https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-features/devs-creator-alex-garland-interview-980235/
Was Forest’s original plan always to project himself into the machine at the end?
It’s always his plan, because this is how he gets to actually be with his daughter again, rather than just watch his daughter. The thing that changes for Forest is that he has adhered to a view of quantum mechanics that does not include many worlds. There’s just one world, which means he can recreate his daughter exactly as she was, and rejoin his life exactly as it was without the car crash happening. What he is forced to accept in the end is that there will be versions of him that can experience that, but also versions that will not experience that. So he has a more poignant end result than the one he was looking for.
So even though he believes in determinism, Forest was going to be able to craft a version of reality that was exactly the same except for the car crash, and go there?
That’s exactly right. In effect, what he’d be able to do is rejoin that timeline, but not make the phone call to his wife and not, therefore, be the cause of the car crash. And then he’d be able to experience the unfolding of his life exactly as if the thing never happened. And within that state, it would be a world of equal status to the world that you and I are talking in right now. The problem is that the world is not the simple, deterministic world he wants it to be. So he has to accept a different version.
Was Forest’s original plan always to project himself into the machine at the end?
It’s always his plan, because this is how he gets to actually be with his daughter again, rather than just watch his daughter. The thing that changes for Forest is that he has adhered to a view of quantum mechanics that does not include many worlds. There’s just one world, which means he can recreate his daughter exactly as she was, and rejoin his life exactly as it was without the car crash happening. What he is forced to accept in the end is that there will be versions of him that can experience that, but also versions that will not experience that. So he has a more poignant end result than the one he was looking for.
So even though he believes in determinism, Forest was going to be able to craft a version of reality that was exactly the same except for the car crash, and go there?
That’s exactly right. In effect, what he’d be able to do is rejoin that timeline, but not make the phone call to his wife and not, therefore, be the cause of the car crash. And then he’d be able to experience the unfolding of his life exactly as if the thing never happened. And within that state, it would be a world of equal status to the world that you and I are talking in right now. The problem is that the world is not the simple, deterministic world he wants it to be. So he has to accept a different version.
