I am a person, you are not. It’s a cold message no one wants to receive, but one they do in many ways, from many sources.
Severance is back. If you somehow missed the fervor around it before, I don’t blame you for missing my brief mention of it back in 2022 when it first gripped me and wouldn’t let go. Now here we are, in the beginning of 2025, and it’s finally returned, after I spent actual years holding off on rewatching it so I could have the freshest eyes possible. To get you ready to head into the office once again, I want to talk deeply about the themes and implications of the first season. If you haven’t seen it yet and want to, don’t worry, I’m going to avoid major spoilers. If you haven’t seen it yet and you’re on the fence, I’m hoping this will convince you to watch it. And thankfully, Apple TV is doing weekly Friday episodes instead of a binge drop, so there’s still plenty of time to catch up between episodes.
Severance is a process used by a (definitely pharmaceutical, perhaps more) company called Lumon to surgically alter the brain so that the your memories are geographically split in two. It’s said that the work is so sensitive that some jobs at Lumon require severance and what this does is create a separate you when at the office. This goes way beyond not friending your coworkers on Facebook or letting them follow you on Twitter, it’s a completely different person that never sleeps, has no friends, and lives exclusively in the office. Season 1 starts with the extremely talented Britt Lower waking up on a conference room table with no memories. She’s Helly, she’s told, as she’s greeted by a disembodied voice giving her a survey. Confused and angry, she asks to leave. But she doesn’t. Well, she does, but every time she walks out the door, she walks back in, inexplicably. After several attempts to quit, which has to be approved by her “outie”, the main personality outside of the office, she receives that cold, cold message. The outie is a person, Helly is not. And her outie is 100% on-board with whatever is happening to Helly, so it doesn’t matter that she isn’t.
In Severance, there are mysteries abound. What are they working on that’s so sensitive? The team we see the most of, Macrodata Refinement, groups seemingly random strings of numbers by feeling until they’re out of numbers for the quarter. Why is the technology at Lumon so seemingly out of date? Seriously, what’s with the 70s aesthetic? The computers look more rudimentary than when Matthew Broderick had to hold a phone handset up to his modem to connect to the internet in WarGames. Why are the severed groups kept separate from each other? Why does Lumon seem so cult-like? Their handbook is written more like a Biblical text than anything I got at work, which consisted mostly of meaningless motivational garbage and warnings about insider trading. Just how much power do they have (the town where our severed protagonists live and work is called Kier, a clear reference to the Lumon founder Kier Eagan; he’s even depicted on the license plates; and while we’re talking about license plates, why do they say “a cure, for mankind” in Latin? That sounds like a corporate slogan). And what exactly does Lumon do?
But that’s not what I want to talk about. We can have plenty of discussions on the theories, pick apart the clues, but I can’t do any of that without spoiling the show for you. What I want to focus on more are the implications of severance and the questions raised by the very concept of severing your memories. And that cold, cold message from Helly’s outie.
It’s not just corporate culture, either, which Severance does ask a lot of questions about, it’s the nature of life and identity itself. If you have no memories of your outside self, are you the same person? Who even are we without the memories of who we were? There’s an old saying, that no man ever steps in the same river twice, because he is changed and the river is changed; but we carry those memories with us, we have the echoes of our previous selves rattling around in that squishy gray trap in our skulls. Without those memories, how can we be sure of who we are? Lumon is generous enough to let people use their real first names; up top, our main protagonist, played by the always brilliant and yet somehow still underrated Adam Scott, is depressed widower Mark Scout. We see him crying in his car and always cloaked in darkness when he’s in the outside world, a complete mess, rudderless and adrift in a sea in which he no longer feels complete after the loss of his wife. On the severed floor, he’s the relatively well adjusted Mark S., but only because they told him so and he has to believe it. You’re given a name, kept separate not only from your coworkers (so they don’t find each other on the outside; they’re given staggered entrance and exit times to minimize outside contact), but also from yourself. You don’t even get to know who you are; outside clothes are changed and kept separate, Mark even has to leave his Vostok in the locker in favor of a sterile dial watch. Any reminder of yourself is quite literally checked at the door. Mark is running from the grief of losing his wife, but we all carry things like that with us. We all have pain, grief, and trauma that haunt us, that fly invisibly above our heads like a cloud in an ad for antidepressants. But we have joy as well, we have happy memories, we have formative memories, and they’re part of us too. They’re the parts that make the cloud easier to deal with, the parts that make things better when it seems like they’re all bad. Divorcing yourself from the grief may seem attractive, but at the cost of losing your joy, losing your self, is that worth it?
