#reintegration sickness

[notaplaceofhonour]

Changing my Severance fan theory. We already knew Lumon was lying about the severance procedure being permanent because of reintegration. I think they’re lying about the other part too. Reintegration isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable—with the same results as Petey.

Lumon and Reghabi are both trying to solve the same problem, just in opposite directions: Reghabi by making reintegration survivable, Lumon by strengthening the barrier to prevent it.

[dolphelecat]

Hey, so, uh, is it just me, or has Mark seemed more volatile specifically since Regbahi flooded the chip? Like, I know he's going through A Lot, and he's always been an asshole and never has been good at handling his negative emotions but, you know, does anyone else wonder if difficulty regulating emotions might be a side effect of experimental brain procedures? Anyone else worried about whether there will be long-lasting effects from this? Anyone really anxious that this will blow up on Mark and his goals in the worst way and everyone will just blame him for it?

[gothicseverance]

A trauma is a traum, a wound, a rupture in our life-experience, and as such it is obviously not going to be possible to adequately assimilate it into a smooth, linear narrative progression: if it was, it wouldn’t have been traumatic in the first place. We can absorb normal events into our ongoing mental narrative of ourselves, but traumas are the places we get stuck, where we trip up, and as a result they tend to generate mental stutters.

—‘Every Night, The Same Routine’

Art by @larri0li 🖤

[galmiahthepigeon]

Also great how people had assumed that the shot in the trailer of Mark gorging down on a plate of food hunched over the table would be innie Mark thanks to reintegration, so hungry from only eating office snacks and experiencing diverse and intense flavors for the first time. Turns out it was good ol' outie Mark. Just chompin away looking like a sad wet and starving stray animal as per usual<3 exactly the way things should be

[j-uuce]

the thing that gets me about the orpheus and eurydice parallels to the mark/gemma/helly love triacontagon is that THEYRE ALL EURYDICE they’re all equally doomed by the narrative to be confined to some form of hell

[slayerdurge]

helena: okay i have to be really subtle and crafty so mark doesn't suspect i'm not really my innie... careful now eagan... careful now... reintegrated mark: what monthquarter are it?

[shrinkthisviolet]

…I said I didn’t want to make another OC and YET I can’t stop thinking of a “what if Mark and Gemma had a daughter before Gemma died” OC idea

[arachnopoda]

HOLY SHIT. WHEN HELENA SAYS THE NAME “HANNAH” ITS LIKE A MIX OF BOTH HELLY AND GEMMA.

I don’t know if that’s intentional but there’s so many layers to that if it was on purpose.

[bbygrlmarkscout]

I've watched the reintegration scene SEVEN TIMES now and I still get full body chills from it..

The slight change in his voice when he says "you mean what quarter?" is INSANE!!! Ever so slightly more child-like and higher in pitch than all his previous answers ... Fucking 😭 And then the editing.. how was his posing so precise despite the costume changes ?? The precision angles and exact same expressions. The scene and episode ending with the phrase "who are you?" The same phrase that starts the show?? (And again when Mark first meets Reghabi)

SHOCK. AWE. WONDER.

[kestrel-of-herran]

s3 mark becoming sicker bc of the reintegration (coughing and other symptoms) and hellyna has to find a way to save him...

[alkeneater]

Bro i want to integrate the Severance into my clone high au so badly i already explained it to my fp and it sounds like a great idea

But there's one little thing... it will make my comics irrelevant.... it will change the plot slightly....

i can't work on the comic anyways it's getting too hard lately bc of my mental condition soooo WE'RE SLIGHTLY CHANGING AND EXTENDING MY AU TO MAKE IT COOLER

but the price is... no more comic </3 sorrey.... (lmao like anyone cares) i will probably make a visual novel tho.... someday.... when i feel like the au is ready...

anyways stay tuned anddddd don't be afraid to ask questions about my AU i'd be very happy to answer them!!

[gothicseverance]

The Gothic novel is, in its conclusion, typically neither open nor closed — but slightly ajar.

—Industrial Gothic

Gif by @maxanor 🖤

[bowyer35]

I see you, Mr. Erickson...well played 🤫

[macbethz]

Well I’m officially ready to call it that severance has declined in quality significantly since s1 but at least I got to see them talk to innie mark like a scared prey animal this episode

[bumblingbabooshka]

Reghabi is now 2 for 2 on doing a reintegration procedure on someone who immediately starts running around the second it's over even though she tells them not to

[failchild]

i can write so much more about why i think severance S2 isn't as strong or enjoyable as S1, but i could truly go on forever so i've organized my thoughts into three categories: lack of inter/departmental connection, dropped storylines, and how the world feels much smaller (1.2k words under the cut)

lack of inter/departmental connection

a significant theme of the S2 finale is the solidarity between different severed departments. MDR, mammalians nurturable, and the marching band department become impromptu allies against lumon management. innie mark is hesitant to save gemma not just because he might cease to exist, but so might the entire severed department. so why wasn't this a theme throughout the whole season?

episode 3 was building up to this: mark and "helly" made contact with mammalians nurturable, and irving visited O&D to share a nice moment with felicia. but that interdepartmental connection is completely dropped until the the finale, seven episodes later.

innie mark's concern for all severed workers rings a bit hollow when he doesn't seem to care about the three innies he got terminated in episode 1, and hasn't thought about irving at all. (i know ignoring grief is mark's whole thing, but he's known irving his whole life! there's not even a single moment of him acknowledging irving after his firing.) like, okay, mark said innie rights! does he really demonstrate that throughout the season, though?

