Also, Britt Lower is really good at walking. I could watch her walk for hours.
I imagine will see more from Helena’s point of view next season, but I think this makes it clear that she’s a true believer in Severance. I think she has bigger plans than just taking a few pictures.
Or…she’s a rebel. Maybe she knows that her innie would never submit and this is her way of bringing the whole thing down from the inside. All of the other severed probably had to pass certain psychological tests to confirm that their psyches were fundamentally submissive. Helena was in a position to bypass such tests.
But what would have been the point of the coverup? It got revealed to the board anyway a few days later, and nothing essentially changed.
Well, I think the point of the cover-up on Cobel’s side was to cover her ass and not get fired. The cover-up on Helena’s side was to not pull the plug on whatever her project is. And I don’t think we know who revealed the info to the board did we?
Cobel assumed that Graner spilled the beans. His motivations will remain a mystery.
Cobel’s reasons aren’t a mystery. The question is why Helena Eagan–and anyone who treated her–would participate in a coverup.
It doesn’t seem like the exposure of the incident to the board and to Jame Eagan has actually changed anything for Helena or Helly. So, what was the point?
It could be as simple as “I don’t want my dad to worry about me.”
I am judicious in what I share with my parents because sometimes I just don’t need the drama.
I suspect she is neither a true believer nor a secret mole but as someone raised in her family and in corporate America is simply helping the organization to do whatever it takes to increase its profits.
Among other things I see this show as a critique of capitalism, which trains us to follow orders in order to make a living without thinking about the moral and ethical consequences of what we are doing.
Ms. Casey has been alive 107 hours. So if we take 16 hours as an average waking day, she has been alive for less than a week. That’s heartbreaking, knowing that she doesn’t have an outie.
But she’s not awake all day; just when she’s needed
Yes, I know. What is your point? From her point of view, she has experienced a total waking time of less that a week. That’s my point.
I thought you were saying she was alive for only a week; not awake. Sorry.
From her point of view, being awake and being alive are the same thing. That’s why she says “My life has been 107 hours long.” She doesn’t have an outie, so she experienced living only while she was awakened for work purposes.
It was your 16 hour waking day comment that threw me. Her personality has probably been alive for years (I don’t think the show has made it clear how long ago Gemma “died”). But she has only been allowed 107 hours of consciousness - and thar horrible ratio between life and awareness is what’s so tragic.
I was comparing it to the life of a regular person. We experience approximately 16 hours of waking life a day. Divide that into the 107 hours that she has been awake, she has experienced a “life” of less than a week.
It is strongly suggested that she has experienced multiple “lives” since her “death” in the car crash, with her memories periodically wiped on the Testing Floor. So while the current iteration of Ms. Casey has had only 107 hours of consciousness, her physical body has had more.
That doesn’t exactly make it less horrifying or tragic.
Just finished watching season 1. Excellent show, and a very refreshing change of pace from the usual.
There is clear Philip K Dick inspiration here, but what I thought of first was the video game The Stanley Parable, in which you’re stuck in a surreal office, with little knowledge of why you’re there or what you actually do. And, apparently, that was an influence (among a few others, like Brazil and Office Space):
I enjoyed the surreal nature of the basement. I hope they leave some parts unexplained. How is it that the departments can hardly find each other, and yet no one seems to get lost in the halls? Do they go on for miles and miles, or are they just convoluted? We saw a map, but I don’t trust it.
I have some headcanon for the code detectors. It’s not some super-advanced technology after all. Even Helly thought it was sci-fi nonsense, IIRC. Instead, it’s just a short stop on the elevator ride, with a third severed personality enabled at an inspection station, or perhaps you’re set to the aforementioned “goldfish” mode. Regardless, people there perform a thorough but otherwise ordinary inspection, maybe with an X-ray in case you swallowed something. There’s no fancy symbol detector, just some people that can spot if you wrote something on your arm or shoved a post-it in your pocket.
I’m not 100% sure that fits with what we saw of Helly’s suicide attempt, but there are a few unknowns about that anyway. There was the alarm that went off when Helly tried to leave with the note, but we also know there are cameras everywhere and she was not particularly secretive with that attempt, so maybe that wasn’t the code detector at all. I think there’s enough wiggle room to make it work.
While I knew this thread existed, I wanted to watch the show again before reading about it, as I wished I had done that with some of my other favorite shows. I just finished watching the season a second time, and am glad I did, as I missed a few things the first time. Here are some of my thoughts and guesses. (I’ll go back and read this thread afterwards, as I’m sure some of this will already have been discussed, and I’ll be flat-out wrong on others).
Needless to say, major spoilers coming:
So we learn that Helly is actually an Eagan. She evidently volunteered to undergo the Severance procedure as part of some demonstration that she really believes in it. And she went in anonymously, at least as far as her unsevered management team of Cobel, Milchick and Graner knew. Apparently the leadership at the Corporate level down to Natalie did know both her innie and outie personas.
That all leads to one big question I have. If Helly is an Eagan, then I would think that the Eagan family should be very interested in every stage of her initiation and integration process, and give her the best resources to help her transition to being a happy innie. Instead, they allow her video interview to be conducted by Milchick, who obviously had no idea she was an Eagan at all (he told her a story of the how the founder drank raw eggs in the morning, and she responded “I’ve heard”). And then, once in Cobel’s control, her initiation is handled by Mark, who is doing it for the first time (basically still in training) and being assisted by Irv. Would such an important person be expected to be integrated by a newly-promoted manager trainee and his colleague? Perhaps the answer is that they will all ultimately be equal as Kier’s Children? That does seem to be the company’s ultimate goal. It may or may not be significant that they allowed a female, and not male, heir take the plunge. We also have no idea on any other issues she’s had in her personal life, and may have decided to do it for the same reasons as the others, which is to use work to completely escape their personal lives for 8 hours a day. For those like me who’ve worked on salary in office settings for most of our careers, we’ve certainly come across people who use their jobs as an escape. I guess Severance is just this concept to the next level. Also interesting is that there is obviously nothing particularly lucrative about being severed. Mark and the others seem to live very middle class lives.
