Anyone watching Severance (new show on Apple TV)?

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My wife and I just watched all of season 1 of Severance and we loved it. Probably the best new show we’ve seen the last year or so.

Any time I watch a show like this, though, I question if it has any ability to still be good in season 3-5 or so. I can’t picture season 2 at this point. Now that the innies are not only aware of their situation and the outside world…but also have red-alerted Lumon and its board, how can this show continue in any way similar to season 1 at all?

I have not read this thread, but is there any indication what Lumon does, then? Nothing? Everything? Macrodata Refinement was just busy work?

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Lots of theories. No data. There’s one theory I’ve heard which rings true to me, caveat emptor.

The Eagans and Lumon are in the immortality/cloning business. The idea is that somehow Lumon is creating new bodies for the family and/or the elites to which they transfer their consciousness to during the “revolving”. One thought is that the various Lumon departments are used to essentially train the incubating vessel or otherwise make it a suitable destination for a consciousness. Maybe they are “wiring up” them up or something. This would suggest that Macrodata Refinement might be being shown “data” from a consciousness and their emotional reaction somehow programs the new body to respond to emotions. Optics and Design similarly could be training the new brain to process visual inputs or how to visualize/remember things.

Obviously a lot of unsupported speculation but it feels like it’s on the right track to me.

Here’s another loosely related theory which could also be plausible.

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It does not seem to be busy work as the board seemed to be concerned about making quota in meetings with the non severed management.

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I hope we get to see more Outie-Helly next season. She must be a true believer, considering she never really needed to be severed. They could’ve just made up a bunch of pictures claiming it was her innie.

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(This post contains spoilers for all of S1.)

Well, presumably they’ve been actually making some product or service for the past 100 years that results in their wealth and power, which presumably is not immortality/cloning. But it’s certainly possible that they are a pharmaceutical company which actually makes and sells pharmaceuticals, or something, but also has some other inner secret aim.

Definitely the best show I’ve seen in a while. I do think it was maybe 5% too pretentious and self-clever sometimes with fancy cuts and stuff. I was VERY lost as to what was going on when we were cutting between Dylan at his waffle party and Cobel trashing her shrine. And while I appreciate they though about a LOT of the obvious things a lesser show wouldn’t think of, w.r.t. sending messages back and forth, I wish they’d covered the question of what if an innie just refuses to work? Remember, the innies, from their own perspective, are just doing a job as a straightforward economic exchange. So from the perspective of an innie, if they really really want to “get fired” and cease to exist, all they have to do is make it not economically profitable for Lumon to employ them. So, just refusing to work should do it. Or, more than that, just going around smashing everything.

We the viewer strongly suspect that wouldn’t work. But from the innie’s perspective, it should. Hellie should at least have considered it.

But I do love lots of the clever little world-building ideas. For instance, that the innies are all just totally hooked by Ricken’s awful self-help book. Because, why wouldn’t they be? They have no frame of reference, etc.

I also give full props for two of the biggest mike drop twists I can remember in a long time… the identity of Mark’s dead wife, and the outie identity of Hellie.

What I think will really determine where this show ends up in the pantheon of excellent TV is whether, when we’ve see all there is to see, the mysteries from S1 end up having genuinely satisfying answers. Very few shows as mystery-oriented as this one have really nailed that. And quite a few (I’m looking at you, Battlestar Galactica and particularly Lost) have failed that test spectacularly.

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I love that the author is actually a self-doubting anxiety-ridden guy, but they all love his book because he…well, he also has two personalities! His book-self is kind of his “innie”, calm and confident. His real self is the “outie” that is nothing like that.

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As a viewer, I’m willing to bet that time in the Break Room is a sufficient deterrent. And it sounds like the Testing Floor is the solution to hold outs.

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Sure, but she doesn’t know about that initially. I’m not saying I wanted to see a plot arc or even a mini arc of Helly going on strike. I’m just saying that it’s a very obvious strategy she should employ, and for the most part the show was good about acknowledging such. “I’m just not going to work at all, what are you going to do, FIRE me?” is so obvious that it should be at least mentioned in passing.

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It’s been a while since I watched, but isn’t that sort of what she does? She might not go on strike exactly, but I’m sure she’s kind of slack work wise.

