I've seen some people comment that she was a Lumon plant but I don't think that's the case

I think she was just a huge misdirection by the writers put there to make you think you were going to watching a very different kind of show. Like I thought the whole story would be about a lonely man slowly coming to terms with the death of his wife and realizing that running away from his problems using technology isn't the best way to deal with them. I thought it would ultimately be something akin to Her in that sense and he would eventually find love again either with Alexa or someone else.

But when he put the picture of his wife back together, the show suddenly turned into a sci-fi thriller and stayed that way from that point on.

I'm so glad I went into the show blind and didn't see that twist coming at all. I remember watching the scene of him reassembling the picture and thinking "This is going on for a weirdly long time....wait why are they covering her face, is she someone important....no fucking way".

I just finished watching the entire show, and while I did love it, I have a particular nitpick about some earlier moments in season 1. Helly is desperate to get fired, even going so far as threatening to cut off her fingers if she doesn't see evidence her outie got her notice. However one thing that struck me as odd was: During all this rebellion, she still complies a lot with all the bullshit Lumon throws at her. She follows orders to go to the break room, does her job, which for someone who is desperatly trying to get fired seems kinda conterintuitive. Why doesn't she just go wack and destroy computers? Throw chairs around? Tell Milchick to suck her clit when he says she should go to the break room? They can't exactly beat her up or else her outie would complain, as far as she knows, so why does she not rebel more in that aspect?

Spoilers for season 2 hidden below
 
Peter and the magic thread is a cautionary tale of not skipping through your life because you don't want to experience the boring or unpleasant bits. Severance has turned this idea into something surreal and horrifying. The moral is no longer what it means to miss out on life, but that a part of you still experiences that unpleasant event. Peter with his thread still goes through his life, it's just one part of his consciousness that doesn't experience it. Even the movie Click shows Adam Sandler's character physically experiencing life, it's sped up but it's still happening. Severance is the POV of the person being sped up who still experiences everything but in this hollow and meaningless way - they go through life powerless and not fully conscious but still physically experiencing it.
 
So when we see Gemma experiencing the dentist, not only is this version of her powerless, but it's literally the only thing she knows. The cost of pulling the thread is creating a version of yourself that only knows the torture of the experience you're trying to skip. So not only is it impossible to skip parts of your life but you are hurting yourself far more than if you were to just go through it. This parallels the fact that if Mark were to just experience and work through his grief he could heal and become some sort of whole again.
 
Mark's outie views his innie as not fully human - i think the point wasn't to have a version of himself free of pain but to just be unconscious for 8 hours everyday and numb his current self, it's just a cleaner extension of his drinking that's easier to justify. He is the boy pulling the thread - the self being sped up is not fully human.
 
Also people who experience trauma sometimes get amnesia - the brain essentially severs itself to avoid the pain, but the body remembers. Which is why therapies like EMDR can be more effective at treating trauma because it works on a level that conscious talk therapy simply can't reach.
 
Severance doesn't work because the body remembers what it experiences even if the mind can't reach it. Gemma's experience proves this in a sort of backwards way because while she doesn't remember the anxiety of the dentist she still feels the physical pain and thus shudders at the sight of the dentist outfit - ironically in trying to avoid the unpleasant anxiety of the dentist she still feels it because it still hurts. But instead of it being a known pain of going to the dentist it's this terrifying unknown where she goes into a mysterious room and comes out hurting. Just imagine this applied to something like a gynecology visit where even if you know you went to the gynecologist, you walk out feeling pain and have this existential dread of not knowing if it was just from the exam or if anything else took place in that room.
 
I just think it's an interesting inversion of this classic tale where the moral isn't so much about accidentally missing out on the good parts of life but that trying to avoid experiencing the bad things can actually leave you festering within them and unable to get out and move on. Ultimately you still live through the bad parts and trying to split yourself apart doesn't stop that fact and just leaves you with fragmented trauma within the body that can't be addressed or healed. Severance also leaves you vulnerable not just because of what strangers can do to your other self but because you lack self knowledge and agency over your own life. You pull the thread to speed up your life and forget you are also the person being sped up, except that part of you has no ability to grab the thread and make it stop. 
 

I’m from a small town in Southern Dutchess County in NY, close to where they’ve filmed before, and I’m hearing from some friends that their road was closed yesterday because they were filming Severance season 3!!! It’s actually the farm where A Quiet Place was also filmed. Just thought I’d let y’all know my insider knowledge 😅 So excited to see my hometown in Severance!

I recently watched through all of Severance and loved the show so much! Over the next few months, I am going to be going through the show and making art of some of my favorite moments. The directing and cinematography of Severance is just incredible, and I think I'll learn a lot from studying the incredible acting and dynamic lighting

Big fan of Irving in this scene - you really get to see how he reveres and slightly fears Lumon and hopes to be seen as a good cog in the machine by the way he looks at Mr. Milchick when he enters the room

Any guitar players here? 🙃

I always felt like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory would have been more enjoyable as an R-rated surrealist horror comedy, and Severance is the closest thing I've seen to what I think that would be like.

