Meh...

I've long believed in the idea of no free will/choice, so I was easily sold on some of the premise of the story. I'm not so much for determinism but I understand and enjoy the attempted deployment here. But story wise I think its a bit of a mess. Some of the things I find hard to accept;

- Nick Offerman is actually a very bad man in this film. He murdered someone, or rather watched and accepted/ordered it. There were a dozen ways to handle this, but he chose murder. Yet his character shown is supposedly very compassionate, the act of murder here seemed very out of character and juxtaposed to the other Forest we saw. Somehow, through this show, we're supposed to develop sympathy for his character, and at the end when he and Lily are together in sim land... they're pals, going to have a coffee together sometime, all the while this guy killed her boyfriend in another life... yeh nah... that's kinda crap writing.

- The DEV computer was supposed to be a calculation machine, nothing more nothing less. Binary computers are slow, quantum ones fast, exponentially so. Give it enough time and data and it can accurately predict what happened moments before or what will happen after an event. I guess the present is the best starting point for the calculations to start to work, as in the present it has access to the freshest data, but I just find it a bit hard to believe it can continue to correlate and add on plausible data from present day to go back in time, MUCH back in time to accurately say 'this happened' (JFK, paintings in a cave), and again the same when going forward. I kinda liked the idea that some time prediction could be possible, with margins of error the further you went, but this idea of total accuracy for each spectrum of time just felt a little too far fetched, even for me.

- And Lily being able to somehow break free from our simulation by exercising freewill basically nerfs the entire premise and point of the show. It just didn't work for me. A poor way out. You see it all the time, sci fi books and films, a good premise or idea but no real thought or clue to tie it all together and end it well, most end up doing the same, savagely breaking the very concept of the idea. Makes you want to throw the book across the room!

- And at no point did I understand DEVs machine to be some kind of a VR/multiverse machine, a kind of simulation where you could put people/data into it and watch other versions of the world, um what? I thought it was already established that NO multiverse could exist, it flies in the very face of a world where freewill and choice are essentially illusions, so for any simulation to have a version of the world where Forest's kids lives is again another slap in the face of the very concept of the show was trying to push, no freewill, no choice. It just contradicts itself, even when its not 'reality' but even a simulation. How do they even make such a simulation where the girl lives?

- There is only one 'reality', ours. We may obey the same rules as a simulation, but the machine (I thought) was purely a calculation machine of the reality that is our own. It already has the data of Lily and Forest/Nick, it needed it to make the predictions. They died for real, so whatever thing we were watching at the end seemed nonsense. The fact the machine stops making predictions after they die was again a naff turn of events that made no sense. Because Lily is... 'special'... pfft *vomits in mouth

Nice try, but sadly this show kinda bombed, and I didn't even touch upon the acting..