It seems pretty clear that when the innies are severed, the outies lose something. You especially see this with Dylan. His innie got the part of him that his wife loved. Same deal for Jame and his daughter. Jame doesn’t get the same thrill from abusing Helena as he did before she was severed.
I like that interpretation!
That’s pretty interesting and insightful.
I don’t think it’s that the outies lose something because of severance. What the outies are missing is innocence, and maybe a zest for life. The innies are them before that was beaten out of them by life.
That had been my understanding, plus though that being severed was a different trauma. But I like this one better.
How about…This is all about saving Gemma. “She’s Alive!” - 2 episodes ended with those words. We also know Gemma has many innies. We were also just reminded by Dylan that he, and even Mark, couldn’t tell that Helena was really Helly. So, Mark will save “Gemma”, but leave us wondering which one - does he really know his own wife kind of thing…end season.
or maybe it’ll be a sophie’s choice between saving Helly/Gemma and leave us wondering if it’s innie Mark or outtie Mark making the decision and leave us wondering if it’s Helly/Helena, etc.
It has to be something like that. I really just don’t know how it all works and if you can get stuck in a certain innie form. I guess if you sneak someone out in the wrong way, the only way to switch to your normal outtie self is for Lumon to do it (via the elevator or otherwise)…or is that right? I would guess they would still be innies walking around forever from Season 1 finale if no one ever switched them back, right?
I thought this episode was a big improvement over the previous, which I disliked quite a bit. That said, the one scene/plotline that I thought was a big miss was the interaction between Cobel and Mark/Devon. It is baffling beyond belief for them to not keep asking her for clarification. It’s not like they’re under time pressure. They have hours to kill for contrived reasons. There’s no human reason for them not to just be demanding she tell them everything she knows. And there’s also no particular reason for her to answer cryptically. If she’s going to answer, she’s already revealing Lumon secrets and breaking her oaths and previous loyalties by admitting that Gemma is alive and might die. Cryptic answers in that situation are just a TV show contrivance, and a boring and overused one at that.
That said, I liked just about everything else. I wish it had been a bit more clear why Irving went along with Bert. If someone says “I need you to come with me” you’re allowed to say “no” or “why”. But it was emotionally powerful enough that I didn’t mind. And I enjoyed the Hellie and Dylan stuff, and particularly Milchick.
The big difference I see between this season so far and season 1 is that in season 1, there were weird things that we didn’t understand, but the characters were curious about them. Imagine a version of season 1 in which the severance procedure and severance floor were as we saw, but we never had any of the business with Helly trying to send messages, trying to escape, trying to threaten her outie, etc. All of that stuff was great fun to watch, but it also answered our questions along the lines of “hey, why don’t the characters just…”. I feel like that level of well-thought-out-ness has been missing this season.
We’re just loving this new season.
For my money, the casting agent who found that unnerving young lady should win an Emmy.
She’s PERFECT.
Ether it does or it doesn’t. Who could say?
Or,
Mark pulls off his mask to reveal that he’s actually Cobel.
If we are doing predictions mine is that every character in the show has been severed from people living in a world with late model cars and office equipment.
Ahhh, the cars of Severance.
I notice every “not quite a particular model” car, but my wife, who’s not a car aficionado, dosen’t.
And a Reddit thread from Season One:
The TL;DR on the Autopian link is that Kier is in a country like Cuba where new imported cars are embargoed. Maybe. I sure would love for it to be more than just a stylistic choice.
The other option that I keep thinking about:
Why do we assume the “outie” world is the same one we’re living in?
Evidence for that keeps popping up… cars, equipment, tech are all different than “our world”.
And what about Mr. Mitchick saying:
That is the highest waterfall in the world.
Sure, someone said that the innies wouldn’t know he was lying (though Outie Helena was there, wouldn’t she have reacted to that?)…
…But what if it was true? Maybe The Outies’ World doesn’t have much in the way of waterfalls? Maybe Niagara is just a flat river between NY and Canada.
What else? No “natural bridge” rock formations? Or National Parks? And come to think of it, we haven’t seen any Pez dispensers or View-Masters… aha!
That’s a really huge leap. I go with the simple solution: he was lying. Just like I doubt they were actually fed “copious amounts of luxary meats” at the camp.
From that article, here’s Dan Erickson’s (one of the writers) explanation:
[W]e used cars from a lot of different time periods to give a slight sense of disorientation. At Lumon, the Innies are intentionally made to feel unmoored from time and space, and that bleeds into the town a bit too. We wanted the town to feel like an extension of Lumon in a way.
So assuming he’s not hiding some deeper meaning (a big assumption), it’s a style choice, but style with a specific purpose, not not just style for the sake of style. That’s believable to me.
I think the rest of the argument, that Kier is some separate country, ignores several things. In the first episode, Mark asks Helly to “name a state” and she says Delaware. They use regular US currency. The address for Kier includes a US-style zip code.
Not to mention the whole subplot with the congressman’s wife. It’s very clear it’s the US, just with some alt-history changes due to the influence of the Egans.
The technology and cultural anachronisms are clearly style choices on the part of the team. I don’t expect an in-universe explanation that is internally consistent or makes sense.
And I don’t say that as a criticism… mood and metaphor are just as valid reasons as plot or ‘in world realism’ to make artistic choices.
I say Ricken is neither. At its core, this is a show about different kinds of trauma and how it affects people. The second scene of the entire show is Mark crying in his car. Devon made a point to call out that Gemma’s death affect her and Ricken as well. You can see in the flashback that Ricken is, while still a little odd, a lot more normal than his current self.
So slight that I never noticed it. It isn’t like they were driving Model Ts or 1950s land tanks. They all seem like bland, generic-looking cars to me.