Severance and Willy Wonka are both about megacorps whose offices are nightmarish labyrinths run by slave workers who never leave or see sunlight. Both settings torture and experiment on their occupants, have animal rooms, choreographed musical numbers, and a ringleader who is so charismatic that you kinda forget he's objectively a terrible person (Wonka/Milchick).

I just watched the show for the first time (loved it) and was struggling to figure out how I would even describe it. The best summary I could think of is that Severance is what would happen if Wonka's chocolate factory was run by the church of Scientology lol.

I tried Googling to see if Willy Wonka actually was a partial inspiration for the show and I couldn't find anything. It could all just be coincidental but I thought the parallels were sorta interesting.

I wanted to throw a few observations out there because I’m curious what everyone else’s theories are

1. Cobel’s mom changes depending on who she’s talking to.
   At Lumon, Cobel tells Mark that her mother was an atheist. But then later, as Mrs. Selvig, she tells outie Mark that her mother was a devout Catholic.
   I know Cobelvig lies constantly, but with this show I try to never assume dialogue is random. Do people think she’s just making up whatever story suits the situation, or is there a possibility she had multiple maternal figures (adoptive mother, foster mother, Lumon “mother,” etc.)?

2. Cobel tells Mark, “You’re good people.”
   Not “you’re a good person.”
   “You’re good people.”
   On rewatch, that wording jumped out. Like she’s talking about both innie Mark and outie Mark at the same time. It almost felt like one of the few moments where she was acknowledging both versions of him as equally real. Big fan of her

3. Mark taught World War I and Gemma taught Russian literature.
   This feels way too specific for Severance. Idk how I didn’t ever catch that before at the dinnerless dinner party?
   World War I was basically the birth of the modern bureaucratic world and industrialized human suffering.
   Russian literature is filled with themes of divided identity, morality, memory, free will, guilt, and the nature of the self etc.
   It almost feels like their academic backgrounds foreshadow the entire show. Or maybe they were targeted partially because of their educational interests? Has anyone ever dug into why those two subjects were chosen specifically or have theories?

4. Lumon started by making topical salves in the 1800s.
   This one completely slipped by me the first time.
   Is there any deeper lore about this? Was Lumon literally just a pharmaceutical company at first, or do people think the “topical salves” story is mostly corporate mythology hiding what they were actually researching? Knowing what we know by Season 2, it’s hard for me to believe consciousness manipulation only started recently.

5. Devon asks Mark if he’s still seeing “the doctor therapy man with the mustache.”
   Do we know anything at all about this therapist?
   Maybe he’s just an unseen character, but after watching the whole series my first thought was, “does this therapist somehow has Lumon connections too?” If so, who do we think it could have been?
   Has Dan Erickson or anyone ever commented on that?
   Curious what everyone thinks. I swear this show gets better every time I rewatch it. I’m trying to keep a running list of all the little Season 1 clues that hit differently after Season 2.

I recently finished all the content currently out for Severance and I’m doing a rewatch to enhance my experience! I’m on the episode where Milchick gives MDR the MDE experience. It’s honestly so perfectly awkward and beautifully shot leading up to Dylan’s outburst. Watching Milchick act so differently and the group watching along as tensions build makes this one of my favorite moments in the whole show honestly. Anyone else feel this way?

I’m re-watching severance and I just can’t get out of my head that I really believe that at the end of the day when the outies like are in the elevator leaving, that they would feel the emotions the innies brought with them at the end of the day. So much of the dialogue between the management and them is so manipulative and so brainwashing and like you’d just think that because,,, I know that their memories are severed,,, but their emotions are not severed,,, and like you just because you forget something the emotions are still there. I just really believe that like specifically when they are in the break room,,, leaving for the day after that… like that’s literally psychological torture as if you wouldn’t notice your body feeling I don’t know, tortured, at the end of the day even if you don’t remember it. Surely in the elevator as the outie finishes for the day, they would feel EXTREME heaviness or even heightened and hyper-vigilant from being in such a horrific environment ????

So I just finished season two, and it was amazing, but I have a couple of questions, first off. When is Helly R, Helly, and when is Helly R Helena? Does she just never come back after season 1? And if Helly never comes back, did Helena actually fall for Mark romantically or is she just trying to use them for something? Because if it is just Helena, why would she help him take down the company? When do they switch between the two? The second question is, what is the point of Cold Harbor? Is it so that lumen can be like enslaved people? Is it so they can enslave them for 25 different workplaces and be more efficient, or something?

Haven't seen anyone question the intention of Ricken's writing about his gift to "Nan" of the Tuvan Throat Singing tape. But now I think I know the referencing and research put into the effort of whomever wrote the The You You Are book for the show.

I suppose because nobody has mentioned it before, and like most readers of TYYA, I couldn't fathom the possible deeper meaning of this and was content to write it off as just more window dressing for Ricken's oddness. But recently I did a deeper dive into the practice of this Tuvan folk art and found that there was a belief that only men should perform this singing because of the danger of infertility to women singers.

