Maybe if Lyndon had made it back to Devs, Stewart wouldn’t seem to be so desperate. We learn that while Forest and Katie were hanging out at home, Stewart has somewhat taken over the lab—at least enough to have applied Lyndon’s multiverse theory to the machine, and to preside over it with the rest of the Devs team. While they are astonished, Stewart has slipped from awe into bleak existential dread, pronouncing that what they watch through the machine is reality, and they are the simulation.
Yet these scenes didn’t entirely land for me. Something about Stewart showing the Devs folks (to whom viewers have no emotional connection) a projection one second in the future just brings to mind Spaceballs’ meta gag on the same device. When he starts intoning about how “[t]he box contains us,” it just feels melodramatic: “The box contains everything. And inside the box, there is another box. Ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Uh oh.”
More effective is his quoting of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade,” and his frustration that Forest not only doesn’t recognize it, but doesn’t even make the effort of guessing. It’s classic Forest, who can afford to have others think for him; and Stewart is completely justified in criticizing his boss: “Such big decisions being made about our future by people who know so little about our past.” Maybe that’s what prompts Forest to watch a cavewoman go through her life via the simulation; but that feels like too little, too late, when he and Katie are stubbornly looking ahead to a fixed point in the future.
I briefly felt the shame that Forest should have, at having to look up both “Aubade” and the audio piece that plays in the cold open: composer Steve Reich’s “Come Out,” which plays on a loop one quote from one of the Harlem Six. To be honest, I’m not sure what, if anything, it has to do with Devs barreling toward its conclusion. But combining “Come Out” with “Aubade” and what I assume is the cave people’s language of hums and breaths, creates a similar aural collage reminding us of the art and suffering of humanity that all occurred before—well, before whatever will soon occur.
Has Lily proven that she’s just as reverse engineerable as any other element of the universe? Is anyone at Devs sane anymore, or have they all cracked? Next week is the series finale; and even though Katie and Forest already know how it’s going to turn out, this series has proven that the best part is in how.