ou know how it is. One minute you’re happily cracking the problem of how to predict nematode worm behaviour, the next minute you’re being whisked off to the ultra-secret lair of your billionaire employer’s quantum computing firm and being shown technological possibilities so destabilising to everything on which you and humanity depend for life and sanity that you have to rush to the nearest futuristically designed loo as all your organs rebel. We’ve all been there. And now, so has the brilliant Russian coder Sergei (Karl Glusman) in Devs (BBC Two). He is an artificial intelligence specialist working for Amaya – a fictional amalgamation of all the tech companies whose overt and covert tentacular reach currently control our lives to a degree that would terrify us if we could bear to think about it. After his nematodal success, he is recruited by the company’s enigmatic, all-powerful founder and CEO Forrest (Nick Offerman, putting his enormous, ambiguous presence and capacity for stillness to terrifying rather than comedic use this time). Sergei is a touch apprehensive about the move, but his girlfriend, Lily, is delighted for him. Sergei’s attitude turns out to be the wiser one. So horrified is he by what he learns on his first day of the job that he attempts to leave with evidence of what he has seen in order to blow the whistle. Alas, he proves no match for the state-of-the-art surveillance with which Amaya’s inner sanctum has been laced and he is killed by Forrest’s right-hand man, Kenton (Zach Grenier, perhaps best known in the UK as the brilliantly unregenerate lawyer David Lee in The Good Wife). Lily is shown CCTV footage of her boyfriend self-immolating at the foot of the (sidebar – extraordinarily kitsch) commemorative statue of Forrest’s dead daughter, after whom the company is named. But Sergei’s lack of any kind of suicidal ideation before he disappeared and a suspicious locked app on his phone starts her off on a quest to discover What Really Happened. The game – replete with hackers, retro Russian handlers, icily malevolent blondes, hand-to-hand combat between opposing sides in underground car parks, questions of free will in deterministic universes and much more – is afoot. Devs is a rare beast – a drama with ideas rather than people at its heart. Which is not to say that the characters are underdeveloped. Most of them are quite as rounded as is generally considered necessary for a spy thriller (which is in essence what this is, albeit with the most modern espionage-worthy material as coveted prize), although it’s a shame that the lead actor (Sonoya Mizuno as Lily) doesn’t seem able to bring much more to the part than is exactly written. But the animating force is the “What if …?” We have not yet been told exactly what it is that the crème de l’Amaya crème are working on in their vacuum-sealed, temple-like structure deep in the heart of Silicon Valley, but we can infer from Sergei’s work and Forrest’s speech before he has his unfortunate employee dispatched that it is something to do with computers laying bare too much of the universe for our basic meatbrains to cope with. “Life is always on tramlines,” says Forrest. “We fall into the illusion of free will because the tramlines are invisible.” If they’re not? What do you do when you can predict everything? When you know that everything is predetermined? When all that humanity has done, faced, decided, rejected, embraced across history is meaningless? That we’re just puppets on causality strings. How do you live? Or how do you harness it, and to what end? Too much knowledge is far more dangerous than too little. The show doesn’t entirely lose touch with what we might call the ordinary, current state of humanity – a paltry, threadbare thing though it might suddenly seem to be. There is Lily’s shock at Sergei’s death and, more convincingly, Forrest’s deep-seated grief and yearning for his lost child (it’s hard not to suspect even at this early stage that at least part of his obsessive work is aimed at finding some way to bring her back or alleviate his pain in some hitherto impossible way) and a twisted form of workplace banter among those in the temple set to change, if not unmake, the world. It’s a deep, dark, wild ride. How much of it deals in pure imagination and how much of it is grounded in stuff already here I don’t know. And please – nobody tell me. It’s better this way. Let the quarks take me when it’s time.