#guys i think lumon is up to something...

[basedandlainpilled]

. . . . t h e w o r k i s m y s t e r i o u s a n d i m p o r t a n t . . . .

[spareham]

the more wwi research i do the more im convinced mark scout has some kind of really deep bummer issue with his own existence and/or existence itself

[consultingfujoshi]

ohhhh outie irving's thing goes so much deeper than I could have imagined. it was pretty obvious that he chose to become severed to try to use his innie self to communicate with and learn more about the severed floor and he's been doing all those paintings in the hopes his memory of the testing floor will bleed through to his innie, but this episode implies he's part of a much bigger conspiracy than just that.

irving is not some lone vigilante as I expected him to be. he's working with at least one other person to try to communicate with innies and spread knowledge of the goings on at lumon using his place as a plant on the severance floor. perhaps even the same people that helped petey become reintegrated.

he knows he's being watched and makes anonymous calls a ways from his home. he immediately had a cover story when milchick turned up like he was expecting to be questioned. he doesn't want to reveal that his innie woke up on the outside and is trying to figure out exactly how much lumon knows, and refuses to reveal his own hand before this. he tells milchick to tell him what all this is about so he can get a better grasp on how much he needs to lie about. he IMMEDIATELY distrusts milchick's motivations.

he has no idea what just happened and why, only that there's a chance all the work he's been doing on the outside has finally started paying off and he can't risk undoing all that progress by accidentally admitting to something. for all he knows his innie put this all in motion himself. he doesn't know it's part of a completely unrelated plan with his coworkers to break out. so he lies and pretends nothing happened because admitting his innie broke out might also fuck up the rest of whatever he's planning/working on. he's protecting both of his selves from a company he very clearly now is working to undermine.

he made sure to get home quickly after waking up at burt's (i still need to know how that played out, thanks!) so it looked as if he'd been there the whole time. the gears are immediately turning wrt his innie going to burt. he's trying to figure out how that guy fits into all this. maybe he's even going to approach burt thinking he's a co-conspirator on the outside and try to enlist him. I wonder how he will react when he finds out that's not the case at all and their connection is much more individual and personal than that. when he finds out his innie almost sacrificed all the work he's been doing the past three years because he fell in love and got his heart broken by this guy. I wonder if he'll ever find out.

AND WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH BURT FOLLOWING IRV AROUND. WHAT KIND OF SOULMATE MAGNETIC FORCES RED STRING OF FATE SHIT ARE THESE TWO ON!!!!!

[defiantinnies]

Emotional Support - Seth Milchick

chapter one

pairing: Seth Milchick x fem!reader

cw: afab reader, slowburn, there will be very minor plot changes, milchick is lowkey unprofessional and ooc as time goes on, eventual sexual content, violence, not proofread

summary: Days in the MDR office are long. The lovely thing about them is him. And your co-workers. Definitely also your co-workers.

The lights. Those bright, white fluorescent lights. Boy, do they hurt your eyes. Your bottom also hurts, likely from sitting all day refining. Your fingers cramp so you crack them.

You look over to Petey’s desk. He’s been gone today. With no one else for Mark to playfully banter with, it has been quiet. You thought you’d enjoy it at first, the quiet, but you quickly realized their chatter had been like white noise for you to concentrate, so you miss it.

Irving, as usual, is refining silently. Mark is concentrated on his screen and Dylan plays around with one of his blue Lumon-gifted finger traps, presumably having finished a file. And you are distracted, studying all of them like rats.

After a moment, the three begin talking. You decide not to interject, instead listening silently to their meaningless conversation—something about Mark and Petey being sick, discussion about Irving’s classic “what’s for dinner” line, the perks.

Then suddenly, he walks in. Milchick. “Good morning, Macrodata Refinement,” he says.

Irving stands. “Hi, Mr. Milchick.”

You almost think he’s a suck up, but you know you’d do the same if you weren’t so sheepish, so you cannot judge him.

Instead of chatting with all of you like you hoped he would, he calls Mark out for a “talk”. Mark exits the MDR office and you hear their footsteps grow further and further away until it is silent. Only you, Dylan, and Irving remain.

After a moment, Dylan speaks up.

“What do you think’s going on?” He asks.

“Maybe it has something to do with Petey.” Irving replies. “What do you think, Y/N?”

“A Petey problem.” You say. It seems that your words trigger silence, because that is what fills the room as you sit with what you said.

Dylan leans in closer. “Do you guys think he got fired?” He questions.

“We cannot assume things like that. Mr. Milchick would tell us if so,” Irving says.

“Irv, you trying to get brownie points or something?” Dylan jokes.

And you try not to laugh, but it is so hard not to. Their eyes direct to you. Dylan starts chuckling after a moment.

“See, even she’s laughing. She thinks so too.” He adds.

“Y/N, do you really think that’s funny?” Irving asks. Your smile falters.

“No. Sorry Irv.” You mutter. To occupy yourself you begin refining again before looking at Dylan. “I agree—Milchick would tell us.”

Dylan rolls his eyes. “Damn. Where the hell is Mark? Now I’m stuck with two lapdogs.”

Irving scoffs at his words. You almost see his professional persona break as he opens his mouth to counter him, but he stops himself before anything gets out.

Everyone goes back to refining, and again, you’re back alone with your thoughts again. Where is Petey? Where is Mark? Sunflower seeds or dried blueberries for lunch? Why did you laugh at Irving? That was rude. You aren’t rude. Or at least you don’t think so. What do they think about you?

Irving is the next to be called out of the office. When he is, Dylan asks Milchick what is going on, and he simply responds with that too-perfect smile.

It is a long while before they return. About an hour of refining, you estimate. And when they do, a pretty lady with an intense strut follows them. She has dark orange hair, almost like the food tokens for the vending machine, and a dark green turtleneck that you are sure violates the dress code. Irving sits at his desk, and Dylan is ready to pop another question.

Milchick pushes a television cart into the room, settling it a short distance in front of a rolling chair that you think was always there.

“Who’s she?” Dylan questions.

“Petey’s replacement,” Irving responds. “Her name is Helly R.”

Mark returns with a bandage on his forehead and sits.

“What happened to your forehead?” Dylan asks Mark.

“A speaker was thrown.” He says.

“Shit.” Dylan looks back at the perpetrator, who is watching herself on the television. Her outie, you mean. Everyone follows suit, glancing over at her. They look back to their screens. You don’t.

Your eyes shift between the television, Helly, and Milchick like clockwork. You are looking at Helly when she turns back and offers you what seems like a look of sympathy before quickly turning back at the television.

Milchick looks at you after her. His gaze holds for a little too long. It is intense, as well. So intense and prolonged, in fact, that you are the one to look away first.

Back to refining again, after the nth distraction that day. Helly soon approaches the desks, specifically Petey’s empty one, alongside Milchick.

“Y/N, will you come with me?” Milchick questions. What? Why you? Is it because of the look? What did you do?

You exchange a quick glance with Mark and Dylan before getting out of your seat and following Milchick into the hallway. You two stop once you are out of the office.

“Would you like to take a walk with me?” He asks. His smile is polished, practiced, like usual.

“Ok.” You respond.

Once you reach the conference room, he speaks up. “I just wanted to check in with you.”

You look over at him as you walk.

“I’ve noticed a slight dip in your refinement metrics today. Nothing alarming, of course, but we strive for consistency here at Lumon,” he continues, “I understand transitions can be an adjustment.”

His slight smile doesn’t waver.

“And I know work can sometimes feel…weighty. Even for our most dedicated refiners. That is why Lumon provides the resources to ensure every worker remains at their most optimal.”

A pause. His steps cease abruptly. Without thinking, yours do too. You turn, catching the quiet scrutiny in his expression.

“Would you like to schedule a wellness session with Ms. Casey?” He finally asks.

