This is all very Garland. His science fiction—notably the movies Ex Machina and Annihilation, and now Devs—tends to eschew “engage-the-neutrino-drive!” technobabble. Instead Garland has a rep for getting zeitgeisty science just right enough to bolster a grander theme. So his first attempt at television has his fans recharging their thinking caps in anticipation.

Devs is about parallel universes, a little bit, and it also contains at least two: In one, Devs is a 1970s-style sci-fi tech thriller, in which a woman goes looking for her missing boyfriend inside a sinister corporation. In the other, it’s a story of capitalism, free will versus determinism, and the Big Data that controls us all. Which is good, because those are all stories about the kind of people who like Alex Garland movies. (Well, the second timeline anyway.)

Sonoya Mizuno plays Lily, an employee of a sinister tech company whose boyfriend has disappeared. Photograph: Miya Mizuno/FX

Somewhere around the beginning of Ex Machina, the 2015 movie Garland wrote and directed, the bad guy sparks the plot with a question. Nathan, an insane tech genius played by Oscar Isaac, asks his naive visitor Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to perform a Turing test—to determine whether a sophisticated artificial intelligence named Ava, built to look like a beautiful young woman, can pass as human.

At which point Caleb says, you know, that’s not a Turing test. In a Turing test, the questioner doesn’t know whether they’re talking to an AI or a human. If the questioner can’t tell, the AI passes. Nathan takes the kind of offense that masters of the universe often take when someone from downslope on the power gradient disagrees with them, but for a moment it’s as if the movie itself is also taken aback. The characters have broken not the fourth wall between spectacle and audience but some otherdimensional nth wall between fiction and science.

In a way, who cares if that’s not how Turing tests work? Nobody actually cares if laser swords would be an effective melee weapon, either. Just get to the robot fight!

Except, no, because actually a lot of nerds really do care, and besides, that’s not how Garland does things. At least, not anymore. The son of a famous British political cartoonist, Garland wrote a couple of novels—The Beach turned his own global backpacking experiences into a Lord of the Flies riff that became a Leonardo DiCaprio movie. But when he transitioned to screenwriting two decades ago, Garland felt like he was missing the mark. His 2007 script for Sunshine, for example, is about a spaceship crew trying to relight the dying sun, and features a murderous zombie with a 14th-degree sunburn. But it was also supposed to be about existential ennui and entropy. “Sunshine doesn’t add up in any number of different ways,” Garland says, “and that subsequently kind of frustrated me. I thought I hadn’t been rigorous.”

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Working on his 2010 adaptation of Never Let Me Go, based on a novel by his friend Kazuo Ishiguro, suggested to Garland a new approach. Ishiguro’s story was a quiet adventure, but also an allegory that dealt with the ethics of cloning. “Prior to that, I was much lazier,” Garland says. “I’d sort of have some idea about entropy, and then there’s this whole other idea of a spaceship. I just wouldn’t care about it that much.” Turning Ishiguro’s novel into a script required intertwining, as Ishiguro had, technology and science with emotional and political themes. For that to work, the technology and science not only have to be right, they have to be thematically resonant.