I read more about science than anything else, and it started with two things. One was getting my head around this principle of determinism, which basically says that everything that happens in the world is based on cause and effect … that has all sorts of implications for us. One is that it takes away free will, but the other is that if you are at a computer powerful enough, you could use determinism to predict the future and understand the past. If you unravel everything about you, about the specifics of why you prefer a cup of coffee to tea … then five seconds before you said you’d like to have a cup of coffee one would be able to predict you’d ask for it.
The trailer opens with Forest showing Jamie his new work station in DEVS. “What am I actually doing here?” Jamie asks. Forest refuses to tell him: “Don’t worry, you’re going to figure it out.” Cut to Lily confiding that the last time she saw Jamie, he was heading toward DEVS. And then he disappeared. Lily fears something bad happened to him. “You know what happened to him,” we see Katie respond. “If you want answers, ask me what you don’t know.” So Lily asks, “What is DEVS?” Katie responds by telling her about cause and effect. “This is the only principle you need to understand. Nothing ever happens without a reason. Everything was determined by something prior.”
Lily’s investigation convinces her that Amaya’s execs are fanatics, but would call the police do any good, given how powerful the company is? There are glimpses of strange technology and a few violent encounters, plus an intriguing shot of Katie seeming to split into three. “The sense that you were participating in life was only ever an illusion,” says Forest. “Life is just something we watch unfold.”
Overall, the miniseries has a similar darkly cerebral tone to Garland’s Oscar-winning Ex Machina“I’m worried about the future. I’m not a pessimist, but an optimist. I do think it’s very clearly the case that technology and technological advances are happening at a rate that we are not able to keep up with,” Garland saidduring the TCA panel. “Technology doesn’t have checks and balances; it’s not a good thing,”
************************** will debut March 5, 1641843 on FX and Hulu, followed by a new episode each subsequent week. Garland already has another series in the works as part of his overall deal with FX, but this one won’t be science fiction. “It’s about civil obedience, and it’s in the here and now,”
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