You stare a moment. A wellness session would be good for you. A wellness session would keep things running smoothly. A wellness session would be the right choice. His eyes stay on you, patient, waiting.

Milchick notices your hesitation.

“It’s completely voluntary, of course. We, I, want to make sure you are feeling your best,” He claims calmly. His demeanor seems to expect something from you.

“I’m okay. Really. I think Petey’s absence just has me a little bothered. And all the other distractions today, as a matter of fact.” Your fingers play nervously with the hem of your sleeve. “I appreciate the offer, but I think I’ll get back to normal soon. I don’t want to take up Ms. Casey’s time with something so small.”

His expression doesn’t falter, but there is a subtle shift in his gaze as he watches you.

“I understand. Change can be challenging,” he says, his voice smooth but softer than before. “Even for those who adapt well. And you do adapt well.”

For a brief moment, you feel the lightest pressure against your shoulder. His hand, just barely resting there. But the moment you glance down at it, his fingers retreat just as quickly, as if the gesture was never meant to be there.

The two of you resume walking, this time back in the direction of the MDR office. You steal a glance at him. His posture remains upright, hands clasped behind his back now.

“Still, I hope you’ll be kind to yourself. Petey’s absence has been noted, and if you’re feeling… off, that’s understandable. It’s not a flaw.”

He exhales lightly through his nose, the closest thing to a sigh you’ve ever heard from him.

“I won’t push.” A small pause. “But if that changes—if you ever want to talk, or if the weight of everything becomes too much—you only have to say the word.”

The hum of fluorescents overhead fills the brief silence between you. Still, as you both turn the final corner back toward MDR, there’s a noticeable change in the air. You wonder if it’s just you who feels it, or Milchick too.

As if sensing the moment has stretched just long enough, Milchick’s posture straightens again, his usual professional demeanor locking back into place.

“For now, I’ll let you get back to work.” His smile returns. “I appreciate your diligence. Truly.”

As you near the door, he slows just slightly, letting you step ahead.

“Thank you for taking the walk,” he says, voice as smooth and measured as ever, but something in his tone feels lighter. He is letting himself slip again. “I hope the rest of your workday is fulfilling.”

“Yours too, Mr. Milchick.” You smile.

He nods. Smiles, again.

Milchick lingers for a beat, watching as you settle back into your station. Only when you’ve fully returned to your work does he finally turn away, his footsteps fading into the distance as he disappears down the hall.

All eyes are on you. Mark, Dylan, Irving, Kelly—no, Helly, you think—all look at you. Their eyes ask something they don’t need to say, one you’ve heard today after two of the men staring were taken out by Milchick. What did he say to you?

You swallow, shifting in your seat. “It was nothing.” The words feel flimsy the second they leave your mouth.

Dylan scoffs, leaning back in his chair. “Right. ‘Nothing.’ That’s why he took you on a little field trip.”

Irving exhales sharply through his nose. “He didn’t reprimand you, did he? Because if your numbers are down, it’s entirely understandable given the circumstances.”

The circumstances. The word hangs there, but you all know what it means. Petey. Helly.

You try not to fidget under their stares, keeping your hands folded neatly on your lap. “He just wanted to check in,” you say carefully. “Make sure I was… adjusting well.”

Dylan is about to say something. But then Mark clears his throat and breaks the moment. “Alright, everyone. Let’s get back to it.” His tone is light, casual, like he’s trying to brush off the tension, but you can tell it’s more for your benefit than anyone else’s.

Again. Refining. The office settles back into the usual rhythm of work and you force yourself to focus on your screen, on the numbers in front of you, but your mind keeps drifting back. The hallway. His voice, softer than usual. The warmth of his hand on your shoulder.

Slowly, absently, you bring a hand to your shoulder, pressing your fingertips to the spot where his touch had been.

There’s nothing there now—just fabric and the familiar shape of your own body. But still, for some reason, you keep your hand there.

[sageshouldknowbetter]

So… what are those weird “twin” beings?

In my opinion, one of the terrifying parts of Severance S2E4 was when those Mandela Catalog analog horror-type… things showed up to point the way for the refiners. (This whole episode seems to be pretty inspired by analog horror. I was half-convinced that at the beginning, Mr. Milchick was going to turn into a distorted police sketch captioned “The Milker 😈😱” or something.)

So… what’s their deal? I’m going to explain why I believe they’re not clones, actors, or robots… but something else altogether.

First, they don’t have coats. The twins are outside in an extremely cold climate, standing there for who knows how long, and they don’t. Have. Coats.

If they were really clones (or even hired actors), wouldn’t they need to be warm too? Why would Lumon risk damaging what they undoubtedly worked so hard on (or popsicle-ifying an employee) by dropping them in a freezing climate with no protection?

Some clone truthers would argue that maybe the clones can’t feel pain or sensations yet. They’re not finished: maybe fixing their brains is what MDR is working on. But I find the idea that they are somehow super-resistant to weather a bit harder to swallow. And while the innies are at least smart enough to avoid danger and seek safety, a clone unable to feel pain and with a half-formed brain would have no self-preservation instinct. They might be curious about what happens when they insert a stick between their ribs or go cheerfully gallivanting off a cliff like some kind of suicidal Roomba. Boom. Millions of dollars down the drain.

And there’s another thing they don’t have: footprints. Lumon-hired actors have footprints. Robots have footprints. Clones would have footprints. But the doppelgängers… don’t.

For the clear shots of shadow Helly and shadow Mark, we just see them appear with no tracks to show how they got there. We don’t even hear boots crunching in snow. The only explanations are a) Lumon somehow shot them up to the surface on a Hunger Games-style platform (implying that the ORTBO wasn’t actually outside), b) they got some poor guy (probably Milchick) to hurriedly cover up the footprints as they made them for Maximum Creepy Effect, or c) whatever these things are, they’re not corporeal.

I’d vouch for the latter. Because no matter how dramatic Lumon is, I really don’t think they’d spend THAT egregious an amount of money for a bit of extra goosebumps.

So, then… what are they? I’d say some kind of hologram or Lumon-approved hallucination.

I don’t think the ORTBO actually took place outside. There are many reasons for this. The TV at the beginning and the theremin needed to be plugged into something, there was a large room on Petey’s map called “team-building,” Milchick’s walkie-talkie range would be too small, it’s too risky for Lumon to ask outies to shut off their brains for multiple days in the middle of nowhere… and Lumon wouldn’t actually let the innies outside. Not because it would be dangerous for them, necessarily — but because it would be dangerous for the company.

Lumon doesn’t actually need to take them outside. They don’t want to cause a potential PR scandal from the outies talking about the “work retreat” or risk one of them running away. All they need to do — the whole purpose of the ORTBO — is to make them think the outside world is a terrible place and never want to go there again. The cold is real. The hunger is real. The danger is real (to an extent). But the environment… is not real.

So they can project holograms. They can power the TV and theremin. Milchick can remove the Glasgow BLOCK (the term “block” implies Helly WOULD have usually appeared but was blocked from doing so, and the only place that could happen is the severed floor). They make some basic holograms clearly based on the MDR group picture and boot them up. They don’t need to be realistic. All that matters is the message gets across.

Now all that’s left to wonder is: if Mark and the team were surprised at this team-building, that implies that they’ve never done it before. So how did Petey find it and map it? And why was one of the twins behind Mark in S2E1? We might never know.

