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Severance (season one *spoiler* thread)

13K views 128 replies 32 participants last post by  cmontyburns 
#1 ·
The other thread has never been marked for spoilers, so here's one where we don't have to watch our language.

* SPOILERS for S01E01 - S01E5 "The Grim Barbarity of Optics & Design" FROM HERE *
 
#116 ·
Just now reading through this thread because my wife and I finally finished watching last night. We didn't start until all the episodes were available, but then as we got nearer to the end we started increasing the time between viewings because we didn't want it to be over. I don't think we've been so totally captivated by a TV show since Mr. Robot.

I think the only thing I can add that hasn't already been mentioned is that, going forward, it should be standard that Turturro and Walken can only work in tandem.
 
#28 ·
Random thoughts from E8:

Irv: We learned a lot of random things from Irv's experience:

1. A few episodes ago Ms. Casey told him "Your outie loves the sound of radar". "Radar" is the name of his dog, so at some of the things the Wellness Counselor says are based on reality, perhaps as a way of testing for a reaction.
2. Irv's almost certainly been down the corridor leading to the Testing Floor Elevator (you can see the down arrow in his paintings), and it's leaking through. The paint is also leaking through to his innie.
3. That also explains the black paint under his nails, and the staying up all night drinking coffee explains why he dozes off at work.

Mark:
1. It's gonna be really weird if Mark wakes up while Ricken is talking from his book.

Overtime:
1. I really want to know what a lot of those other modes aside from Overtime do, like Goldfish.
2. I'm tempted to see if there are easter eggs or other things to learn from the dozens of other names on the panel in that control room.

Things that bug me:
1. We've seen that the basement at Lumon has cameras everywhere, but it seems like they seldom watch it realtime; nobody saw the leadup to Helly's suicide attempt, and a huge number of the Data Refinement shenanigans should have been caught if anyone was watching the video feeds. You'd think that when the employees were caught after they put the locked door on their office, that they'd go back and review and see that Mark has a card he shouldn't have.
 
#33 ·
Random thoughts from E8:

Irv: We learned a lot of random things from Irv's experience:

1. A few episodes ago Ms. Casey told him "Your outie loves the sound of radar". "Radar" is the name of his dog, so at some of the things the Wellness Counselor says are based on reality, perhaps as a way of testing for a reaction.
2. Irv's almost certainly been down the corridor leading to the Testing Floor Elevator (you can see the down arrow in his paintings), and it's leaking through. The paint is also leaking through to his innie.
3. That also explains the black paint under his nails, and the staying up all night drinking coffee explains why he dozes off at work.
Yes, it was great connecting those dots. Both innie and outie are being haunted by the other's memories. It's a bit poignant that Irving apparently is going to wake up and find out he may have a more vibrant innie life than he has an outie one.

Mark:
1. It's gonna be really weird if Mark wakes up while Ricken is talking from his book.
Who knows if the cuts are meant to imply this is all happening simultaneously, but if so it appears Mark will wake up while hugging Harmony/Mrs. Selvig. I hope it's not just a matter of plot convenience that she was just fired and is mad at Lumon and thus may not be inclined to do anything when she realizes she is suddenly talking to Mark S. I think the show is smarter than that though.

Things that bug me:
1. We've seen that the basement at Lumon has cameras everywhere, but it seems like they seldom watch it realtime; nobody saw the leadup to Helly's suicide attempt, and a huge number of the Data Refinement shenanigans should have been caught if anyone was watching the video feeds. You'd think that when the employees were caught after they put the locked door on their office, that they'd go back and review and see that Mark has a card he shouldn't have.
My version of that nit is that they would likely have known Graner's body was missing his key card, and even if they didn't, they surely would have deactivated it. So that one is obviously a plot convenience.
 
#41 ·
I would have been surprised had this news not come, but still, it's good to have it official now:


"It's really exciting to see the response from people who are loving the show — and the level of fan engagement," said Stiller. "It has been a long road bringing 'Severance' to television. I first read Dan's pilot over five years ago. It has always been a multi-season story, and I'm really happy we get to continue it. I'm grateful to our partners at Apple TV+ who have been behind it the whole way. Praise Keir!"
 
#62 ·
I was going to post that as well. Here are a couple more reads:

Interview with creator Dan Erickson, EW.com:


Interview with Britt Lower, Vanity Fair:


Both Erickson, in the EW interview, and Stiller, in the RS interview, say that Erickson wanted to reveal a little more at the end of season one, but Stiller felt like where they ended it was the best choice, dramatically, and convinced Erickson to hold more back. Stiller has said this before, but it's still cool to read Erickson confirming that he knows the answers to all the stuff we are wondering -- what the MDR team actually do, how Gemma came to be Ms. Casey, what the goats are for, etc. We're not being shown things just for WTF purposes.
 
#70 ·
Of all the meticulous planning, they really didn't think of a better way to hold the levers open? seriously? that fat short guy motionless in that awkward position without a single flinch for an hour is absolutely impossible. And his glasses remained at the tip of his nose the entire time!

That was totally ridiculous.
 
#86 ·
It did for me, I thought they messaged pretty well she was supporting the company/family line and to use a much abused quote "failure was not an option" she needed to go through severance to prove it was acceptable and nothing was going to stop that.
 
#2 ·
Creator Dan Erickson reputedly had the season and beyond well mapped-out, so I really hope WTF moments like the room full of baby goats ("they're not ready!") isn't a random "let's throw in something weird here" detail. I have faith that it isn't. Ready for what? :oops:

Mark's sister Devon is a great character. Funny, grounded, smart. It's a good performance, because on paper I can't see why on earth she tolerates Ricken, much less is having a baby with him, but somehow the performance makes it work.

