Despite Lily demanding some manner of confession or acknowledgment from the man behind Devs, what she gets instead is a one-on-one lecture with the woman running the show. It’s heartening to see how Lily refuses to be swayed by Katie’s frustratingly serene omniscience, challenging her and Devs’ guiding principle: Nothing ever happens without a reason. Everything was determined by something prior.
So what is Katie’s reason for withholding the entire truth from Lily? In bringing Lily up to speed, she also fills in the remaining blanks for the viewers who already knew that she and Forest were looking ahead to some sort of potentially fatal vision of Lily at Devs. For as long as they have been able to run simulations through the machine, only “glimpsing” at the future (uh huh), they have only ever been able to see up to a certain point. After that, it’s a blizzard; and as they’ve gotten years and months and days closer, that fixed point in time has never moved.
It seems pretty clear that that final moment of the simulation is the vision that Katie and Forest watched: Lily dragging herself across the floor of Devs. Lily, in all likelihood, dying. Now, it makes loads of sense why Katie would not tell this skeptical woman sitting across from her that her death has something to do with the breakdown of the laws of the universe—and by that, she means the machine’s ability to further predict the future. But if Katie’s entire worldview hinges on the notion that all actions are predetermined and there is no escaping the fate they’ve seen, then why not tell Lily that she will probably die tomorrow night at 1 a.m.?
Perhaps Katie doesn’t trust in determinism as completely as she claims. Maybe she relishes knowing one more thing than everyone else. Perhaps she’s watched the simulation so many times that it has become boring, and she wants to see how Lily will end up at Devs.
Despite these little moments, the Lily/Katie conversation is less interesting than Forest and Jamie’s odd bonding session outside. Aside from that final piece (you know, the breakdown of determinism), it’s rehashing information viewers were already privy to. But placing these two men on Forest’s porch in some absurdist display of “let’s leave the women to their business” makes for some of the most forthright discussions in the miniseries.