[spaceofunknown]

I’ve been thinking about zufu and about Helena getting Gemma’s name wrong. I love the ambiguity there, we don’t know whether it’s by accident or on purpose. I think the most fucked up (and therefore my favourite) interpretation is that Helena is continuing to try to gauge how invested Mark is in his marriage. “Did you guys look happy in the wedding photo?” “I’m sorry if I’m distracting you from looking for your wife” - I think it goes deeper than jealousy, although jealousy is certainly a part of it. I think Helena knows about Gemma, and is trying to reconcile her affection for Mark with her complicity in his wife’s suffering. The easiest way to do that is to build a narrative in which Mark doesn’t care about Gemma anymore. This is easy to do with innie Mark, who reassures Helena that he felt nothing for Miss Casey, who is entirely focused on “Helly” whenever they’re together. But the minute she tries to flip that on outie Mark, he immediately stops flirting with her and becomes hostile. She doesn’t know that he knows Gemma is alive and a prisoner of Lumon, so she might have been expecting him to react in the way that innie Mark would have, just politely correct her and then brush it off. I think it’s possible that having a deeper understanding of Mark’s love for Gemma has increased the guilt that she was already feeling (if we take her words in the tent as genuine), and could have something to do with the look of dread on her face the very last time we saw her at the beginning of episode 9. I also think this would say so much about her psychology, that she is able (to an extent) to stomach any amount of suffering, whether that be her own, Helly’s, or any of the victims of Lumon, until it’s Mark who’s suffering.

[ananke-xiii]

work/life balance vs we're like a family

okay so i'm gonna tag this "severance spoilers" but it's def more about s1 and i want to use this post for future reference since s2 is currently airing so there aren't gonna be any actual spoilers in it

if you've worked in corporate you probably know that "mental heatlh awareness week!!11!!11" and the "we're a team, we're a family" propaganda is real and sickening.

"severance" has taken the first theme literally since people arguably have "solved" the work/life balance conundrum by removing themselves from the picture: you don't actually need to balance your work/life... life anymore if one part of you "lives" while the other "works".

cool, fine, great concept, we're all hooked.

However, one of the show subplots is gabby arteta's and devon scout's pregnancies. And, as we all know by now, it's INSANE.

so... what if... they took the "we're like a family" theme literally too??

what if this is not a subplot, but THE plot?

what if it's not so much about severed workers but severed pregnancies??? as in, the severance procedure is a by-product of experiments on reproduction?

if you think about it, the severance procedure is about space rather than time: severed people still experience events in a linear chronological order but these events are based on the location they're in.

and where do gabby and devon go to have their babies? to the hospital, you say? No, they go to those scary pregnancy houses in the woods.

and who does mark end up dating? devon's midwife, alexa. Now, I don't remember how many but the show makes a point when it tells us the number of children alexa delivers per day. and, i mean, have you seen the town they all live in? it doesn't scream babyland, as a matter of fact there are literally no babies at all. the house are empty ffs.

so where are all these babies?

and what about ms cobel and her shrine with the baby thing inside? and she's a midwife as well? or, at least, she knows how to work with babies.

so... hear me out... what if.... WHAT IF

when ms cobel tells that guy (i don't remember his name, the security guy anyway) that "if you need a hug, go to hell and find your mother?" it's not just a cool line, but a key line?

we know the severed floor has been visually paralleled to hell via helly r.

we know that helly r. tells mark something along the lines of "you're not my family".

we know helly r. is very much family to lumon to the point that, when she was a kid, she thought she had hundreds of brothers and sisters...

we know that gabby's husband is a pro-severance senator who's clearly pro-lumon

so... what if

the key, or one of the keys, is literally to "go to hell and find your mother"?

what if lumon is your literal, actual family like in helly r's case????

[ninthprime]

severance 2x01 thoughts (spoilers)

bit late but i’m just throwing a few things down just in case

three things about the new MDR employees that stuck out to me: 1. mark w. and gwendolyn used to work in the same office (but not dario!); 2. mark w. states his old team (presumably also gwendolyn’s) never made quota; and 3. every bizarre thing that dario says about how low-tech his old office was. i don’t know how important these characters are or which aspects of this are relevant but they all feel like pretty purposeful lore details.

i’m like 65% sure on the “helena pretending to be helly” theory- it’s the occam’s razor explanation- but i think if that’s the case, we’re going to know about it within a couple episodes. the tension will be us as viewers worrying about what helena will do with the innies and whether helly can be helped, not about whether it’s helly in the first place. the other 35% of me thinks that’s helly but something happened over the timeskip that we haven’t seen yet, most likely some sort of threat or manipulation of her by lumon (maybe something on the testing floor?). my absolute wildest theory would be that they’ve reintegrated her, but i feel like something that big wouldn’t happen offscreen…

i also think miss huang’s deal is going to be either way more simple or way more complicated than anybody is guessing. my kneejerk thought is that she went to the same school as cobel did, but there’s gotta be something to that “crossing guard” line. the other scene that stuck out to me was her and irving glaring at each other for an extended moment before they went into the break room- but i can’t tell if that’s foreshadowing a later reveal or setting up a future connection/rivalry?/etc. (it does kind of remind me of that “irving used to have milchick’s job” theory)

i think milchick’s being purposefully messed with or tested somehow. being given a child as his new subordinate/replacement, his computer not being updated, etc. he probably knows or is at least guessing at it, too. why the board is doing that, though, is beyond me. maybe they think he could’ve been collaborating with cobel?

i keep seeing people asking why the outies would go back to work after the s1 finale. i actually think the guys, at least, all have good reasons- mark needs to understand what “she’s alive” means, irving has his lumon investigation, and dylan has to support a family (which i’ve been guessing is the reason he took a severed job in the first place). helena’s the only one who may have been reluctant, but the decision may not have been hers alone depending on lumon internal politics. i suspect what actually happened is lumon didn’t want them all back due to risk of another rebellion and either fired or suspended dylan and irving- but they let mark come back because they need him for whatever they’re doing with gemma/ms. casey. that’s also why they let everyone come back when mark started causing trouble; they want mark there and working specifically.

the easiest way for the MDR team to figure out how long it’s actually been since the s1 finale would probably be to find and talk with burt’s old O&D co-workers, but i’m not sure they’re still on that floor? it looks like we might have multiple basement floors now? not sure about that but then where did mark w., gwendolyn and dario go. are they just fired/dead

at the end of this season i need to make a compilation of every absolutely batshit milchick line that tramell tillman delivers with 100% seriousness. give him an emmy. we’re underrating the bit after the “throuple” line where he just follows it up with “thankfully, she failed at this” while the camera stays on mark’s baffled face. peak comedy.

i would kill and die for irving

[doux-amer]

Helena thought she could go undetected if she acted kind, which is frankly patronizing and says volumes about her lack of understanding of Helly and the innies. From what I can tell, she (and Lumon?) only cared to watch the day the innies enacted their OTC plan, so she thought, "Okay, they're all fond of one another, and they have team spirit" and decided to act warm, nice, and collaborative. That must be why they like and trust Helly! Except Helly's more than that.

Helena doesn't care to think of Helly as an actual person, just a role she can slip into, and surely it can't be hard to be her because she is Helly. But Helly is headstrong, inquisitive (and demands that others question things as much as she does), and highly skeptical, and as much as she's kind, she's also quick to sarcastic retorts and teasing. You don't see that on display in season 2. She's soft and she doesn't go off snooping on her own, not caring whether or not anyone follows her. She lets Mark take the initiative on everything. Her hatred towards Lumon is absent; the only time you see her actively dissent is when she laughs over the story about Dieter—and she gets it wrong because the others are confused and a bit uncomfortable before they hesitantly join her in laughter whereas Helly would have been able to say something that would have landed with the others immediately. She doesn't get the group dynamics either. She makes a snow seal for Irving, and her "sympathy" for Irving is cruel and condescending because Helena is cruel. I think part of her wanted to shut Irving down, but she's also clueless enough to genuinely believe she would come off as kind. Gotta be gentle with poor, breakable Irving, guys.

