Devs season 1 premiere recap: Episode 1

A coder who works for the San Francisco tech company Amaya gets promoted to its mysterious Devs division and immediately gets in over his head.

Devs gets off to a pretty weird and creepy start with some ominous choir music and a montage with views of San Francisco intercut with mysterious monoliths, people appearing to have violent mental breakdowns, repeated images of a little girl, and Nick Offerman standing in a forest in the dark. I’m already enchanted and terrified.

Sergei (Karl Glusman) and Lily (Sonoya Mizuno) live together and work at the same groundbreaking tech company called Amaya. They wake up, share breakfast, and take the Amaya shuttle to the company’s impressive campus, which is set in an idyllic forest and overlooked by a gigantic and creepy doll-like statue of that same little girl, like some post-apocalyptic remnant out of Fallout 4. Amaya seems to be like the Microsoft of San Francisco.

Sergei works in the AI department has an important demonstration that day to the CEO himself, Forest (Nick Offerman). He comes late to the meeting, excusing his tardiness by explaining that one of their competitors planted a story in the New York Times suggesting that Amaya needs government oversight. Interesting that someone thinks they’re doing something that potentially dangerous.

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Sergei has coded an algorithm that can predict the movements of the nematode. Although the algorithm breaks down after 30 seconds, it’s still highly impressive and earns Sergei an invitation to join the coveted and mysterious Devs department. But first, he has to pass an interview with Amaya’s thorough and xenophobic head of security Kenton (Zach Grenier). He’s apparently nervous that Sergei is Russian and his girlfriend Lily is third generation Chinese. Still, he passes the security check and enters the Devs program.

Forest shows him around personally, bringing him to a building set back from the campus and through the woods. The labs and the machine inside are protected by a lead Faraday shield around a 13-yard thick concrete shell around a gold mesh around an eight-yard unbroken vacuum seal. Whatever they’re doing in there, it’s pretty intense.

You may be wondering how they get through the unbroken vacuum seal. “You’ll see,” says Forest. “It’s pretty neat.” And it is! Everything inside Devs is pretty neat. They get through the vacuum by taking a floating horizontal elevator supported by an electromagnetic field. The machine is massive, taking up nearly all the internal space of the building. When Sergei asks how many qubits the machine is running, Forest answers that it’s a number that seems pointless to express as a number. Whatever this project is, it is vast and elaborate.

Forest shows Sergei to his work station. He’s not told his purpose, his job is just to read code and figure it out. And it doesn’t take Sergei long to figure it out. Whatever he reads in the code, it’s something devastating. He has a small breakdown in the bathroom and even throws up. Before returning to his work station, he messes with the settings on his watch. It looks like he might be sneaking a picture of the code with a secret camera.

Katie (Alison Pill), who works very closely with Forest and was present for Sergei’s nematode presentation, also works in Devs. She approaches Sergei, brings him a water, and encourages him to settle in and take his time. Sergei asks her if the code is for real or only theoretical. She tells him that they’ve run the code and gotten real results. It’s not theoretical. Whatever the code is, Sergei says that if it’s true it literally changes every single thing. Katie corrects him, “No if it’s true, it changes absolutely nothing. In a way, that’s the point.”

Unfortunately, Sergei gets caught taking secret photos. He tries to escape through the woods but Forest confronts him on the path. He forgives him because he says the universe is deterministic. Every cause has an effect, the world runs on tram lines, therefore Sergei could not have chosen to do anything but what he did. Still, an industrial spy must be eliminated, so Kenton tackles Sergei and puts a plastic bag over his head until he suffocates. Katie is there too.

He’s obviously missed by his girlfriend. She goes into work the next day and immediately approaches Kenton about her concerns. As head of security, he has access to all the CCTV on the campus and they’re able to track his movements as far as when he walked off campus toward the highway late last night. We know this footage must have been faked, but even though Lily doesn’t, she still gets the sense that something is off. Forest gets involved, acting concerned although he knows full well what happened to Sergei. He tells Kenton to call the police and report Sergei missing. Forest gives her his personal guarantee that he is all over this. The double meaning is not lost on us.

Lily does some digging of her own, checking out Sergei’s phone from the last known backup. Nothing seems weird until she notices a Sudoku app. Not only did Sergei hate Sudoku, but it’s also password protected and will erase all data after three incorrect tries. So that’s weird and secretive. Lily seeks out her ex-boyfriend Jamie (Jin Ha), who she left on bad terms, to ask his help hacking Sergei’s phone. Unsurprisingly, he tells her to f**k off.

To his credit, Forest is upset by Sergei’s death and his part in it. Katie sits with him and they talk about how, knowing what they know, it shouldn’t be so hard. But what are they supposed to do, unravel a lifetime of moral experience? Humans are hardwired magical thinkers. Take the most rational person in the world and they’ll still pray when their kid gets hurt. This is when it becomes obvious that Forest’s own daughter, likely the company namesake and mascot Amaya, was lost to him.

The next morning, Lily is called in to watch CCTV footage of what appears to be Sergei sneaking back on to the Amaya campus, dousing himself in gasoline, and setting himself on fire. That’s clearly the end of Sergei and Lily is horrified and devastated. She runs to the amphitheater surrounding the Amaya statue and she sees his burnt corpse as Forest and Kenton look on from their places, removed from the scene.

Full disclosure: I love Devs creator/writer/director Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation). And I loved everything about this first episode. Everything from the dark, mysterious, impenetrable conspiracy and pacing, that somehow reminded me of AMC’s sadly forgotten Rubicon, to the shades of Stanley Kubrick in the monolithic sculptures and insane monastic choirs. I have no idea where this is going and I love every minute of it. What a novelty it is to be so thoroughly confused and surprised and aesthetically enriched.

What did you think of the premiere of Devs? Be sure to tell us in the comment section below!