Severance on Apple TV+ is an incredibly chilling show around work-life balance with a Black Mirror-ish vibe. The show gives a dark spin to how companies look at their employees, their work, and gives a sci-fi spin to concepts such as confidentiality agreements.
For those of you who’ve watched the series so far and are wondering what exactly is happening with the employees of Lumon, you’ve come to the right place. I don’t have all the answers but have a few that can simplify the technical aspects of the premise.
What exactly is the Severance procedure?
Severance is Lumon’s process of inserting a chip in the employees’ brain and splitting their memory into two halves. So when an employee enters the office, the chip switches to the office memory, and when they leave, it switches back to the outside memory.
First off, let me quickly set some context and paint a picture. Lumon is a company that has a department that needs to remain confidential. Nobody knows what exactly happens in that department, not even the employees who work in it. All they do is filter out the bad numbers from the good. We still don’t know what these numbers represent or how the difference between good and bad is identified.
To ensure complete confidentiality, they hire people who are ready to sever their brains. This means that their memory gets split into two halves.
When an employee is in the outside world, they know nothing about what they do at Lumon but just know that they work there. When the same employee is inside Lumon, they only know about their work with numbers and have no idea who they are in the outside world.
The people inside the Lumon call their outside counterparts outies to make that distinction. This is essentially what the Severance process is, and we don’t know much else.
Now that you know what Severance is, let’s bring some perspective to the story through the character of Petey. Petey is an ex-employee who reintegrated both the halves of his memory, and as a result, died. This could’ve been because of the side effects of this process.
However, before Petey died, he left us with many secrets about Lumon. He said how the company was doing something shady but didn’t know what it was. He drew a map of the entire office but didn’t know certain parts.
We also find out from him that senior officials at Lumon, such as Harmony and Milchick, are trying to hide something from regular employees such as Mark and Helly. What they are hiding is still not revealed.
So, there are many questions and no answers. But this also makes me speculate if the explanation of this process is just a diversion. It’s almost like the company uses this process as a front for something bigger, something dirtier.
The show’s opening credits showcase these black gooey shapes of men packed in an office space and moving through it. Even Irving, from time to time, sees that black gooey liquid appears before him.
Could this be an indication of cloning, by any chance? Could Lumon be cloning humans who work in the office, or is there something else that they are hiding?
Whatever the answers are, we will only know in the upcoming episodes. Perhaps by the end of this season, we might get a clearer picture that actually leaves us dumbfounded.
I hope that happens because the show is truly gripping, and a great pay-off would just make the experience complete.
About Severance
Severance is an American science fiction psychological thriller streaming television series created by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle. The plot follows Mark (Scott), an employee of Lumon Industries who agrees to a “severance” program in which his non-work memories are separated from his work memories.
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