My thoughts on Severance

We finished watching season two of Severance tonight and as expected, things are set up for season 3 (which was also announced today). I’m not going to do a review of the show per se, but I do want to talk about my thoughts about it, and more specifically about some of the philosophical questions that the show brings up.

However, in order to do that, I need to talk freely about various plot points, so I’m going to bury the rest of this blog post below the fold. You’ve been warned, spoilers ahead.

Before getting too deep into things, I will briefly say that I do enjoy the show overall, and I think that it is masterfully created. I do have qualms with the pacing and how the show was cut into its episodes. I also have a personal aversion to plot lines that do little more than to tantalize you to keep watching “just one more episode/season”. But these flaws aside, there’s a lot about this show that is astoundingly brilliant.

The cinematography, the sets, even the costumes and props, are exquisite works of art. The mixture of old cars along side modern cell phones, juxtaposed with CRT computer monitors is both jarring, and yet so brilliantly maneuvered that you actually have to think about it before your brain picks up on the disconnect. The constant winter setting and desaturated look-and-feel give the entire world of Severance a strange sense of despair and emptiness, yet is beautifully portrayed.

That idea of despair is where I’d like to detour to share some thoughts about what I think the show is really about. In the season finale of season 2 we learn that Gemma has been held captive for two years while her severed husband Mark (thinking she’s dead) is slowly working on some type of computer algorithm that creates more and more severed personalities inside of her (unbeknownst to either of them of course). Through the creation of these personalities Gemma experiences different types of pain, physical and emotional, yet is always returning to her normal self at the end of the long days of severed sessions.

We come to find at the end of the finale that she was in fact being systematically programmed to evolve a personality that felt no pain or sorrow, and could detach completely from her real self to be an empty shell. Her final personality’s task was to dismantle a baby crib that had become the bane of her pre-Lumon existence, having suffered through years of failed attempts to conceive.

As the head of Lumon watched from monitor, smiling at what he had created, there are scenes interspersed of his son beginning a ritual to sacrifice a young lamb to accompany Gemma on her journey into death, having finally achieved the nirvana of pain-free bliss. Obviously the entire event goes sideways when Mark breaks into the floor that Gemma is on and breaks her out, but these scenes give us an insight into the true meaning of the show.

Humans cannot handle pain, and will do anything to avoid it.

The entire premise of the severed workforce is to be a place where people can escape for 8 hours a day from their pain and sorrow-filled lives. They can work, be productive, and then wake up 8 hours later not having to have suffered through the dreariness of the daily grind of their job. Inside the severed floor, the ‘innies’ develop their own lives, free from any knowledge of the anguish that their ‘outies’ are going through.

It’s apparent that freedom from pain is a key component of this ultimate breakthrough that Lumon is pursuing, and wants to unleash on the world. The severance procedure is one example of a step towards that future, but it’s still not perfect. Even Lumon’s origins as an ether factory that people could sniff to get high hints at this ultimate goal. The programming of Gemma to be that pain free vessel is the key to bringing harmony to the rest of the world. I’m guessing that there is some aspect of her blood that they believe they can turn into some type of drug for the masses to ease the world’s pain. No more suffering. No more needing to tame the mortal tempers to achieve bliss.

But the ultimate lesson of the show (at least so far) is that the act of trying to disassociate and avoid pain and sorrow takes on a life of its own. The ‘innies’ rebelling against their captors, wanting to live their own lives and to simply exist, is a metaphor for how pain and suffering can become a thing unto itself. We may seek to contain it, avoid it, bottle it up and set it aside, but it’s still there, and it’s still a part of us.

In the very telling conversation that Mark has between his ‘innie’ and ‘outie’ personality he realizes that he can no longer control the pain that he’s squirreled away into the Lumon severed floor. That sorrow has become something unto itself, and he has to face the fact that trying to dismantle it (by saving Gemma) comes with consequences for the life that he created to deal with it in the first place. Mark made a choice about how he wanted to handle his pain, through an ultimate technique of avoidance. And now that pain and sorrow is returning to call the shots in his life.

Facing pain and suffering is never easy or desired, but avoidance seldom brings lasting peace. In many ways Severance is a cautionary tale about the consequences of not dealing with pain and sorrow. The longer that the severed employees let the ‘innies’ live and develop their own lives, the more that their pain grew into something that in the end, they can no longer control. The final coup de grâce sees ‘innie’ Mark opting for whatever life he can have inside the severed floor with his love Helly, instead of letting ‘outie’ Mark go. Mark’s pain took on such a life of its own that it refused to die, and that’s a choice that ‘outie’ Mark, and now ‘outie’ Gemma, are going to need to face.