't even know about all the stuff going on in devs She doesn't even know about any of that. So I started to feel a little bit of a disconnect to lily and then this episode She's not conscious for most of it. So I'm finding myself Losing emotional connection to the show. I'm still very curious and interested to see where it goes But I will say I'm hoping that next episode lily starts to get more agency And I can sort of get invested in her again. There is the forest character I love forest, but I it's hard for me to feel too bad for him when I remember He killed my guy surga in episode one So like I said, I'm hoping I get roped back in with the lily character next episode Moving on from that. So we see lily as a child Through katie's eyes on a chrono visor lily is playing a game with her father I believe the game is go. I thought othello Apparently those two games look very similar But go is a more popular and much more difficult game Her father's pretty impressed with her and I think this is just Establishing for us that as a child she was very intelligent In the same way and she has strategic thinking to be good at go It's a similar sort of skill it takes to be good at chess You need to be able to see a few moves ahead So maybe she is playing a long game here. Maybe going to the hospital was all part of a bigger plan Then we see her in the hospital with her father And we hear what I believe are her father's dying words or likely his last words to her An ancient greek saying no man ever steps in the same river twice Because it is not the same river and he is not the same man I think they wanted to put that quote in this episode Because it plants a seed in lily's mind to think about change That's what the quote is all about everything is constantly changing the river is changing You're changing and to put it into a quote and to make it her father's last words We take the concept of change and I think make it a very important one to lily Which I think is a viewpoint that is opposed to her enemies forest and katie They would see change as just part of a deterministic world So change is just the universe moving through a series of chain reactions That began with the big bang so I think that's why this is not only a character moment for lily But it's also putting that idea into the show and just adding to the philosophical conversation around everything we're seeing here We also see a couple of lovely moments where lily and surge first meet at the coffee shop We see surge say i love you for the first time alone, what did you think of surge's uh technique picking up lily at the coffee shop? Well, I guess I can't be too judgmental because it worked So maybe he knew his his audience there Right See you on tinder. No Me neither. I'll see you here I'll try it out in the real world. We'll see how it goes, but I will say I found this to be a pretty heartbreaking moment seeing surge again And seeing a couple of what were probably the best moments of his life Knowing where he ends up. It was it was pretty heartbreaking And then on top of that you remember that it's not just us as an audience seeing these moments But freaking katie is sitting there in her ivory golden box Watching this The same way jamie would scroll through his ex-girlfriend's facebook page total invasion of privacy But heartbreaking moments. I thought We also see katie meeting forest So katie is at a college lecture watching her professor discuss the dual slit experiment Which by the way, if you're not familiar with that experiment, I would recommend googling it on the show I think they called it dual slit. You're going to want to search double slit experiment It's super interesting when I first read about it It led me down a whole rabbit hole reading books about quantum physics Super interesting stuff But on the show they basically break down the experiment by saying it shows a particle in multiple places at once a super position And when we witness the particle when we try to observe it, it seems to change the behavior of that particle katie's professor posits that this could be That human consciousness is the modifier the fact that human consciousness is getting involved somehow affects the experiment katie flips out She thinks the experiment does not speak to the nature of the particle necessarily But more to the nature of the universe i.e. the many worlds theory the one that forest Hates so much the teacher dismisses it And katie storms out of the room calling all of her classmates a bunch of dweebs And then we again get that very cool effect where when katie walks out of the building we see many katies And one of them is approached by forest who says that he knows That she has a reputation for being one of the smartest students there But her family will not be able to afford her college fees anymore He wants to pay for them and he wants to hire her cut to a later conversation On those same steps where forest asks you understand what i'm asking she says yes Forest says is it madness? Is there a world in which it could work? So i assume That this is all after he explained to her what he wants to accomplish Which i think we know the basics of it he wants to build an insanely powerful computer That can prove the world is deterministic by making perfect projections of the past And of the future Now you and i this whole time have been assuming there's more to it than that They want to be able to project into the past into the future But does he want to do more does he want to bring his daughter back somehow? Where do you sit at the