Or in coma if not. Which is where Gemma might be now?
Mark’s outie watch is a Vostok Komandirskie. I read in an article that the one in the show is actually owned by the show propmaster. Apparently they’re used a lot in movies etc… because they come in hundreds of dial and strap variations.
Vostok’s are super cheap. Not particularly accurate, but also extremely tough. I’ve owned several over the years.
That makes sense. I was hung-up on the typical way we always see them go from Outtie/Innie - clear distinctions between the outside world vs the severed floor world.
But really, it’s just a floor or more technically just a switch that is flipped. That can be done anywhere. Gemma’s “outtie” could just be in another room inside the building.
Huh. Maybe Miss Huang wasn’t a very good crossing guard?
A great one! She dived in front of a car to push a smaller child out of harm’s way! Driver was speeding and texting. …
Doesn’t the fact that Miss Huang knows she was a crossing guard mean she’s not severed? So she’s not an innie?
Plus, she’s management, isn’t she? Management seems to consist of unsevered persons?
My imagining is that any innies whose outies are comatose are subject to different rules. Ms. Casey was management too. Also Miss Huang may believe she was a crossing guard because she was told that. True or not.
I guess that makes the difference in the dates less likely to be a flub. No prop master is going to get it right 100% of the time, but when it’s your own personal watch, you probably know it pretty intimately making that kind of lapse much less likely.
Was she management or was she just head of her (one person?) department, like Petey, Mark and Burt? There seems to be a difference.
I suspect Ms. Casey (heck, maybe the whole severed floor) is just there to prep Mark to achieve whatever “Cold Harbor” is.
Hmm. Not sure.
What would be the purpose of confining a comatose person who was brought back to consciousness via severance to the severed floor? If there is no outtie mind to go with the innie mind then your just left with single consciousness again.
For the purpose of having a slave who loses consciousness if they try to escape?
I think coma is a bad description. I really doubt there are severed people who are comatose in outie life and normal as innies.
For Gemma, I see two possibilities: she would be normal is she were allowed off the severed floor, but given that she’s supposed to be dead, that’s not possible. So she’s “deactivated” when she’s not needed. If you want to think of it as being in a coma, it’s her innie that’s comatose.
The other possibility is that she’s some clone or something that only exists in a severed state.
Just throwing this out there, but what if the characters have been severed twice? The world of the “outies” is almost as weird as that of the severed floor, and as Cobel/Solvig discovered, may also be a closed one. Maybe the real outies are yet to be introduced. Maybe they are all coma patients.
That’s a LOT of severed people and infrastructure to build a giant company town around, complete with door factory. But I don’t think the idea is without merit - the outtie world as we’ve seen it is still deeply weird.
Anyone who doesn’t laugh at that “door prize” joke has had some portion of their brain rewired.
Where else would they be? Yes their outie is thought of as dead. The bringing them back is an experiment in service of … something. Maybe bringing back someone currently cryogenically stored but having control of the balance of temperaments they come back to consciousness with, and control over episodic memory as well?
Looking at the list of protocols, I think it’s likely they use Clean Slate to bring back Irving’s innie. John Turturro is too good to restrict him to only outie scenes, and there could be some interesting plotlines around him as a new innie with no memories. How much of his personality is innate and carries over? Does whatever innie-outie communication he had still work?
If true, I wonder why they wouldn’t have done that instead of firing Mark’s co-workers in the season opener.
In the end, it’s a show and some things are done for narrative purposes. Wiping them all in the opener isn’t a good story. Wiping Irv now potentially is.
Of course, they consistently go in ways I don’t expect, so best bet is something completely different than whatever I guess.
They clearly need Mark for some reason, they don’t care about the other three. They only brought the other three back because Mark wouldn’t work without them.