I suppose that’s a question that you’d have to answer for yourself, if you lived in a world where the severance procedure exists, but I know what my answer would be—and it’s a resounding no. I’ve thought back on the things that I’ve gone through in my life and even my worst days, the ones that creep into my mind when I’m staring at the clock on my bedside table late at night, I wouldn’t give them up, not even for a few hours a day. Because those bad days made me who I am just as much as the good days. As The Babadook showed us, grief isn’t something you get over, even the acceptance stage in the DABDA model doesn’t mean that you’ve let it go; it just means that you learn to live with it, that though it with stays with you, it loses its power. Joy doesn’t. Joy stays with you and doesn’t fade. Sure, the salient details may fade as memories do, but the feelings stay with you and they don’t lose their power. I may not remember the exact route of my driving test, but I definitely remember the feeling the first time I took to the open road as a licensed driver. I wouldn’t trade that, not even for a brief escape from my ghosts.
Severance also asks a lot of questions about work/life balance, a wink-wink-nudge-nudge phrase used often in jobs where the balance is meant to be tipped heavily towards work. I remember getting my first BlackBerry, which somehow was meant to make my work/life balance better, but also seemed to mean that even though I’d get home from work at 7 or 8 at night, I was still supposed to be available. It’s funny how these technological advancements are sold as making our lives better, but the ultimate benefit seems to be with the employer. Now, a severed employee shouldn’t have to worry about taking work home with them, this is a completely different problem. It creates a version of you with no rights, no anchor in the world. It creates an unseen, unknowing, and unknowable slave. That’s not a word I use lightly; I know the weight it carries and I know the history of it in the United States—but it’s also not history in a lot of places and it’s in places that we benefit from. Is slavery acceptable just because we can’t see the slaves? Because it doesn’t affect us personally? Because we don’t know about it? The Good Place addressed the complications of modern life and how difficult it is to live without contributing to harm unknowingly; Severance drives this point home by asking if we’re complicit by being willfully ignorant of the harm to which we contribute.
When the question is asked about what they do at work, which neither the outie nor innie actually know, the cost is raised. The moral cost, that is. Is this separation worth it if the cost is killing people eight hours a day? Not that I think that’s what they’re doing, but I don’t know—and they don’t know either. We have things like fast fashion, almost certainly made in sweatshops in third world countries. We’ve heard of factories with such terrible working conditions that they have safety nets installed to counteract suicide attempts and, hell, even here in the US, the working conditions at companies like Amazon make my complaint about my BlackBerry positively quaint. Even without all that, it calls into question the very idea of separating your work and personal life. How are you supposed to even do that? Am I a person at home and not a person at work? Just an employee, property like the desk where I sat or the water cooler which I huddled around to talk about Game of Thrones? To be fair to my old employer, they actually did a pretty good job at letting you be a human being at work, but I know that’s not the case everywhere. And that’s the question Severance is begging you to ask—you are the person you are and you are that person whether or not you’re at work, so how are you supposed to be someone else just because you walked through a specific set of doors? Time and time again, our protagonists have said the work they do is important. They’re told it’s important. This prompts Helly to ask “Is it really important or is it just important because you say it is?” It’s a salient question when they don’t actually know what they’re doing. But it’s a question that’s applicable to many of our lives. We put work ahead of so many things—family, leisure time, the arts, our hobbies, etc., because it’s something we have to do—and that’s not to say work can’t be important. I certainly wouldn’t imagine a doctor or a nurse having to question the importance of their work, and the pandemic showed us just how many jobs are essential, but in an office setting? Moving numbers around? Is it all that important to the level that we have to exclude other things from our lives? Severance, in addition to being an incredibly well constructed, well acted, and well written mystery, is a terrific vehicle for meaningful philosophical questions about practical, everyday life. We’re not talking about Immanuel Kant and Epictetus here, we’re talking the daily lives that each of us are living right now, today. And that’s part of what makes Severance so brilliant.
I didn’t even mention that in the midst of all this mystery and deep moral questions, there are standout performances by the entire main cast. That may be odd to say, but there’s so much to every character, so much depth and realness to these people inside and out of Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement department, that each one of them gets more than one moment to stand out above the rest from time to time. Of course Britt Lower’s Helly and Adam Scott’s Mark are excellent, but the performance as Irving by John Turturro shows off his masterful ability as an actor and Zach Cherry’s star turn as Dylan took him from the guy I recognized from a bit part in Search Party to a role in another one of prestige TV’s gems, Fallout, and I’m sure there’s more to come from him. Tramell Tillman as Mr. Milchick and Patricia Arquette as Ms. Cobel are also magnetic when on screen. Even the supporting cast is excellent, especially the self-aggrandizing blowhard of a dime store philosopher whose every superficial thought he treats as a revelation, Ricken, played by Michael Churnen. And on top of all that, the show is genuinely hilarious, giving moments of true laugh out loud comedy in amongst the darkness and mystery (sometimes wholly unintentionally, in the case of Ricken). If you haven’t tuned into this show yet, do it. It’s worth getting an Apple TV subscription just for this. It’s that good. Severance marks not just the return of the water cooler talk-worthy show (owing in part to its weekly episodic releases), but the return of appointment television. In an era where so much content is available at any given time, we’re inundated constantly with shows that don’t respect our time because in the streaming space, time works differently, Severance is a show that wants to give you the most from your time and the space to digest, think about, and discuss. Thank goodness for that.