moment? Do you still think he's trying to accomplish more than that or could that be it? Is it just Trying to prove the world is deterministic Well, it does seem like he might be trying to bring his daughter back considering the experiment they were doing with that that rat I thought so too And then i did a little bit of thinking and i'm actually not sure that's the case because remember What we saw with the rat was a flashback. It was on the screen. Katie was watching linden was there And i have more to say about that but that's probably the most interesting part of the episode and you've got to save the best for last so I will just say at the moment. I have a feeling that really is the end of the experiment they're trying to prove that the world is a deterministic place And i'm not sure there's more to it than that we'll get more into that when we talk about the experiment First and we're almost there first. Let's talk about forest and his daughter We see a quiet moment between forest and amaya where they're reading together in bed And i think they showed this to us so we would just have a renewed appreciation For the love between forest and his daughter and how great things were So it underscores the awfulness of what we see next We see forest on his porch. He gets up He sees an suv containing his wife and daughter driving home While he's watching them in the suv. He's on the phone with his wife Just talking about what they're going to have for dinner that night until some idiot T bones them flips the car over Presumably kills both his wife and daughter and then an incredible moment For nick offerman. He walks towards them and just yells no Over and over completely breaks down as he's walking towards them. We see the multiple realities effect again We see that same car go by multiple times and we see different iterations of what could have happened in that moment In one case the suv hits the car in another they miss each other entirely In one of them as nick offerman forest walks further away in the foreground of the shot We see the suv arrive. No problem forest greets his wife and daughter and The scene was incredible for a few reasons one Visually just looked amazing every time they do a car go right by a person They did the same thing in the last episode where the car almost hits lily perfect Two it just shows such trust in the audience that will figure out what's happening here At first I thought another car just went by and it almost hit forest But I think alex garland respects our intelligence to to understand that we're seeing multiple realities Overlaid with each other number three nick offerman's acting here amazing and a number four How do you take a scene where a man's family dies in front of him such a tragic scene? How do you make it even more tragic? You take every other possible reality where they don't die and you put it in front of forest All at the same time. It was just amazing. Never seen a scene like it before Alon, did you like the scene? I thought it was awesome. Maybe my favorite scene of the episode Yeah, favorite scene of the episode And probably in the top two or three of the series so far Let's talk about kenton. He has a meeting with forest and katie And we see one of my favorite kenton qualities here his no bs attitude. He tells him straight up I'm not going to jail lily is a liability And if it comes down to it, I will act in a self-interested manner And I just want to look for an opportunity in my life to use that sentence I will act in a self-interested manner And katie says it's not in your power to kill her Kenton doesn't know what the hell she's talking about. He says okay. Let me worry about that So like I said, I love this moment from kenton It's also just funny to see somebody like kenton who's not involved in all this crazy quantum stuff Collide with katie's world where she's essentially telling him It's not in your power to kill her because the tram lines have already dictated that you're not the one to kill her And she thinks he can interpret all that by saying it's not in your power Well, doesn't he know what they're doing though? I got to think back to the previous episodes. I have a feeling he has Some general idea. I don't know if he knows all the details of it. Well, remember when they were talking him and forrest were talking at Forrest's house on his porch. It seemed like he had a good understanding of what was going on Maybe maybe he just has a top level Understanding right it could be that not a hundred percent sure But I'm very curious to see Lily's next move here. We know that she Assuming the tram lines stay accurate We know that lily's gonna end up in the golden box And supposedly die The fact that kenton sees her as a threat tells me that she is going to make some sort of a move likely with jamie's help you and I were Speculating that maybe linden will get involved which I would love But uh, love the no-nonsense kenton curious to see what happens next with lily And it was just nice to see kenton seeing her as a threat Because part of my disconnect the last couple of episodes Is that I've been seeing her as sort of a powerless character at least for a couple of episodes But kenton clearly doesn't think so he thinks she still got something left And I think so too excited to see what it is so Let's talk about the experiment. We saw a few glimpses of this in a previous episode It might have been last week's episode. I forget but in the opening We see katie's face Forest face a couple of the other characters all Reflecting a different