Devs: What Stewart’s Poem Is & Why Forest Gets It Wrong

In the penultimate episode of FX/Hulu’s Devs, the ominous poem quoted by Stewart in the hallway of the Devs laboratory may be a subtle hint at the shortcomings of the show’s antagonist. Written and directed by premiere science-fiction filmmaker Alex Garland, Devs is a cyber-thriller that explores the cult of personality and dangerous innovation that occurs behind the doors of tech-startup companies. The show follows computer engineer Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno) as she unravels a massive conspiracy regarding the death of her boyfriend and the company that they both worked for – a conspiracy that slowly brings her into the orbit of the company’s secretive Devs team and the quantum computer that they’re working on.

Forest, the CEO of Amaya, believes in determinism, the idea that the entire universe is predicated on cause and effect. For him, every action taken was predetermined, removing him of the guilt of personal accountability. This is why the quantum computer was built; it runs on a coding program that reduces the universe to simple data, allowing the Devs project to simultaneously project events from the past and predict the future.

However, there are members of the Devs program who don’t exactly see eye to eye with Forest. In episode 4, Lyndon (Cailee Spaeny), the audio engineer for the Devs team, cracks the code on how to perfect the machine by swapping out Forest’s determinist theory of quantum physics for the many-worlds theory. It’s evident that most of the Devs team doesn’t share Forest’s vision for the project, and nowhere is that clearer in episode 7 than Stewart (Stephen McKinley Henderson) challenging Forest’s authority with the help of some classic literature.

In episode 7, as Forest is making his way to the Devs lab to check on the quantum computer, Stewart is in the hallway reciting an intricate poem about the inevitability of death. Forest stops to listen, and Stewart asks him to guess the poem and the author, which Forest refuses. Stewart then reveals that the Devs system is now fully-operational, thanks exclusively to Lyndon and his many-worlds theory. Every moment in human history is now available for extensive study. Forest chooses to ignore Stewart’s criticisms of Forest’s priorities and his demand that Forest guess who wrote the poem.

Later in the episode, Forest and Katie(Alison Pill) reflect on the day’s events, with Katie asking Forest if he heard Stewart quoting “Shakespeare” in the hallway. But the problem is the poem isn’t Shakespeare; it was written nearly 400 years after Shakespeare’s death. The poem is “Aubade” by Philip Larkin, one of the most acclaimed and controversial British poets of all time. The fact that Forest didn’t know this, let alone couldn’t even guess, is indicative of the type of person he is.

Stewart’s qualms with Forest don’t boil down to the fact that he doesn’t know famous literature. It’s the fact that Forest has been using the Devs project under the guise of “studying the past,” when in actuality the purpose has been Forest’s selfish desire to observe his own daughter before her death. Forest’s strict belief in determinism arises from the guilt he feels for the death of his wife and child: they were killed in a car accident while talking to him on the phone, leaving him to believe that his call was responsible. Forest has to cling to determinism because it absolves him of any responsibility in their deaths – in any other interpretation of the universe, he must accept some degree of responsibility. This is why he rejected Lyndon’s many-worlds theory in the first place.

Forest prioritizes personal gain over societal wellbeing. This is the failing of Devs because the machine was never created for knowledge; it was created to cheat death, something that Philip Larkin knew was impossible. Stewart recognizes Forest’s disregard for the teachings of the past, and at the end of the day, this contempt for history’s lessons may end up being the downfall of not just Forest, but reality as we know it in the Devs universe.

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