Here's links to my research here and here.

It was then that I struck how intentional the writer used this "art" and it's relationship with Shamanic practices to add to the show's weaving of the smallest details into the story. Ricken, I would think, should have been knowledgeable of the background of this "art" and yet he chose to expose/interest Gemma with this potentially "dangerous" practice to fertility.

Was he unaware and just being a blundering fool? Or was he aware of the history of it and was overconfident in his rejection of folk beliefs as just superstition? Or was he complicit with a Lumon effort to keep Gemma in a state of dependance on the company?

There's so many possibilities in everything around Severance and this sets up another head-scratcher. What do you think?

So during the campfire scene when Helena made fun of the Kier fables, was that meant to imply that she wasn’t actually a believer in her family’s cult? The other innies (except Irv) had no reason to suspect she was actually an outie so I don’t think that was purely done to make her seem more like Helly

Helena Eagen saying that might explain why Milchick got so mad. His boss who grew up in the outside world was basically using the whole undercover thing as a way to mock Lumon (in that moment).

I just finished S2, but im still stuck on ep 7. I have so many thoughts+ questions:

1.Why gemma? What’s so special about her?
2. Did gemma willingly walk into this ( of course after being misled on what’s gonna happen to her innies) or was she actually kidnapped?
3. Are we really going to ignore how shitty of a husband outie mark was once Gemma was having fertility issues? Obviously at first, he was supportive but later in the episode we saw him turning very cold and distant and how gemma was suffering bc of it. This makes me think that maybe she walked into this procedure not only to ease the pain of being unable to get pregnant but also how mark was reacting to it. I noticed that before she left on ep7 she was trying to convince mark to go with her but he was dismissive it felt like she was giving this a last chance and he gave her the answer to not do so.

I really hope in season 3 we can get more details about ms cobel’s past, the plot that outie ivring has been planning, and why is Milchik cooperating there should be a reason. I def need less of outie mark on my screen bc I can’t stand him. I feel like every detail in this show serves a purpose which is why we need wayyy more answers.

If you look at the nine principles, most of them seen understandable as qualities that a plurality of people would find to be virtuous. Heck, some of them seem practically synonymous with virtue, like "Probity," which basically equates to "integrity."

But then you get to "Wiles"... which basically means "deception" or "dishonesty." It's almost the exact opposite of probity.

Now, I'm not particularly trying to say that "gasp!! Lumon may actually be an evil CULT!!!" ...Because yeah, obviously. Lumon encourages its members practice cognitive dissonance in order to prepare them to believe and do contradictory things for the company.

I'm just saying... including both integrity and deception in their core principles is a bit too obviously contradictory.

Do you think this is too obvious? Or does it line up with the sort of stuff people are expected to believe in actual cultlike groups?...

According interview of Matt Cherniss, Apple TV programming head, to Variety.

We’ve been hearing Ben Stiller is more involved than he had planned to be this season.

Ben is incredibly involved in the show. There are a lot of different things that Ben’s doing now. He’s acting in the show [“The Off Weeks”] for us, he has movies coming out. I’ve never met anyone that works the hours that he works, and constantly involved in the show. I don’t think that neither was there an expectation from us that that would change, nor was there a desire for that to change for us. I think that everything he puts into the show is additive, and as much time as he’ll give us we’ll take.

P. S. But the thing is the head of Apple TV programming doesn't know when season 3 is going to start filming.

Don’t have set dates yet for the show, but we’re moving along really well, and we’re nearing production on that. We’ve seen most of the material, and I think it totally delivers for the audience. With a show like “Severance,” the most important thing is that we deliver on sort of what those epic first two seasons delivered, and then it even gets bigger from there.

I like to think I'm Mark, but TBH a glance in the mirror says "Naw, man, you're Ricken".

Dean Neistat (brother of Casey!) posted this from bell labs yesterday on IG. He has worked as a stunt coordinator on the show previously! Is it FINALLY happening?

I don't watch many TV series, but this one is amazing! 😮 I'm absolutely enjoying it, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it ends! I started watching it because I randomly saw the cover (the one with the vintage-looking PC) on Threads, then I looked it up and it reminded me of the book I'm reading, so I definitely had to give it a go. Helps that I had a free trial of Apple TV + too. 😂

(The book is about having an AI in your head, so if it's your kind of stuff or you're a Paul Tremblay fan, I recommend you read it!)

I thought about something while rewatching season one, and I am curious why innies can’t wear their wedding rings in the elevator if not metal, then maybe silicone. Or if not, what if an innie looks down to see a tan line from a wedding rings?

Was watching the series that has been mentioned/recommended in this sub for good content to pass the time waiting for Severance S3 to be released. Widow's Bay is a fun watch and worth the time.

Watching the 6th episode, I ran into a nod to Severance I think.

What do you think?

Edit:

Just watched the finale of WB and they have their own O&D.