OB

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I just finished it.

I had never heard of this show until it was recommended in a Red Letter Media YouTube video. And then a few days later, I got an offer for three months free on Apple TV Plus.

So I blew through the nine episodes in a couple of days over this long weekend. Absolutely fascinating show. I had never seen anything like it. I usually avoid “dark sci-fi”/Black Mirror type stuff, but this was a real treat.

The story points were all surprises to me. Really, really good.

The season ended with a cliff-hanger. I hope it’s not one of those situations in which the writers didn’t write an ending yet. Because that usually turns out bad (see our current conversation about Game of Thrones).

One of the things I really liked was the retro technology. Most everything was switches and dials and buttons. It made me feel really nostalgic for hte 1970s and 1980s. And the cars also were from that era, it seemed like.

But really, the revelation that in severing memories, you were creating a class of slaves that inhabited the same bodies as free people. Fascinating concept.

(Red Letter Media also recommended Pig with Nicolas Cage, which also turned out to be really good.)

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After the initial despair, and even before the suicide attempt, I think innie Hillie was less interested in ending her own existence than getting revenge on her outie and Lumon.

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Yes, the foodless dinner party at the beginning of the season showed that they were all straining to kiss his ass, especially the guy who found the baby.

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I have to say, I felt a kind of sincere joy when the wellness director’s identity was revealed. But I have always been a hopeless romantic.

I also didn’t think they would put the baby in real jeopardy.

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I love Redletter as well and was glad they liked Severance. It’s a great season 1, but can it really do 4-5 seasons of this? That was Jay’s thoughts and are also mine.

Pig was good, but I actually might fall into the “not quite as good as everyone says” camp on that one. Nic Cage is even better in Mandy and I also liked him in Prisoners of the Ghostland, which also came out in 2021.

Anyway, Pig is a bit overrated, though I agree his individual performance in it was excellent. The movie? Well, OK.

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Maybe. Will be curious to learn if they bother filling in this bit of the backstory. Lumon could be like the companies Alphabet or Meta in which it’s a shell company with a bunch of hyper-profitable brands underneath it paying the bills. The outside world might assume that Lumon doesn’t really do anything besides manage shareholders and budgets. The situation might be the inverse where Lumon is the skunkworks arm of some behemoth multinational and was spun off to keep the details hush hush. Maybe it’s a thing like Nokia or 3M that started with something mundane years ago before evolving into something totally dissimilar.

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If they can only do one or two seasons, then they should just do one or two seasons. Look at the Watchmen series on HBO. One season. Done.

My thought isn’t “can they do 4-5 seasons.” Mine is “I hope they end it when the story should end.”

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The creator joked that he has 20 seasons planned, but my guess is they’ll probably go for 4-6 seasons. That’s about the standard for the new era of “Prestige” television.

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That is the same basic idea. I think that Severance has not stated how long it is going to run, so it could be open ended or they may have a set idea in mind.

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The creator (Dan Erickson) has talked about where the story goes in a few interviews. If you take him at his word, he knows the overall story but has flexibility within that framework.

To me, it was important to really figure out as much of it as we could before we got into telling the story, because it’s like once you understand the maze you’re in, then you can play in it. That said, we do have a pretty good conception of what the alpha plan is for Lumon—what their overall intention is, and what role these characters are going to play. There’s definitely a framework that we have in mind.

He’s thrown out suggestions of anywhere from two to six or seven seasons. Given the reaction to the first season, I can’t imagine they’ll stop at two.

From the beginning, obviously with any show, you don’t know how long you’re going to have to tell the story. So, I always tried to keep it fluid enough that this is a story we could tell in two seasons, this is a story we could tell in six seasons.

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I’m re-watching. There is one plot point I don’t get. I don’t know whether we are talking spoilers here so …

I don’t understand how …

Ms. Cobel kept the news of Helly R.’s attempted suicide secret from the board. Helena Eagan awakened while hanging and then spent a few days in the hospital. So, she would have had to agree not to tell anyone she knew, including her father, what was going on. And it wouldn’t just be her keeping quiet. It would have required an active coverup. Not even Mr. Graner knew that Cobel was covering it up, so he wasn’t helping her do it. How could that have happened?