She's incapable of understanding Irving's loss and she underestimates him. She's never been a position like he's been in. He has nothing, his entire belief system that he's been indoctrinated into since birth is a lie that has caused him profound suffering, and he found love so powerful that it transcended everything and made him willing to sacrifice everything. He doesn't have anything to lose. He sees no point in being at work anymore so that means he'll take massive risks and have no fear. She doesn't understand that because she doesn't understand love or loss.

She doesn't actually get what drove the innies to rebel and risk everything for the OTC because of that. One of the first things anyone in Helena's shoes would think when she learned she has to go back to the severed floor is how they would have to come up with a lie. She's quick to see that's necessary when it comes to the gala fiasco because she values the attendees' trust and understands how their support or lack thereof can affect Lumon, but it doesn't cross her mind for the innies until the MDR members ask one another what they saw. Did she really think they wouldn't talk about this? These are people who risked their entire existence just to get a glimpse of the outside world and learn a little about who they are. They'd be eager to talk about everything as mundane as how vast the sky is (which was one of the first comments Dylan made on the ORTBO!) and as intimate as the most minute details about their outies' lives and identities.

Helly herself is the one who got the ball rolling for the plan in the first place because of how much she rebelled. They would expect her to be candid regardless of what she found. Helena seems to forget and find incomprehensible Helly's deep-seated loathing of her and Lumon. Obviously, it's possible that Helly would be afraid of judgment and of losing her team's trust. She was broken when she found out who she was, so full of regret when she recited the break room apology in the bathroom at the gala. But Helly immediately moved into action and knew she had to get the word out there about the unjust treatment of innies. It's not just curiosity motivating her, but a desire for her life and the lives of the other severed employees to be better, for them to be treated as equals. To have freedom and agency.

Regardless of whether Helly would have told the others who she was on the outside or not (and I do believe she would have if not immediately, then very soon after), she would have wanted to destroy Lumon. She already hates Helena and was willing to hurt her and even kill her not only to escape her claustrophobic, prison-like life but also as revenge. She would want to raze Lumon to the ground even more than before after her discovery.

In that sense, I think that's why Irving was highly suspicious of Helena. Sure, there's the "night gardener" comment, but that was just a seed. If it had been Helly and that had just been a terrible lie born out of shame, he would have quickly dismissed it if she acted like Helly. But he continued to observe her and thought she wasn't acting like Helly. Everyone on the team is gung-ho about rebelling, but Helly and Irving were alike because they were driven by a type of anger that set them apart from Mark and Dylan. Mark and Dylan also felt mistreated, but they were driven by curiosity as well. They wanted to know more about themselves and their lives. For Helly and Irving, that was of interest to them too, but it wasn't the priority; they operated from a place of feeling like they had nothing to lose, which is why Helly was the one to provide the spark, the fuel for the fire, and Irving was the one to fan it into a conflagration, to inspire them by declaring, "Let's burn this place to the ground."

Helena doesn't seem to know this. She doesn't try to understand the innies because she doesn't see them as real people, as equals with their own interiority, with deep thoughts and emotions. She just chalks it up to the innies being unhappy, which is right, but it's a superficial interpretation. She doesn't dig into why or try to sympathize, and that leads her to be this weirdly placid version of Helly. One with a complete lack of fire. One who's complacent and just does enough to give a shallow impression of whom she assumes Helly is by reducing her to a handful of traits: curious and kind.

I think she vastly underestimated how important Helly is to the others and ultimately that backfires on her spectacularly. If you love someone, you know them. She's never had someone truly see her except on the severed floor because she's never had love until then and she's never been accepted for who she is and encouraged to be herself. For all her condescension towards the innies and Helly especially, she has limited, childlike knowledge of how complex a person can be and how relationships can work.

[aunteutis]

TLDR;; my personal Severance theory for what the hell is Lumon's deal. it's a cult, but with great benefits (plus dental!). also, the MDR Orientation Booklet! yay!

hi, so,,,, hyperfixation time:::

the Severance Reddit guys (they're the real heroes and we're all a family here at Lumon) said there was something called the 'Lexington Letter' - it's sort of a proof of concept letter/story for Severance's worldbuilding, probably more intended for the studio rather than audiences at first, apparently published as promo later.

SPOILER WARNING HERE, just this once.

so i read it all, and the letter in itself has some elements of the base/what i guess is the original story: car accidents, severing because of depression, Lumon appearing misteriously, innie-outie communication, people following people. it's written as an exposé on Lumon, sent to a small newspaper in hopes they will publish it. it's very interesting (and another piece of media to obsess over), so i'll leave the link here in case you want to read it:

the thing is:: this letter includes a copy of the Orientation Booklet, and it explains the refining process as if the readers were innies.

it goes on about the process, but it defines the data to refine as part of four different categories: WO, FC, DR and MA.

each of these categories ellicits the following emotional responses that we are told about during the show:

WO=melancholy

FR=joy

DR=fear

MA=rage

NOW::: i'm probably not the first to notice this, so please chime in if you did. but i think each of these categories corresponds to each of the four Tempers that Kier believed to conform every human soul/personality. those being WOE, FROLIC, DREAD and MALICE.

so the (human) refiners are !!instinctively!!!! classifying numbers that correspond to each type of the four Tempers that their biotech-founder (and presumably god) believed to make humans, well, human. and every time they put the numbers in each bin, the bin shows a progress report defining how much of each of the four categories there is already. much like the 'balance' between tempers Kier talked about.

small interruption here (i promise it'll be relevant later): in the Lexington Letter, three things are mentioned that stood out to me. first, the letter itself tells about the explosion of a truck of Lumon's business rival, Dorner Therapeutics. the accident kills 6 people, and the explosion is triggered barely two minutes after one of the files has been fully refined. so -at least according to the original show's plan- the refining process is an actual thing with a tangible function. it actually IS encrypted data that they're looking at all day.

the second thing was very brief: some sort of controversy regarding Lumon's feeding tubes that had caused a libel suit (by Lumon) that made another small paper go bankrupt. it's mentioned as a deterrent, and the Lexington Letter is not published.

third (last one, i promise):: Peg, who writes the letter, says at one point that a Lumon employment ad came up on the radio just as she said, alone in her car, 'Fuck this job' (her former job). as if it heard her, basically.

so, end of interruption. bringing me back to::: THE THEORY.

we have the Four Tempers; Lumon, a biotech/generally huge everything-corporation with (according to Devon) influence everywhere; and at the center of it all, Kier, who is effectively a messianic figure.

we have the Gemma reveal (Mark says in s2ep2 that he identified the body, so there WAS a body).

then there's Ms Cobel/Sigwell's shrine and //feeding?// tube, with the name Charlotte Cobel on it, and an apparent lore-compliant, unknown controversy to go with it.

finally, we also have a fuckton of encrypted data that:: a) needs refining b) actually serves a purpose in the real world c) we are very briefly shown that the file's progess is related to Gemma (dead, but also alive, personality-lacking, and in the experimental floor) and, presumably, other people. and goats.

i don't really know the purpose of it, but i think they might be sequencing the human genome and personalities of everyone //related to Lumon//? to like. make replica people??

like,,, sure, maybe they want Mark specifically to chill forever with his not-so-dead-anymore clone of a wife, but it IS a biotech company that plays god with life and death, and HAS a god like in their company policy. they have legends, and paintings, and rites, and scripture, and mysteries.

like. Lumon is -BY DESIGN- THE ultimate intersection between a literal religion and corporate loyalty/devotion that plagues and defines the current job market paradigm. the work is mysterious and important, and the company provides or punishes as an absolute and final entity. Kier is all-knowing father, overseeing judge, the origin and ultimate motive for everything. you don't even need to exit the Lumon product ecosystem to live, because they're already everywhere outside. hell, they've existed from the beginning of the only history you need to care about--late industrialism!! the rise of the market economy!! wouldn't it make sense for them to give you a solution to the final problem of death as well?

so, my current theory (To Be Forgotten Tomorrow) is that they are trying to deliver on that promise that every religion out there gives. they're ending the finality of death, and making people again. not just physically; they are literally bringing back complete reproductions of people, body and soul. they use the severeds' intuitions (and probably some sort of conditioning in their chips) to estimate the precise balance of tempers that make up distinct human personalities, just as Kier said.

because think of Ms Cobel, or Mark. for me, they are the most extreme cases. if you had lost, say, your wife. or your mother, or daughter. the person you loved the most, dead. and if a family company that you've seen everywhere, and known all your life, stepped in and told you they'd be able to rid you of the pain. or bring them back. if they told you that if you're loyal enough, blindly trust them with your own agency, they'll make everything right - wouldn't you take them up on that offer?

and now that's out of my head yaaayy. sorry for the long thing. i hope at least the letter and manual helped.

if you read all that, congrats! you've been awarded a fingertrap.

kiers!!! (as in 'cheers'. like. you get it, right? right.)