Ricken, meanwhile, is an oddly pivotal character given the effect his book is having on the Mark he didn't give it to.

I'm continuing to love Britt Lower's Helly. I wonder if we'll ever get to know why her outie is such a bizniatch. I felt a little bad for Mark S when Ricken's book finally gives him the tools to understand what she is struggling with and she throws his outreach in his face. "I'm not your new Petey." Fortunately they find baby goats after that and she realizes having an ally might be a good idea.

I love Dichen Lachman but I can't decide if she's giving a... not bad, but off maybe?... performance. The non-severed denizens of the floor like Harmony and Milchick are, as we've seen, putting on performances for the employees, but Lachman's Ms. Casey has this ethereal, spaced-out personality that seems like she might be severed but almost certainly isn't. It doesn't bother me and I think it works in context, but it's curious.

It seems ridiculous at first that the divisions could believe all these rumors about each other, but then I think that the innies are basically all infants, with no practical life experience to draw from that would tell them otherwise. So why not. Clever Milchick running a code-whatever on Irving with the copy machine to try to keep him from spending time in O&D.

None of these people actually get much work done!
 
#11 ·
* SPOILERS FOR S01E06 "Hide and Seek" FROM HERE *

I love Dichen Lachman but I can't decide if she's giving a... not bad, but off maybe?... performance. The non-severed denizens of the floor like Harmony and Milchick are, as we've seen, putting on performances for the employees, but Lachman's Ms. Casey has this ethereal, spaced-out personality that seems like she might be severed but almost certainly isn't. It doesn't bother me and I think it works in context, but it's curious.
So Ms. Casey IS a severed (part-time) worker. OK.

I just knew when Devon and Ricken needed a lactation nurse that Harmony/Mrs. Selvig would show up. How creepy she put the baby to sleep humming the Lumon song about Keir. At least we know Harmony is a true believer, judging from the fact that her bedroom in in the bunker-like basement next to a Keir shrine.

Interesting! They can wake the innies up whenever they want. Mr. Milchick even wears his white short-sleeved shirt out into the world. Can't wait to see what Dylan thinks of having seen his outie's kid (and his closet) next episode.

Also will be revealing what new security measures were installed. It seems to be a bit of a race now for Harmony, Michick and the rest to put the clamps back on the severed employees before the employees break too far free of their shackles. I was kind of hoping that Mark S. would refuse to go into the break room. What did they do to him in there? Rapped his knuckles? Made him punch the wall?

I wonder if the pictographic card that Dylan stole was just a reason to show us activating an innie outside or if there will be more explanation of what those cards are for. I need to go back to that point and study what else was on them.

In looking up who plays Alexa, Nikki James, I learned she is a Tony winner (for Book of Mormon). Even the small parts on this show have a pedigree! I like Alexa. I'd like to meet an Alexa.

So Mr. Graner is on the way to the school. Not sure how Mark got there ahead of him as it seemed Graner visited Harmony at home well before Mark and Alexa hooked up and Mark fished the phone out of the trash, but who knows. Maybe Graner didn't go right there. Seems like he had arrived right at the end of the episode though.

"F*** You Lumon!" is stuck in my head.
 
#3 ·
Yes I am SO curious about Helly's outie. What kind of person do you have to be to consign yourself to a hell so terrible that you're willing to commit suicide to escape it, even if you can't remember why? Will we ever get that story?

Ricken's book was absolutely hilarious.
 
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#4 ·
Yes I am SO curious about Helly's outie. What kind of person do you have to be to consign yourself to a hell so terrible that you're willing to commit suicide to escape it, even if you can't remember why? Will we ever get that story?
Well, it's obvious that Outside Hellie doesn't think Inside Hellie is a real person. It's interesting that we already know more about how Outside Hellie (whom we've never really met directly) feel about her Innie than Outside Mark does about his.
 
#52 ·
A wild ride, and I enjoyed it, but I really didn't get that much of a surprise from this episode, it unrolled pretty much the way I expected it:

1. I had long suspected that Helly was in management, and the short "party" shot of her at the tail end of E8 pretty much confirmed that.
2. I figured Innie Mark would eventually see a photo of his "dead" wife, and there's some 'splainin' to do.
3. Basic TV screenwriting means that we'd get the switch flipping off right as the episode ended.
4. I strongly suspected that Innie Mark would out himself by referring to Kobel by that name.

The interesting thing for me is that we still have no idea what the Innies actually do. So a huge potential amount of material for S2.

Other random comments:

1. I loved Britt Lower's facial expressions as she shifted between putting on the corporate smile to blend in, and her look of disgust when nobody was looking. An interesting byproduct of the premise is that I'm cheering for one version of the person, and hating the other
2. While Ricken and his groupies are quite annoying, part of me likes how self-aware he actually is, especially about what outie Mark thinks of him.
3. The particularly lame incentives that Milchick was offering to Dylan. Yeah, he's really going to go for a coffee cozy right now.
 
#55 ·
Amazing season. One theory I saw elsewhere. Father Egan mentioned about his revolving. After they (the Egans and maybe other founders) die they upload their memories/consciousness into the virtual world and are part of the board. The macro data refinement could have something to do with maintaining that virtual consciousness by filtering out anomalies and bad data.
 
#123 ·
I'm pretty confident that I know whats really going on with Severance after having watched it four times. For example what MDR really does with the numbers (teaching the chip to understand emotions beside memory), various symbols in "Kier's" waffle party, whats the deal about kelp? What we can expect next year? And my suspicion that Irv might actually be the inventor/creator of the technology. And all of the many Easter eggs that are easy to miss. (Cobel's runaway car for example)

Go here. I had a lot of fun writing this, so hope you'll enjoy it.
 
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