color. We also see a dead rat lying on a golden surface So finally we see what it's all about We have that golden surface with an interesting pattern etched onto it We see a few objects a clock a rat sugar cube a skull and I'll just say my old before we go into all the details of what happens here My overall interpretation of what they were doing Is they were trying to create a perfect simulation of the objects on the table They were essentially a way to calibrate the machine. So for example, you take the sugar cube I want to create a perfect quantum computer simulation of that sugar cube And we will zoom in further than any known computer can zoom in to see how perfectly we've recreated it at a certain point They perfectly recreate that rat. So they've now calibrated the machine to our reality And then they say let's extrapolate. What does that mean? It means we've calibrated with the rat Well, we don't really care about the rat. We care about the whole world So when they start to extrapolate they see more and more of reality they see forests face So I don't think they were trying to bring the rat back to life I think they were trying to use this computer like we've seen to project into the past and project into the future But in order to do that you need to make sure that the computer is properly representing our reality How do you do that? You take an item we understand like a sugar cube And recreate it in the computer. See how well you've recreated it. Oh, we did it perfectly. Let's try it on the rat Oh, we got the rat perfectly. Okay. Now. Let's start to extrapolate That was how I read that scene later in the episode We see the rat continuing to lie dead on the table But we see it moving on the screen and that's because They've recreated the rat and now they're looking into the rat's past and they're seeing it alive While forest and katie are watching the rat on screen Forest asks katie. Do you think any of the other devs know what we're really doing here? katie says no and then she offers up what she thinks we're really doing here katie thinks that forest is essentially putting himself on trial He's trying to determine is the world a deterministic place If the world has free will then forest messed up He could have done things differently. He could have saved his daughter If the world is deterministic, he had no choice He is free of guilt. It wasn't his fault So I think katie is right. I think that this is really forest's ultimate goal It all comes down to him trying to prove Whether or not the world is a deterministic place And it's so important That we're looking at this reality and not some other reality because he needs to know in our reality Could he have made other choices or what happened? That's what had to happen and then he can move on and not be guilty over this Because even if she lives in other realities, like I said, he needs to know about this reality So my current theory is that he's not trying to bring his daughter back Now in the next episode if we see that dead rat start to reanimate get up and start running around the room I'll change my tune And I doubt we'll get an answer an in-show answer to whether or not we have free will I'm assuming this is an idea that alex garland really wants to explore And in the show even if we do get some sort of an answer I'm guessing it'll be shrouded in doubt For example, if we get to the 48 hour mark and lily survives There's going to be a question mark of Which universe are we seeing that she survived in one universe? But she did die in another and there's going to be that big question mark over the show I'm assuming this is the kind of show that ends with us asking a lot of questions So towards the end of the episode Katie's been channel surfing through the past She decides to check out the future again and she Sees lily crawling lying on the floor and dying Except this time it's not blurry. We get to see it. Thanks to linden in in great color and hd So we find out lily was not just lying on any floor But the golden floor the one that is in this devs building So somehow she's going to get into devs And then katie watches jamie break lily out of the hospital and katie smiles What do you think that smile was all about? Like like I said earlier, I don't fully understand katie's motivations And if she's morally leaning one way or the other So I don't know. I think that she She I think is reassuring herself That the determinism that her and forrest believe in is in place It's sort of like okay. I checked all the tram lines the device tells me lily dies in 48 hours She looks at the device lily's still gonna die in 48 hours She's escaping the hospital, which leads to point a to point a to b to c to d which leads to her dying So I think it's her just sort of reassuring herself. Yep. What I saw before is still the case So that's that's my current thought and on the question of morality My guess is that katie would describe herself as amoral as in Morality doesn't exist in a world where we don't have free will In a previous episode when she's consoling forrest after forrest had to have serge killed lily talks about how or katie talks about how difficult it is To essentially unteach yourself all the morals that have been In your experience as a human your whole life So I think she would describe herself as someone that's at least attempted to To disconnect from morality entirely Now she still has emotions. We saw her Effected by the scene of forrest and his family. I don't think she can fully disconnect herself from all that Anyway, overall, I