❤️❤️❤️

[l3v5ha]

something about the death of doug graner is so funny to me because like wdym reghabi impulsively killed the head of severed security with a baseball bat and it turned out to be the single most influential factor in allowing every other thing in the rest of the series to happen. what do you MEAN lumon just straight up didn’t replace him. (allegedly) got RID of severed floor surveillance in the days after. didn’t take ANY security measures sending the innies out into the wilderness. the way we’re supposed to believe lumon is this all-seeing, all-powerful corporation but we don’t see a single security guard in the entirety of the finale, don’t even hear jame or mauer call for one, despite drummond getting taken hostage & mark interrupting what we’ve been told will be one of the most important events for all humanity…

like don’t get me wrong i’m not trying to be a plot-hole realism guy. there’s enough suspense without jame yelling “GUARDS!! SEIZE HIM!!”. i just think its hilarious that from what we’ve seen, the single most effective tool in dismantling an autocratic pharmaceutical megacorporation was 25 inches and made of steel

[kestrel-of-herran]

long severance post ahead but it's worth reading bc i think i'm actually onto something.

you guys remember the lexington letter?

there might be actual clues about what lumon is doing is there. if peggy's innie finished refining something, then lumon staged a car accident ("exploding probes"), perhaps the finished room for that file could now be tested on one of the people in the car accident, the accident being a cover for lumon to kidnap them same as they did for gemma. since this connection between refining and a car accident is made in an official companion text, there has to be something actually important about it.

petey also said something along the lines of, what if you spend all day there killing people?

maybe sometimes mdr refines rooms for subjects who are already caught and experimented on, and others preparing more rooms for people they have their eye on and are just waiting to kidnap.

but why car accidents? besides removing the person from the lives of their friends and family seemingly permanently so no one tries to get them out, it instills deep trauma in the test subjects, allowing lumon to keep refining the chip's effectiveness in blocking extreme negative emotion.

it's possible lumon already knew who they wanted to put in lexington and how they'd stage the car accident, and the refining was a process to get that experience perfected.

oh actually. i had another epiphany now.

why is peggy the narrator of the lexington letter?

the most significant thing we know about her is that she was in a car accident. is it possible that the rooms she was refining were based on her own trauma, e.g. the numbers on the screen represent her own memories of the car accident and how she feels about them intuitively, which intuition she has bc these are her own feelings supressed by the chip. she sorts the feelings in boxes to remove feeling from the memory, wiping the trauma -- but maybe what's valuable to lumon isn't the cleaned file, it's the dust bin numbers.

maybe they're using the data stored there to determine which memories were most traumatic or evoked strongest emotion so they can supress them. if i remember correctly, the kier posters on walls say that you need to clean your body from tempers -- does that mean all emotions? is eradicating, refining, cleaning the human condition of tempers the purpose of the cult?

remember, the numbers in the files have already been sorted (mentioned in the first eps), to the extent that the programme can detect when something is sorted incorrectly (this is also in the lexington letter). which might indeed mean that we're talking about memories of the refiner that have been derived from their own chip.

so mark is refining gemma's rooms bc they have similar trauma. they have similar life experiences and lumon can use his intuitive responses to his memories to create negative experiences for her.

but everyone at lumon would be refining their own "files" -- the unique disk set up on their computer when they started out, like it was for helly -- bc these are their own memories that they're sorting the emotions out of so lumon can use those to perfect the endurance of the chip to suppress intense emotion in their test subjects belowstairs. maybe the files "expire" bc the memory becomes dimmer with time.

maybe lumon generally seeks out people with trauma so they can access their memories and use their own ability to sense out the emotions the chip is suppressing in the visual representation of their memories for the creation of more traumatic experiences to test on subjects they hijack through accidents until they can eradicate all emotion?

[thelivingautomaton]

MANNNNNNNNN ok. not to get my SEVERANCE brainworms all over the place but i literally cannot stop thinking about this show. also i keep reading theories on reddit and some of them are really good and some are unbelievably stupid/media-illiterate. so i am dumping my wild predictions/theorizing/thoughts on season 2 here. Please Enjoy Every Bullet Point Equally(TM)

OKAY let's get the big one out of the way: it seems pretty apparent now that cold harbor (and maybe all of the datasets mdr is given to "refine") is binning memories/experiences/brainwaves into severance chips, likely in order to reformat or rebuild someone's personality from the ground up.

this reddit post sums a lot of the evidence up but tl;dr you see an electron microscopy image of neural axons, as well as an etCO2 statistic, which is typically used to monitor respiration of someone who's in a coma or on ventilation

MOREOVER, the four aspects of mdr's data line up with kier eagan's four tempers (woe, frolic, dread, malice -- i've also seen it pointed out that this aligns with the four mdr workers, and in the original pilot script there's a reference to "needing" four workers, but iirc they all work on separate files??), and apparently one of his Whole Things(TM) was the idea that you can neatly sort a person's entire personality into those four boxes

the numbers provoke an emotional response in the refiner based on their interpretation of the data, which we can surmise is likely neural/electrical signals of some kind, specifically from brains that have been frozen or cryogenically preserved and are slowly being thawed. hence all the stress over "finishing" files on time, before they "expire" (i.e. brain thaws too much)

the opening credits for season 2 places a HUGE emphasis on big swollen misshapen heads, on brains, and also on ice...including a blink-and-you-miss-it glimpse of a crashed car sinking into the ice, which takes us into our next big point:

gemma obviously didn't die in the car crash BUT!!! lumon taking her and (presumably) replacing her body with a double (mark says he identified her but that she was also "burned" so that's obviously questionable) was actually something of a random fluke. for whatever reason the circumstances of her death made it so that she was ideal to use as a guinea pig for "part-time employment"

again, kind of going off the s2 opening credits here and the image of the car sinking into the ice -- obvs mark visited the tree where she crashed, but i feel like i remember he had to drive on a bridge overlooking a body of water to get there? maybe gemma and the car both fell in and were frozen (since everything in SEVERANCE apparently happens in the wintertime, lol)

i mean, it wouldn't surprise me if we learn that the car accident was "arranged" by lumon??? (either purely to harvest bodies or potentially if gemma turns out to have been involved in anti-eagan stuff on the DL) but idk, i don't love the idea cos i don't like it when shows try to tie LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE THING together into the big overarching mystery, y'know? like, some things are really just down to dumb luck and chance

i also don't think miss casey herself is a clone of gemma, so either her body was WAY less fucked up by the car crash physically than we might otherwise think, or lumon has some top-secret super-healing tech on the testing floor. maybe both!