EDIT: oh my god, miss casey—innie mark willingly killed miss casey. if he was truly so concerned about every innie, shouldn't he have been conflicted about leading her to her death? the person he said "we're people, not parts of people" to? the person he said "no one gets to just turn you off" to? (mark! you just turned her off!)

what stands out more is the lack of connection within MDR itself: once irving's gone, MDR just doesn't seem to care about each other. their tight-knit friendship and "we're in this together" dynamic is supplanted by romance. sure, mark and helly love each other now—why does that have to come at the cost of their friendship with dylan? do they just not care that he's been disappearing for half the work day? in the S2 finale, it's a great character moment for dylan when he comes to the rescue, but would helly and mark do the same for him? they didn't seem to notice or care that he was gone for mark's completion of cold harbor.

dropped storylines and dramatic twists that lead nowhere

(i know how television works, i know that plotlines that begin in one season can get resolved in another. okay. now that's out of the way)

remember how bold of a decision it was to have mark reintegrate in episode 3? the building of tension, reghabi asking an increasingly confused mark basic questions ("what season is it?" "you mean, what quarter?"), mark waking up on the severed floor table, and the triumphant soundtrack that follows? none of that seems to matter now: reghabi is out of the picture and mark doesn't get reintegration sickness or hallucinations anymore. reghabi kept warning mark to not move his head—then he fell to the ground and slammed his head, and was beaten in the head by drummond. is his brain okay? did the reintegration process even happen? did i dream this plotline? where am i?

what did the undercover helena plot accomplish? okay, so it was crazy when irving revealed that helena was impersonating helly. what exactly were the consequences of this? besides irving getting fired, there were barely any ripple effects for this seemingly momentous betrayal—mark was uncomfortable for two episodes, and helly was upset for, like, ten minutes tops. it's a fun plot twist for sure, but it doesn't seem to truly affect the character it should matter most to, and helly isn't given the time to wrestle with the fact that she's an eagan (royalty! a god!) and found out mere hours ago. we get to know helena a bit, i guess, but she was already compelling when she was just a face on a TV screen, telling helly that she wasn't a person.

speaking of irving's firing, this was the perfect setup for learning more about his outie, but we learn nothing. we have the same questions as we did in S1: who's he working with? what's his motivation to infiltrate lumon? why does he know about the elevator to the testing floor? irving is just as much of a mystery as he was in S1—and now we don't know if we'll ever see him again and get answers to those crucial character questions.

milchick has undoubtedly the best character arc this season. in episode 9 he finally snaps at upper management and can barely process what it means when outie mark tells him, "work's just work". i don't think milchick would turn his back on lumon entirely, that wouldn't be realistic, but all his character moments throughout the season seemed to be culminating to him realizing that, yeah, work is just work, it's not that serious. it makes sense that he would try his hardest to escape the bathroom, then get greeted by an innie uprising—but that would have also happened to a S1 milchick. after the kier animatronic microaggressions and all the shit he has to do to prepare for cold harbor's completion, would he really try to escape the bathroom that hard? or would he be having a midlife crisis, staring himself down in a mirror? i'm genuinely not sure.

i know i'm in the minority here but i loved ricken in S1—he and his strange followers bring an earnestness and sense of humor that made the show feel unique in how it juggled wildly different tones. ricken was also crucial to the innie story, and helped innie mark realize his potential as a human being. but besides appearing in a single flashback during the gemma episode, ricken's been completely absent since episode 3. what happened to his lumon sellout arc? what does he think his wife, who he has a newborn baby with, is doing? did he die in a private yacht explosion?

we still don't know what cold harbor is, right? we know that each file MDR completes is another room for gemma, but what's cold harbor specifically, and why would it kill her? she starts to disassemble a crib without feeling negative emotions—how is that any different from any other innie? is the point to sever away specific trauma? is that really it? and again, why would that kill her?

the world feels much smaller

the world outside of lumon is absent in S2. S1 had ricken and his weird friends, mark going on dates, back alley concerts, anti-severance protests, snippets of the news—there was life outside of lumon! S2 leaves that all behind to tighten focus on lumon and the people directly involved in the company, which makes the story very insular.

characters are so vitally important now: helly is an eagan, mark is the only one who can finish cold harbor and cold harbor is The Most Important Thing In The World We Have To Complete It Now, everything MDR does is because of gemma, and cobel invented severance. everyone else feels supplemental—people like irving and ricken can be easily discarded. the science fiction aspects, which were bizarre and unknowable in S1, are now directly personal to everyone. it's like milchick lying about the tallest waterfall in the world: it just makes everything seem smaller.

this also muddies S1's central themes and satire of the corporate world. mark isn't just another cog in the machine anymore, he's the most important guy (they fired and rehired a bunch of people, just for him!). the work isn't mysterious anymore, we know exactly what they're doing. mark being an ordinary guy who goes to an office job he doesn't really understand was the point of the corporate satire. severance just isn't interested in that anymore, which i guess is understandable; the show can grow into something different. but using a sci-fi concept to comment on office culture and the different personas we inhabit for work was so clever and special, and now they're just exploring well-trodden ground like identity and what it means to be human. sci-fi has already done that one, guys! many times!

again, i can say a lot more but i think this sums up my main thoughts. and i generally liked each episode individually, but when i look at the season as a whole it just doesn't cohere nearly as well as S1 did.