‘Severance’: The Perfect Show To Not Binge

At first glance, Severance was not an obvious choice for bucking the common-in-2022 trend of streaming services releasing all of a season’s episodes immediately. The premise of Severance, for those not aware, is the existence of technology that makes it possible for a person to shed all their memories and become someone else with more-or-less the same personality. The idea isn’t a new one- genre sci-fi like Star Trek uses it all the time. What Severance does differently is that it uses the technologyfor the oddly specific purpose of allowing a normal person, like us (an “outie”) to force our other self (an “innie”) to have a day job at Lumon, a corporation with an aesthetic that blends liminal space with classically creepy IBM messaging.

Binge-watching is the ideal way to consume Severance, because it’s an accurate simulacrum of the lives of the innies themselves. They get to a stopping point (entering the elevator) only to immediately begin another day of work. Because, you see, they have no concept of the world outside the severed floor. Severance discusses, entirely seriously, the at-times-absurd ontological implications of this form of existence throughout its run.

In the first season, one innie attempts suicide, having found their existence that miserable. Although to be more accurate, what this person does is try to murder their outie, which would achieve the same result. An innie who never comes back to work ceases to exist for all practical purposes.

After a dozen episodes where the innies could reasonably assume they’re only going to wake up in the office again, the fourth episode, which aired this week, throws a frankly outrageous and disorienting curveball by having the four innie main characters wake up outside, on a cold mountain. Severance in general is a very unsettling show, and despite presenting this break from routine as a reward (maybe), subsequent events just get creepier and creepier and even more surreal. But appropriately enough, never quite so surreal that the stated explanation necessarily seems impossible.

That sentence having a lot of qualifiers isn’t (just) me trying to avoid spoilers, it’s because despite being a fairly self-contained story that I watched several days ago, I’m still not sure what exactly was going on, or if the fifth episode is just going to revert everything that happened entirely. There’s good reason for that. The third episode ended on the fairly intense cliffhanger of outie Mark, the main character played by Adam Scott, choosing to reintegrate his innie self with his outie self- an act that would effectively destroy innie Mark as a distinct person. Whether innie Mark really “dies” if outie Mark simply regains access to his memories and can become a whole person again is…well…ambiguous. And that kind of ambiguity is pretty much the whole point of the show.

All of which is to say that Severance is very philosophical sci-fi, which is not a genre that audiences tend to appreciate. Showrunner Ben Stiller (yes, that Ben Stiller) wasn’t really sure he’d get a second season at all, is why this is happening so long after the first season. In some ways, the show’s for the better for that. I’d argue Severance Season 1 actually works fairly well just as a standalone story. The events of the final episode are such that it’s entirely plausible all four main characters simply cease to exist because Lumon never recalls them to the office.

Then the first episode rolls around, and it’s still hard to tell what, if anything, is actually going on. Lumon’s woke branding is satirical from our perspective, but the innie characters are rather unsurprisingly skeptical about what’s going on since they’ve never seen woke branding before. The second episode of the second season makes it much more clear what’s been going on from the outie perspective.

Not entirely clear, mind you. And that’s the crux of the genius of Severance and why it’s a show that only really works in a weekly format. There is no mystery if you can binge-watch the show. A single episode might solve one mystery only to put a couple more in its place. And it’s legitimately really fun to speculate about that. Fans of the show have been wondering ever since the first episode whether one character is actually who they claim to be, or just an outie posing as an innie. The show presents clues, confirmed in the fourth episode, so stupidly specific it’s a bit remarkable anyone went to the effort.

This YouTuber went to the trouble of analyzing specific elevator chimes in order to confirm a theory that’s only definitively confirmed in the fourth episode. So maybe, don’t watch that video unless you’re in that sweet spot between the end of the second episode and the end of the fourth episode where you’ve seen all the evidence, are aware of the obvious speculation, but don’t know for sure yet.

There simply isn’t any way to do any of this kind of theorybuilding with the all-at-once streaming model. Why would anyone bother to look into such a thing so closely if they could just go ahead enough episodes to find out for sure? This is the mystery box idea at its best- it’s not just that the box you get at the carnival is exciting because there could be anything inside. You have to believe that there’s something good in the box and that maybe, just maybe, you can get a good guess before you’re all the way home and it’s time to open it.

Kudos to the production team at Severance who time and again have shown that when fans pay attention to detail, it’s not to nitpick, but the highest form of flattery. Easter eggs are lazy. Small details that hint at later plot twists? That’s the good stuff. Don’t give it to me all at once. I’d rather not overdose.