ANYWAY, remember "allentown"? mark s's first-day fluke, where he completed a file in one day? that was him refining gemma into miss casey the first time around. YADDA YADDA LOVE TRANSCENDS SEVERANCE he literally put the splintered icy fragments of his dead wife back together again because she LIVES IN HIS VEINS guys. and now he's doing it AGAIN with cold harbor. this is why lumon was so desperate to keep him around even while they fired irving and dylan at the drop of a hat: they know he can get the job done, ESPECIALLY when it comes to working on gemma/miss casey. (see also: mark w commenting about how his team from the branch that shut down never made quota)

i've seen the idea tossed around that all the refiners are assigned to someone who was emotionally close to their outie (e.g. irving's deceased father) but i really don't think that's the case -- like, dylan says mark's freshman fluke let lumon devise new techniques for refining to cut down on the time it takes to finish a file, and istg i can see it perfectly in my head: cobel asking mark s how the FUCK he managed to do that and him just being like "i don't know, the numbers looked...scary??????" and her just. rolling with it.

(also i feel like that's why dylan's generally a good refiner -- he can read people! his outie knew what to say and how to act to impress the door factory guy in s2e2!)

so lumon really really needs cold harbor to work. if it's not because they care about gemma SPECIFICALLY for some secret reason, it must be that they care about the technique. lumon (i.e. the board and/or the eagan family), like so many corporate overlords before them, are selling immortality.

i'm on the fence about whether they're trying to resurrect/immortalize kier eagan specifically -- like it would make the most thematic sense, and they have a ton of material FROM his life certainly to work with, but he's supposed to have died in 1939 and cryonics tech just wasn't advanced enough at the time. but also the world of SEVERANCE is pretty distinct from our own so i guess it's plausible

i feel much more confident in saying they're trying to get the technique working specifically for the sake of current ceo jame eagan, who is an old decrepit fart. imo the "revolving" he mentions to helly in the s1 finale is key to this -- like, it kind of sounds like eagan-speak for rotating through/swapping into a new body???

this MIGHT be where the idea of cloning becomes involved, which i can see supported by the emphasis in the s2 opening credits on babies (including baby kier at the end ofc), but i also just had the even more fucked up thought that what if the end goal is to upload the eagans' personalities (and those of their chosen cronies) into the bodies of severed workers. hence the continued necessity for a severed working underclass as well as their ruling higher-ups -- it's a body farm, an endless cycle of severed workers toiling away to let the rich live on and then having their bodies/minds/souls co-opted when they've lost their other utility. oh my god helly was right THEY LITERALLY ARE LIVESTOCK

guys holy shit what if the season ends with jame (or KIER) eagan's personality getting uploaded into miss casey's chip and overwriting miss casey (and also gemma?? idk i feel like mark scout/mark s are both going to have to come to terms with the idea that gemma as she was is capital-g Gone, even if her body and brain are still sort of alive). and then season 3 has dichen lachman chewing the scenery as creepy old man eagan. I THINK IT WOULD BE FUN AND ALSO FUCKED UP

okay so what about cobel, right? like, obviously she's been drinking the eagan kool-aid, she is All In on immortalizing kier (or jame or whoever). but there's more to it than that!!! she's the one harping on about reintegration being real and possible, AND she's desperate seeking for any signs of it during mark s and miss casey's wellness sessions. why? cobel wants to revive her mother charlotte (we see her medical tag on cobel's eagan shrine), but she wants HER MOTHER, not a blank slate -- in other words she's rooting for the chips to not function properly in order to truly resurrect someone who's been dead

in particular i think this is why she flipped her lid on mark at the end of s2e2 when he asked what she knew about gemma -- like, idk maybe it's confirmation bias at play but to me her primal scream felt like it was coming from a place of...jealousy? like, "how DARE you ask me that, how are YOU the one who's allowed to get your loved one back and I'M being promoted up the ladder so lumon can get me out of the way even though MY motivations are pure". that kind of thing

cobel's attitude towards lumon and helena in s2e2 is SUUUUUUPER ambiguous -- i think she's going to turn from outright enemy into kind of a weird "enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing this season?? especially since i got the feeling that she really did kind of care about mark and devon in her own supremely weird, fucked-up way

oh god you guys. what if her "mrs selvig" persona was cobel imitating her own mother, mid-atlantic accent and corny outdated references to clark gable and all. FUCK

also the fact that she's looking for miss casey and mark s to remember each other implies that reintegration is possible even without outside interference with the chip itself (i.e. however reghabi reintegrated petey). and you know what?

i think she's right.

THE BIG BOY THEORY: MARK SCOUT AND MARK S WILL START TO SPONTANEOUSLY REINTEGRATE THIS SEASON

i will live and die on this hill, ben stiller i swear to FUCK

what's the overriding symbolism in the season 1 opening credits?? the line between innie and outie is porous (or "mushy", if you will). black sludge seeping from the trash cans that's made of all your other selves (also reflecting how irving dreams of his outie's black paint). mark's innie and outie selves constantly chasing circles around one another until at the end they both collapse on the bed...and then collapse together as a single person.

what's the overriding symbolism in the season 2 opening credits???? not just "mark scout, i.e. mark in red pajamas, delving into lumon's mysteries", not just "mushy confusion of innie and outie feelings re: helly and miss casey" -- mark's innie and outie selves working together. innie mark pulling outie mark out of the severance chip. innie mark hoisting up the curtain dividing outer and inner worlds to let outie mark through. innie mark CARRYING OUTIE MARK IN HIS ARMS. do you see the fucking vision.

of course that's also coupled with the final image of the credits: mark bursting through and out of his own head. which i think emphasizes that there's going to be conflict as well as cooperation between mark's disparate selves (especially when it comes to everything involving the helly/mark/casey love triangle)

why did mark look like he was having a goddamn seizure when he was coming down the elevator. why did he glimpse a mysterious figure following him in the hallway. WHY THE FUCK WAS HIS VERY FIRST INSTINCT TO BOLT FOR WELLNESS AND LOOK FOR MISS CASEY!!!!! (okay this could also conceivably be due to him yelling to devon that she was alive literally one second ago but still)

i think mark's "spontaneous reintegration" is also more or less an insane fluke, basically a product of the fact that he's now working on gemma/miss casey's refinement data AGAIN and both his innie and outie selves are starting to blur together regarding their shock and turmoil over the realization that gemma is alive (and probably loads of other stuff too while we're at it).

but idk, maybe spontaneous reintegration also occurs naturally over time? irving is also having some bleed-through and iirc he's been at lumon the longest of all of them

shit dude. what if outie burt ALSO has bleed-through and that's why he followed irving and was crying. honestly what the fuck was even the deal with that, i don't know!!!!

anyway i imagine that "spontaneous reintegration" would really put a kibosh in lumon's plans to permanently rewire and wipe the brains of severed folks in order to pave the way for an immortal ruling class. also i thought the way they did petey's hallucinatory flip-flopping between his lives/selves was awesome and i would like more of that, please. (also: i miss petey, y'all)

i think if they do end up going this route it's gonna be spoonfed to us pretty slowly though -- like, s2 will slowly build up the mystery of "what the fuck's going on with mark reintegrating", then s3 is his two selves coming to terms with...All Of That

those are all of my big idea theories but i also have some smaller bullet points to address:

dylan's gonna visit his family in the """visitation suite""" and it 100% is going to be paid lumon actors. and the giveaway is gonna come at the end of the episode when we cut back to outie dylan's life and his wife (or one of his other kids, who knows) is terminally sick (maybe wheelchair- or bed-bound?), hence outie dylan's desperation to find another job post-firing

that is one million percent helena eagan down on the severed floor (although i can see the argument for it being helly r and she's just not comfortable sharing her real experience on the outside). her shady story aside, i think britt lower is CRUSHING IT as "helena pretending to be helly but it's kind of off-putting and fake because it's helena's idea of how helly would behave". like, it's giving me the same vibes as in FRINGE when fauxlivia pretends to be olivia and then seduces/sleeps with peter. real ones know