think it was uh to me was a mixed episode on one hand I am starting to lose my emotional foothold with the show. I want to see what happens next I'm curious throughout the episode But if you go back to episodes one and two on top of just being curious I was also On the edge of my seat for lily. I care about her as a character and I want to see her survive and persevere Now that we've seen a couple of episodes where she is sort of powerless Then in this episode she's literally unconscious. I'm waiting for her to come back I'm waiting for her to have more agency and get me more emotionally invested in the show again I mean having said that there are emotional emotional moments that work really well The forrest moment in this episode was incredible One that I will not forget Also, I want to see what happens next right after last episode. I want to know what happens to linden I want to know what happens to lily and we got a glimpse of that But we kind of paused and went into flashback mode a lot of interesting stuff But there is a part of me that says I really want to see what happens next So it was a little bit of a tougher episode The moments I didn't love moments I did love so a little bit of a mixed bag I think I said it earlier. I think the quieter the quiet emotional moments don't work as well for me when sergey and Lily, you know say I love you for the first time and I can't tell exactly what the issue is I don't know if it's the writing the directing or I know a lot of these are not super experienced actors So it could be a little bit of all of the above But for some reason they don't work that well for me and in the big emotional moments Lily seeing her dead boyfriend Forrest seeing his family killed in front of him worked really well So so your favorite parts are when people are dying Yeah, I want Alex garland. Just torture me emotionally. Those are the best parts um and But on top of all that I am still super curious to see what happens in the next three episodes And I still find the philosophical questions this show is exploring to be super interesting I I can't underscore enough how much I love the fact that we have a smart sci-fi show that's wrestling with the ideas of free will versus determinism it's wrestling with the ideas of invading a person's privacy to a degree we've never seen before It's wrestling with the idea of the multiple world's interpretation versus other theories of the nature of our reality so Anytime I say something negative about the show. I just need to underscore no matter what I'm so happy this show is on the air And I am overall big fan of the show Only three episodes to go so can't see can't wait to see where it goes next If only I had that chrono visor wouldn't have to wait My prediction is we see lily die in the golden box So it's actually possible She'll see her death Before she actually dies because she's in there. She can see it Which then gives her the ability to avoid it. It reminds me of earlier when foras said what if you see yourself cross your arms You can will you be able to prevent that right? So we may actually see the are we magicians experiment Will that would be very cool if lily sees her own death She has it in her mind and now she can attempt to avoid it What will happen now? We've seen that in other stories before where in the attempt to avoid some ultimate fate Ultimately they cause the chain reaction which leads them to that fate But I trust alex garland. He knows we've seen that before So whatever outcome we see here, I'm assuming it won't be that it'll be something interesting. We'll see Any other final thoughts on the episode? uh, I want to see more cars swerving by in future episodes every time they've done it so far. It's been amazing more swerving cars and more Stewart, I think oh, yeah Stewart's still great. Yeah, and I think I kind of gave my parting thoughts on the episode already One other just random point I noticed in the comments last episode a lot of people referred to the linden character As a female they said she or her and that's because linden is played by an actress a female actress kailey spainy now In the show they referred to the linden character as a he and I thought that was interesting And I looked into it a little bit found an interview with alex garland where he explained this Basically he wanted linden to be a young male character But he didn't want to have to deal with a Child actor that comes with a lot of production restrictions And you're not necessarily guaranteed the best actor So he hired kailey spainy gave her a certain look and has her playing this male character Linden so I thought that was interesting and I think some people were confused over the gender of the character And so alex garland cleared it up Anyway, I think that wraps it up for today's episode So as always if you enjoyed this video make sure to hit the like button subscribe to the channel and of course Alun, what else do they have to do? You got to hit the bell icon so you get notified whenever we make more videos like this one Exactly or the next time we go live as soon as we can figure out how to get this equipment working And when we go live you're going to want to join the live stream so you can be part of the conversation You can throw your theories out there and we'll discuss them live But for now whatever theories you have whatever predictions you have whatever thoughts you have in the episode Leave them in the comments below and we'll get a great discussion going Thanks for watching and we'll see you on the next one take