Adam Scott as Mark S in Severance.
Halfway through the second season of Apple’s cult hit Severance, the time has come to ask the question on everyone’s lips. What the hell is going on? Not since the heady days of Lost almost 20 years ago has a television series spawned so many theories, interpretations and trips down internet rabbit holes by obsessed fans trying to solve the puzzles deliberately set by show creator Dan Erickson and producer-director Ben Stiller.
We can only hope that once the show about split identity wraps, it’s less divisive than the Lost finale in 2010 (people are still arguing about whether or not the “survivors” of that plane crash were in purgatory all along, or if the events on the island even really happened). Who knows how long it will be before we finally discover what’s really going on at Lumon. But halfway through the second season – and especially after the remarkable fourth episode, Woe’s Hollow – some ideas are beginning to gain serious traction. Let’s take a look.
Warning: This performance review is packed with spoilers. Only read if you have watched up to episode five of season two of Severance. OK? Let’s go!
Same, but different: S2 opened with a new set of innies.Credit: Apple TV+
Lumon
Let’s start with the company name. It sounds a lot like the Latin word “lumen”, meaning light. A lumen is a measure of visible light (one lumen is roughly equivalent to the light emitted by one wax candle). It’s also pretty close to the word “lemon”, which might be a corollary for another tech company named after a fruit (the show’s aesthetic, with the extensive use of white and sans serif fonts and that massive modernist “campus” office building, has distinct echoes of Apple). And in the Cebuano language spoken in the southern Philippines, lumon has a web of meanings, among them “to live together”, to “go along or get along” and to “proceed”. A tech company focused on the light of intelligence and getting separate entities to work together … it could mean something. You can bet it doesn’t mean nothing.
Helly R (Britt Lower) wakes up, bewildered, on a conference room table in the first episode.Credit: Apple TV+
Cold Harbor
The project Mark and the other innies are working on is named after the site of a major battle in the Civil War, one in which the Union side suffered massive casualties. Lumon was founded by Kier Eagan in 1865, the year the Civil War ended. In season two, episode five (Trojan’s Horse), Milchick tells the story of how Kier Eagan used to wander incognito “in his ether factories” to understand the concerns of his workers (a noble tradition, Milchick called it, in reference to Eagan’s descendent, Helena, infiltrating the severed floor in her outie guise; “spying” the innies called it). Ether is used as a general anaesthetic. Surgery is obviously part of Lumon’s business these days, but to what ends – the pursuit of some antebellum ideal of a slave workforce, perhaps? Hmm.
No ceiling? The four innies venture out … or do they?
Montauk
In the clue- and mythology-dense Woe’s Hollow (season two, episode four), Irving has a dream (or hallucination) in which he finds himself at his desk in the middle of the snow-covered wilderness. He’s working on macrodata refinement, but the file is labelled Montauk, not Cold Harbor. Montauk, a town in upstate New York, holds a special place in the hearts of conspiracy theorists as the site of alleged experiments in psychological warfare and time travel carried out (covertly, of course) by the US military. On the Severance podcast, Ben Stiller gave the clearest indication yet that what’s going on at Lumon is all about mind control. The snowbound episode four, in which the four co-workers find themselves in an ORTBO (Outdoor Retreat and Team Building Occurrence), was “an opportunity just to really dig into the weird mind games that Lumon plays with the innies,” he said. “The strength of the mind control that Milchick has, and they have, over these innies is so strong.” So, Lumon is working on mind control.
The goats
Are the goats being bred for scientific experiments? Or are they being cloned?Credit: Apple TV+
OK, what’s with the goats? One possible explanation is that they are somehow linked to the mind control experiments. Think Jon Ronson’s book (and the film it spawned), The Men Who Stare at Goats, about the US Army’s attempts to develop the ability to telepathically kill goats. Ronson suggested the program was linked to the broader MK-Ultra project, in which the CIA deployed a range of methods – including psychological and physical torture and the use of psychoactive drugs – to control minds (the guinea pigs in these experiments were typically enemy prisoners). The program had its origins in experiments conducted on POWs by the Nazis during World War II and operated in secret for 20 years before being disbanded in 1973. Could the goats be part of Lumon’s experimental regime, cannon fodder for a broader program to create totally subservient workers? Or is this all about …
Cloning
Gwendoline Christie as Lorne in Severance.