RICKEN IS NOT A FUCKING SECRET EAGAN!!!!!! DEVON IS NOT SECRETLY IN ON ANYTHING (besides keeping her brother safe)!!!!!! HIS FRIENDS ARE JUST PRETENTIOUS SHITHEELS!!!!!!!!!!!!

as much as i would literally chew glass (positive) for mark s and miss casey to be A Thing, i feel like narratively and thematically it's not gonna work with the show's overarching themes of like, struggling to process grief and selfhood and figuring out what makes you you (or someone else their own independent self). gemma is Gone and you can't bring her back and you can't cut yourself off from the grief and the pain. mark has to reintegrate (literally and metaphorically/emotionally) in order to resolve his issues and move on

this show is so!!!!!! OOOOOUUUUGGGGHHGHGHH

[hellyrossum]

bits of r.u.r. that remind me of severance (or are otherwise interesting)

r.u.r., also known as rossum's universal robots, is a czech play from the early 1920s that i first heard of years ago. it's notable in the canon of science fiction for introducing the word "robot" to the english language, derived from the czech word "robota" meaning "servitude / forced labor". it's a play about artificial life made to be workers, and what happens when those workers rebel against their masters. and it features a woman named helena.

that's how the play was recently brought to the forefront of my mind. between the releases of s2 eps 2 and 3, i was looking up the meaning of the name helena and other people/characters who have been given that name, in search of any potential inspirations for severance's helena having been named as such. when i found this play's helena, helena glory, the bit of context i read seemed so insane a coincidence that i decided to read the full play (thank you project gutenberg), in case of any other connections. and, well.

(this is going to be less a proper analysis of the play than a summary that highlights particular sections/ideas. if you're a fan of severance's capitalism critique and philosophical exploration of what makes someone worthy of being considered a person, i highly recommend reading / listening to / watching r.u.r. for yourself!)

backstory for the play: the og mr. rossum invented a substance that could serve as the building blocks of artificial life. he wanted to pursue the further development of this artificial life for philosophical reasons, to see if humanity could effectively replace god, but his nephew took over and was only interested in using them to get rich. by the time of the play proper, robots are used all over the world as cheap labor.

in act 1, a young woman named helena glory goes to a factory that makes and "employs" robots. helena is the daughter of an industry titan, but she reveals that she's here as representative of the Humanity League, a group that wants to liberate the robots. (you see why reading just this on the wikipedia page caught my brain on fire, right. the double life of it all.)

at the factory, helena proves to be not actually that knowledgeable about the robots; her initial response to seeing one, a secretary named stella, is to insist she must be human because she's too lifelike, and then when the managers of the company come in she assumes that they must also be robots (and makes her case to them for their own liberation), only to learn they're not. harry domin, the chief manager, told her that the employees and officials are robots, but then (after they all have a laugh at her expense) he says of course the managers aren't; a robot could never. bosseshumans are still necessary, as the top of the hierarchy, telling the workersrobots what to do. (but isn't the fact that managers could be confused for robots telling in itself? looks at people's early theories about cobel and milchick. and miss huang.)

the six men all insist that the robots are simply tools/machines, but helena belives they have souls — or, if not, then they should get to have them. this is the philosophical conflict that essentially fuels the rest of the play, and so here is where i start posting screenshots.

guys. is this not. the literal philosophy behind creating innies (as workers, at least). you make a worker who only knows work, will forever only know work, and they will only think of work (right?).

there's something very lumon to me about this bit also:

(i'm not going to screenshot it but. would you believe me if i said shortly after this there's a reference to pineapples.)

and then. the bit where a certain someone's name started blaring in my head.

i don't even need to say it. you're thinking of her too, aren't you.

immediately after this we learn that the head scientist is currently working on developing pain nerves for the robots, which is. so normal. so normal to build the experience of pain into your artificial workers so they don't gum up your production line with their injuries. so they learn how to behave correctly. so normal.

in the interest of not including every moment of the play in this post, we'll skip ahead to when the act ends: dormin says he's fallen in love with helena and traps her into an engagement with him, saying that if she doesn't accept his proposal on the spot, one of the other five men will have her. yeah. as it turns out, this story is not only about how workers are treated like property/resources, but also how women are. another thing it has in common with severance :)

in fact, if that last plot point has you thinking about some disturbing implications that were brought to the forefront in the latest severance episode (s2ep9), you are not alone. neither are you alone if it has you thinking of s2ep7. put a pin in that.

now for act 2, we skip ahead 10 years and find ourselves in domin's home, on an island. the men are waiting for a certain ship to arrive at the harbor that will be their ticket to safety. see, after years of the robots becoming more and more central to the economy — and the military — the robots have, who could've guessed, started a world-wide revolution. the ship will be the men and helena's arc, so to speak; a safe place for them to wait out the violence.

(they plan to take control back from the robots, in the end, and part of those plans includes making them "national" robots instead of "universal" ones, essentially designing different races of them, for the sake of creating divisions between them. which is pretty on-the-nose social commentary... and also reminiscent of the way lumon seeded fear and resentment between the different severed departments.)

helena has not yet been informed of any of this. we see her have this very noteworthy (imo) exchange with her nurse nana:

but then she reads the news and learns not only of the uprisings and assassinations, but also that, in the past week, not a single human being has been born. importantly, even as some of the robots have somehow developed human emotions and the desire for self-determination, the one thing that has kept them distinguishable from humans is their inability to reproduce; they require the manuscript from the original rossum to be able to make more of themselves. the manuscript that helena, upon realizing that humans have stopped having kids precisely because the robots are making them superfluous, burns.

before that, though, she speaks with one of the in-house robots, radius, who's been having "episodes" of destroying things.

this convo, in addition to making me foam at the mouth, establishes something very important that we later learn is true of the robot revolution as a whole. the robots don't want to coexist as equals with humans; they want to conquer humanity. they carry the human's belief in domination and seek to pay back the cruelty that has been shown to them in kind.

("What I want is for her to wake up while the life drains out of her and to know it was me who did it.")

[screenshot from much later but to prove the point:]

speaking of that cruelty. some more lumon ass testing floor as shit:

DR. GALL: [...] do you know, I don’t believe the rascal is a Robot at all any longer. HELENA: Doctor, has Radius a soul? DR. GALL: (Over to couch) He’s got something nasty.

and it's after that that helena thinks to ask about dr. gall's other experiment, and i drop the bomb i've kept hidden from you all:

yup :) there's an innierobot helena too :) modeled after the real one :) "If you were to wake up only for a moment you would kill me for having made you.” yeah. yeah she would. yeah.

here is where i remind you of the pin we put in the men all treating human helena as property, no more a person than the robot workers. of the similarities to the subtext of jame and helena-helly's dynamic in s2ep9, and of dr. mauer and gemma in s2ep7. this man who (like every other guy in the play) is infatuated with helena made a version of her who's literally property. he experimented on her. he continues to monitor her. he sees her as braindead and useless, but lovely. she's a failure.

there's a lot of interesting stuff that happens / is discussed in the next act and a half but i'm going to try to stick to highlights. tl;dr the robots raid the island; domin laments that he was trying to create a world where man was free of labor with the robots (to which i say: there are plenty in history who've said they're acting to free all of mankind from drudgery by assigning that drudgery to a group they consider nonpersons); he has a vision of exactly how he and his friends are going to die(???); and then dr. gall confesses:

DR. GALL: I changed the character of the Robots. I changed the way of making them. Just a few details about their bodies. Chiefly—chiefly, their—their irritability. [...] I was transforming them into human beings.