One thing that is driven home in the show is that the Severance procedure is well-known in society and also very controversial. While “half the town” works for Lumon, it seems the proportion of Lumon employees who have been severed is still relatively low. We learn in the final episode of the season that outie Irv seems to have been researching severed Lumon workers (and perhaps only became severed himself just to get closer to Burt?). Irv’s list wasn’t very long, and Lumon housing is pretty empty still, which makes me think that the procedure is still pretty new.
That brings us to the question of Lumon’s business model. Considering all the products with Lumon’s name on them, the company seems to be much larger and much better-resourced than what we see in the severed area that holds the MDR and OND departments. There are really only 3 unsevered people running the whole operation: Cobel, Milchick, and Graner. So while the corporation is well-resourced (large building, many employees, glitzy parties), the severed area including the MDR department is not. While there are security cameras, they don’t always seem to be monitored, and there are areas such as the closet and toilet that are obviously not monitored. If the department is that important, then I would think there would be many more eyes on them watching their every move. Instead, the workers are able to walk the halls, draw maps, read a book, make plans, etc. without any intervention. Once in a while, Milchick interrupts things. But he has many jobs, from onboarding to break room activity to polygraph administration to photographer to party planner. Even Mark is shown to handle numerous housekeeping and administrative tasks. One possible goal of the Severance procedure, from Lumon’s perspective, is to get the most out of their employees with little to return to them. Waffle parties and small trinkets could be all it takes to make them happy.
With the knowledge that Cobel purposely lives as Mark’s neighbor and injects herself in his life, my belief is that he (and perhaps the whole department) is are part of her own personal study. We do learn that she believes that reintegration is possible, while the Board does not. With her obvious dedication to Kier Eagan, perhaps this was her way of serving his memory. Did she somehow manage to get Mark’s wife’s dead body to turn her into Ms. Casey (or clone her) as a way to see if Mark’s innie has some kind of reaction? Ms. Casey had tears in her eyes after telling Mark that she was being terminated (but tellingly taking the elevator down, and not up).
Did Cobel she set up her residence next to Mark knowing that Petey would eventually look for him? If so, why didn’t she monitor him better? It seems like she didn’t have the resources, which suggests she was doing all of it in her own. Mark was able call out sick from work, meet with Petey, bring him home, and host him for a while until his ultimate demise. BTW, it interesting that the brain implants aren’t equipped with any GPS. It seems that Lumon was a bit overconfident on how well the technology would work, and thus had no built-in safeguards. I also guess that Reghabi was able to prevent the Overtime Contingency to be used on Petey. At least I don’t remember him describing any visits from Milchick.
The fact that Lumon uses such old school tech in the MDR office is also interesting. It’s probably far more expensive to maintain and replace that older hardware than just buying modern versions. Could it be that they fear some sort of internet hacking, and thus want to ensure that there is ability for any outsiders to spy in on them?
As for the actual work that MDR does (and OND for that matter), it’s kept intentionally vague. But are they really doing any work at all? Identifying and capturing the “bad” numbers seems like a game as part of a test. If Lumon can keep their employees happy by simply having them believe that they are performing something of value, they can control them forever. Very much how a cult would operate.
This reminds me of Camus’ take on Sisyphus (the Greek mythological character who is “punished” by having to roll a heavy stone up a hill, only to have it continually roll back down… forever). Camus posits that Sisyphus was basically happy because he had a purpose and got a sense of fulfillment every time he reached the top of the hill. Is that really different than the lives that most of us live? Kind of a microcosm of the human condition. Lumon seems to want to use to this control their employees and expand their control over more and more of them. Remember the satisfaction that they all get when Helly completes the quota on time, even when they have no idea the purpose? Even Cobel and Milchick were rooting for her. Their meeting with OND suggested that OND also had no idea of their own purpose either.
Around Episode 6, I realized that Mark’s innie and outie were both struggling with the same issue: they were both trying their best to play the “company man” role until the accumulation of clues suggesting something wasn’t right forced their human curiosity to win out. Also interesting is that there has to be some knowledge of the external world in order to function as an innie. There are many references to external culture, particularly some that Dylan brings up, that suggests that innie minds are not completed detached from their outie selves. His reference to “MILF’s”, for example. Also, when Irv goes home and the Overtime Contingency is turned on, he seems to know to look in the crate in the closet. Similarly, when inside the security room, Helly seems to know exactly where to look to find the OT Contingency procedure instructions. And when they see Cobel coming down the elevator, she says “She won’t come here”. after which Cobel is stopped and asked to speak to the Board. BTW, you would think they would have had a better plan than to have Dylan barely reach both buttons to keep them pressed.
Finally, there is also a “love conquers all” element. It’s only when the innies all discover love on the inside - Irv’s for Burt, Dylan’s for his kids, Mark’s for Ms. Casey and Helly’s for Mark - that they want to be freed.
Other random musings:
The music in the show is perfect. They use the same theme throughout.
Petey’s cell phone sure has great battery power!
Irv’s accent turns hilariously to faux-British when in the presence of Burt.
The original brain implant had blue and green lights? Interesting for something meant to be implanted in a brain.
I thought it was clear from the stairwell scenes that he knew exactly who she was.