The constant references to twinning hint at the possibility of cloning. And remember way back in the first episode when a startled and disoriented Helly wakes up in the boardroom and asks, “Am I livestock?” Well, maybe. Are the goats and the humans being cloned in Lumon’s lower levels? Do the failed experiments get put out to pasture in the Mammalians Nurturable department? Certainly, the humans who abide there – led by Gwendolyn Christie’s Lorne (which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like grass) – look like botched experiments. At least being here is a step up from being sent to …
The Testing Floor
What exactly happens at the end of that long dark corridor, with the ominous red light above the lift doors? Certainly, it only appears to head in one direction, down, and that seems to signal the most final of exits, as per Milchick’s declaration regarding Irving’s fate in season two, episode five. “Our only option was permanent dismissal.”
“So he is dead,” Dylan asked.
“No,” said Milchick. “Irving B’s outie has departed on an elongated cruise voyage.” (Well, that’s a kind of death.)
Milchick’s brief experiment with kindness is over – in his rather withering performance review, he told Drummond he would henceforth be tightening the leash – but he might not have been entirely deceitful on the matter of Irving’s fate. After all, Irv’s outie has been painting scenes of that view of the dark corridor obsessively for a while, suggesting he’s seen it before. Perhaps often, maybe as different iterations of him are produced, tweaked, set to work, and ultimately disposed of when deemed faulty. It’s more likely to be a recurring memory than a recurring dream. Either way, it’s a nightmare.
The mysterious Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), in front of a painting of Kier Eagan in wrathful mood.Credit: Apple TV+
The peasants are revolting
What does Lumon think of its severed workers? Not much. At the start of season two, episode five, Helena – who was nearly drowned in the previous episode – is told she has to go back down as Helly, her innie. She’s aghast at the idea; in her view, two innies – her own alter-ego and Irv – have tried to kill her. “They’re f---ing animals,” she says. Remember, she’s pretty much the boss of this company; any pretext that severance is for the good of the workers just disappeared.
The aristocrats are revolving
In the episode when the three innies get to briefly experience the outside world by invoking the Overtime Contingency (The We We Are, season one, episode nine), Helena has a conversation with her father, Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry), who tells her “one day, you will sit with me at my revolving”. There’s a theory that this refers to some transfer of consciousness from one body to another and that Jame Eagan is really just the latest manifestation of “the Grandfather”, Kier. And if true, that suggests Helena is slated to become the next incarnation.
Dieter Eagan
No idea exactly what the significance of this might be, but keen observers have noted that Kier’s twin brother, whom we first heard about via the Fourth Appendix in Woe’s Hollow, is an anagram of AI-generated. Others have noted how much the text of that tome sounds like Ricken’s work (and remember, he’s now sold his soul to the Lumon devil). Curious.
Who really wrote the Fourth Appendix?Credit: Apple TV+
Did they really go outside?
Woe’s Hollow was a real departure, the first time the innies had been allowed out into the world. But the ORTBO seemed designed to ensure they’d never want to go there again, with only Lumon’s help (four-ply toilet paper, a selection of deli meats) to buffet them against the hostile elements. But was any of it even real? Was it just a simulation? Remember Dylan’s opening observation – “I knew there was no actual ceiling, but this is f---ing insane”. Computer games generally have no “ceiling” (of course, he could just be marvelling at not being in an office for the first time in his conscious life). ORTBO is an anagram of “robot”. And those avatars – or twins? They sure looked like non-player characters. Hmmm.
The big picture
In season two, episode five, we briefly see Mark flipping through computer files at his desk: Allentown, Bellingham, Cairns (all areas where indigenous populations were displaced by settlers), Chicxculub (the site of the meteor impact off the coast of Mexico 66 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs), Cielo (Spanish for heaven). Are we talking about an extinction-level event … for workers? In his performance review, Milchick is reminded by Drummond of the importance of the “mysterious and important” work being done by the Macrodata Refinement team. “Mark Scout’s completion of Cold Harbor will be remembered as one of the greatest moments in the history of this planet,” Drummond says. “It will take place under your stewardship. It’s quite a legacy you will leave.”
OK, look, we don’t really know where any of this is going. But gee, it’s fun trying to figure it out.
Severance streams on Apple TV+.
Do you have any theories about what’s going in Severance? Let us know in the comments below.
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