(remember that helly r core line about the soul? does it first show itself with the gnashing of teeth?)

the thing is, he did not have this idea on his own. helena (human helena) asked him to do it.

perhaps it was a noble pursuit, from a certain point of view. but you could also argue that it wasn't, that she only wanted it for selfish reasons — for the robots to understand and accept humanity, out of fear of what they would do otherwise — not for the sake of broadening their own horizons and possibilities. (remember that it's been ten years since her activist days, and now she lives in a house where multiple robots are "employed" as servants.) i'd say it's reminiscent of milchick's attempted reforms in season 2, in a way.

it also makes me think about the end of s2ep9; how mark, devon and (presumably) cobel are betting on innie mark understanding and helping them with saving gemma without really taking his own wants and agency into account. same applies to reghabi; for all her talk in s1ep6 of mark having brought his innie into this world for his own convenience, she sure doesn't do anything in s2 to advocate for getting innie mark's consent for the reintegration procedure or just. considering what his perspective on this will be.

of course, since helena, human as she is, is still considered property by the men around her, they don't ask her perspective either when deciding how they'll deal with the robots at their door — and when she points it out, her husband calls her a child. and yet, the men go on to say this:

queen of the final human empire, eh. queen in name only, most likely, right. that doesn't sound familiar at all :)

we're basically at the end now, i promise. the act closes with the robots breaking in and all the humans getting killed — not just the ones we know, but all humans on earth. all minus one: alquist, formerly the rossum company's builder (the closest of all the men to a standard worker).

we see in the final act that he's been put by the robots to the task of recreating the formula for producing more robots, more artificial life, and has had no success. in desperation, the robots volunteer to let alquist dissect them to find the answers, but he recognizes their fear of death and can't bring himself to do it.

(compare this fear of death evident in the robot leader flinching away from alquist even after he volunteers himself for dissection to this bit from all the way in act 1 (which reminds me in an agonizing way of mark and ms. casey's convo in s1ep8):

DOMIN: You see, Miss Glory, the Robots have no interest in life. They have no enjoyments. They are less than so much grass.

one of the robots chastizes alquist for his failure, for not being as "strong" as them. he falls asleep. and then, two different robots enter the scene. one we know, one we don't. they speak of the beauty of the sunrise; and an abandoned cottage they found with two dogs who licked their hands; and each other. they laugh.

laughter makes you human, or is at least a sign of humanity. finding humor, joy in something other than your purpose. (thinks about helena laughing at helly's coupon-cutting joke. thinks about helena letting herself laugh out loud at the dieter story.)

now, here is where we return to that pinned point one final time.

thankfully, helena is spared. primus offers himself in her place, which moves helena to tears. she then offers to go instead of primus, threatening to kill herself otherwise. to which primus responds:

and that's the end.

... so. it's not like anyone at lumon (minus maybe possibly milchick?) is just going to let mark and [gemma] [helly-helena] leave together. certainly dr. mauer, or jame eagan, wouldn't be so magnanimous.

maybe this is more a vision of the end of the series as currently only exists in dan erikson's head than of the finale we're getting in a few days. or maybe it's nothing to severance at all.

but. i have heard what that final shot of ep10 is going to be. and for those who know... do you see it? how it's both an echo and the opposite?

that's going to be my final word on this play for now, because i spent nearly my full work shift on this and i suspect i'm nearing my word count. i hope you severance fans got something out of this*, even though it was more summarizing and pointing at things than active analysis. tl;dr you should read / watch / listen to rossum's universal robots

*specifically @kendrysaneela since you asked for this. hope you enjoyed :)

[crouchbearqrin]

i may have to eat my shoe later with this, but

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------ severance s2 spoilers ------

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i just watched ep6 and i see the theory of burt being evil on twitter and tumblr and i feel like i'm losing my mind because that's not what i interpreted at all from my first watch so then i rewatched the episode

i mean sure burt could be evil but i thought it was a classic controlling/gaslighting behavior situation?

"it wasn't blood it was paint"

"i'd been a scoundrel in my younger days" "to put it mildly"

"fields asked me point blank, do I think I’m going to heaven?"

"the hope was for burt's innie to go to heaven" "yes, with me" - like he's so sure that he's going to heaven and burt's going to hell

"it wasn't 10 years ago it was 20"

"sounds like i'm mad but i'm not"

the sarcastic loose corn

"what your innie saw in this PHILLISTINE"?

idk it seemed to me like burt did something in his younger days that he was ashamed about and fields constantly makes him feel small about it and insists that burt will not go to heaven while he himself will, and pushed him to undergo severance to redeem himself, but now that's backfired on him

and adding to that, the theories that fields may actually work for lumon-

maybe something else happened 10 years ago that made fields join lumon to keep a watch on burt? something about the lumon partner?

and add to that, the theory that fields may be the exports hall guy-

we know that o&d used to go to the exports hall before, but now they send a guy

what if fields came up to the severed floor to check up on burt?

and what if he's the one tied to lumon and he's the unsevered employee and he's the one that sent the lumon spy to irvings house?

...

orrr, maybe lumon has just existed for over 20 years below the surface and burt has been working with them and he's the one that's unsevered and he's the one that's been gaslighting fields all along idk man

[avirginslament]

analysis of Severance season 2 intro and potential and complete spoilers up to date.

rewatching the new intro again and again (because i still cant believe they managed to make it even weirder than season 1's like im bffr when i say i used to find season 1 intro extremely weird in a mesmerizing way but season 2 intro makes that look do much more tamer) i noticed that theres an obvious involvement of balloons? with faces ofcourse. it made me think how in the intro, innie mark is walking down a basement and comes across several balloon heads. it made me think if its the same place gemma and others are who dont particularly have an outtie or their outties are locked in the basement below the severed basement.

there an obvious angle to helly and gemma as innie mark searches for someone and helly runs to the left who springs up from innie marks shadow. similarly so does gemma but she goes to the right. and ofcourse we cannot ignore the eerie elevator irving draws and the zoom and flicker between helly and gemma being in it meaning at some point mark has to make a choice among the two.

one of my favourite bits is when mark sort of ODs and does so because his outties head inflates and merges with the innies head and suddenly it deflates, which made me think if he too was being converted into what people down there are like until but then i thought maybe they just reintegrated. he basically gets reintegration sickness which petey had.

but then innie mark gets pulled away by outie mark who lifts up the wall and take innie mark outside. innie mark here is obviously sick because of the reintegration. and heres the fun bit. the book they are standing on, which is also grassy, each side has severed heads of helly and gemma and then we see cobel with a booklight head peering at them quite voyeuristically confirming that she enjoys the mindgames surrounding gemma and mark. she gets off of it. she likes watching 2 people so in love, but cant recognise each other because shes just that twisted. no wonder she brings in gemma's candle for innie marks wellness session because she wants to see how severance works and how they would react. its like her own personal vivarium. which can also mean why the book with helly and gemma's head is grassy. another fun bit is when innie mark jumps inside the head to only become this oil painting goat. they are obviously being experimented on and being observed, like in a vivarium.

i think lumon is about to experiment on mark with project cloud harbour they've got. but his outtie is going to resist and try to pull him out, to reintegrate, as seen in the intro where the severance injectiom with innie mark inside (or the chip) is being pulled out of marks head and ourtie mark tries to pull innie mark from his head into the known world, tho only partially successful as he gets stuck midway. no wonder why in the previous paragraph as i states, outtie mark is holding a clearly sick or injured innie mark.

i bet this whole procedure is something to do with kier and the revolving and the project harbour mentioned because innie mark is literally surrounded by baby kier? its possible since lumon is obsessed with mark. they didnt fire him, they invited him back. maybe its something to do with him and gemma since their case is just so extraordinary.

like im onto something, i have the pieces with me but i cant seem the put them together.

edit: the balloons are their consciousness. i just didnt have the right word because my mind was faster than my fingers. also i have always assumed that red nightsuit mark was the innie and the suited guy was the outtie...unless...