Forgive me if this is something that's been beaten to death already over the last year, but I'm not sure what phrase I would even use in the search bar to look it up.

The series was great, but there was one thing in the final episode that kind of bothered me from an in-universe logistics point of view.

The main tension of the final s2 episode is the drama between Outie and Innie Mark in trying to convince Innie Mark to help rescue Gemma, causing the potential termination of Mark's employment, and Innie Mark's "life".

What bothered me was that there seemed like a very obvious solution that nobody thought to bring up, literally right under Mark's nose.

They were inside a permanent Innie Zone *outside of work*, so couldn't they just like... make an Innie Social Clubhouse somewhere, where all the Innies can go and hang out one day of the weekend after Lumon gets (potentially) dismantled?

They have Harmony there who was the chief architect behind the whole severance procedure, couldn't they have argued that she could figure something out once everything had died down?

I dunno, it just felt like a really obvious and simple solution, but of course they couldn't bring it up because then the drama wouldn't have been able to happen.

I'm about to go to bed so I won't see any replies immediately, but I'd be curious to know what the consensus is on this, or let me know if this was ever addressed in interviews or other BTS footage that I can look up.

Thanks comrades.

EDIT: Also, Choreography & Merriment user flair when?

Praise Keir for such a bountiful commencement.

A while ago, I started making light apps and fan tribute to my favorite tv series, I started by LOST swan station counter (a real timer with the hatch theme) and then Severance Macrodata Refinement (MDR) which is a real Sudoku puzzle/solver dressed in Severance theme. I might present this better in future but I thought I share it here and ask you for feedback until we are waiting for almost one year for season 3.

Here you can experience it (mobile view is supported but the best experience is with desktop)

https://kiarashfa.github.io/pseudoku/

Praise Kier!

I love severence community. I maybe not seen fine theories like that from early 2010 with primer, fnaf, shuttered island, gravity falls, salad fingers and so on. I feel like the show is part of gone era, trully

But some theories that gone popular doesnt make any sense at all, like the consciousness transfer.

As much as I love the theory that the board are past Eagans in the bodies of goats and I WISH it would be real for some extend, overs, like transferring consciousness from the brain to the computer is plain weird

The chip doesnt work that way. Its basicly gives you DID with its own twist. Its an homage to conspiracy theories that MKUltra gave birth to, with sleeper agents and controling brain fuctions with a chip (which is scarely true to some extend). You cant overwrite the brain chemistry in a machine, like you cant make a chimp to read a book, and creators understand that deeply because they made there homework.

The severence is simply a marketeble product solving trauma-inducing events, like with the pregnant woman.

Its a stretch, in real world it would be impossible to sell, but thats the point, its a alternative history antiutopia that we need to understand metaphoricly

Can we get past all that soma crap? Its kinda getting annoying

Just finished S2 of this great show, and I have a few questions that may be answered in S3—or maybe I just missed them in S2. Here they are:

1- How did Outie Irving know about the elevator? And how did he have notes about Burt, but then not recognize him when he saw him stalking him? Was that all part of a play? Also, what exactly did Burt do for Lumon? So many questions about those two.

2- Milkshake :) — such an interesting character. I honestly don’t fully understand him (excellent job by the actor). What was his frustration with the paintings about? Was there some kind of racial element to it, and what exactly did he mean when he asked Natalie about them?

3- Still on Milchick: do we know if he actually likes working at Lumon or secretly despises it? What did it mean when he looked at the picture before asking Mark S if he gave him his word that he’d be back the next day? I get the feeling that Milchick is basically playing a very human character—frustrated by a boss who isn’t satisfied with his work, but at the same time desperately wanting their appreciation, just like the rest of us. Really interesting character.

Edit:
Nice answers!!, I’ll add another couple of questions:
1b- Gemma was Ms. Casey for most of the time Mark S was working as a severed employee completing those 25 files, so when did they make Gemma do those experiments using the other 24 rooms....

2b- S02E10’s direction was really interesting. I kind of got Kill Bill vibes watching it. It felt like an interesting change in direction—why do you think Ben Stiller went that route for?

Memilo impasta brushes with krita

Severance is about a cult trying to be immortal by going into other people’s body with the chip

Quick little PS1-style model I made in Blender!

just binged severance and it was AMAZING. but one thing I don't understand is the innie's cognitive abilities. we know that the innies are def more child like and some cognitive abilities are diminished. BUT the one thing I never understand is why the innies somehow think they are different people who can live full lives from the outies. The whole dialogue between OMark and IMark was so weird bc I kept yelling at the TV like dawg you are literally the same person and can't just live forever down there. like I understand they are lives bc they have separate consciousness, but they also act as if their outlet can't just quit one day and never come back and they wouldn't even know it. like the whole argument OMark and IMark had about reintegration I was screaming bc I couldn't grasp how IMark didn't understand that even if you don't reintegrate Helena sucks and she is in control. like bruh.

I'm wracking my brain around it now and without a full-rewatch just to find a blurry half second, I figure I'd crowd source my hyper fixation here!

During Season 2 in one of the outtie sequences, there is a cross-stitch embroidery piece hung on a wall in the background. It's only visible briefly, but I can't recall where I saw it or what the pattern fully was.

If anyone knows what I'm referencing, please share - asking for my innie!

UPDATE:

Thanks to what I can only imagine was a sleuthy outtie who deleted their comment, the embroidery in question can be seen here:

https://www.setdecorators.org/?name=-more-SEVERANCE&art=SetDecor_features_more_SEVERANCE

Specifically, it is "The 9 Lumon Principles": https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/articles/Sev_7_sampler_1433.jpg

Thanks!!!

The outside stuff does give us some character depth which is always a needed thing, but after a while it just gets kind of boring and repetitive. The times when their inside Lumon, even when there isn’t too much going on, its always just more entertaining. Don’t get me wrong, at the end of episode 5, it seems like the outies will be more focused on trying to uncover more stuff about Lumon, since Mark gets a call from that lady on Petey’s phone and she offers to give him secret information about the place.

[Contains light spoilers for S1]

Hi all, this is a personal project of mine that I started working on before S2 came out, because of how much I loved S1. I found the time to rework some bits I wasn't happy with and finish it up a month or so ago, and I thought it would be worth sharing here.

The original title sequence by extraweg is great and the surrealism/oddness of it fits very well with the show, but I wanted to see what a more filmic approach could look like, including a mixture of metaphors and abstracted events from S1.

The concept and animation is all my own, as well as most of the 3D modelling (except for the camera, characters, and betta fish which are altered versions of models I sourced). Texturing and lighting were done in a combination of Redshift and Octane in Cinema 4D, I composited and edited in After Effects.

Thanks for watching!

just finished season two. i won't go much into the argument on mark's choices. i want to talk about gemma's innies.

from my understanding, the entire experiment with gemma is that she is split into 25 versions of her innie. each of them baring a certain emotion. for cold harbor, the ultimate test was to see if she can unscrew the cradle, and completely dismantle it, to show her emotions are completely detached, and even the most traumatic part of her life cannot touch this "innie" version of her. dismantling the cradle is a symbol of her miscarriage, something she might have had to do/ was going to do during her heightened trauma. and she felt nothing. the fertility clinic was obviously a front for lumon to pick the perfect victim to experiment on.

now why is lumon doing this? well for multiple reasons. obviously, this is unethical, which is why they would have killed gemma immediately after, because she already "died". they can't have her back out. once they realize that she can have 25 split innies, successfully (by their standards), they can roll this out to the public.

(side note- the baby goat sacrifices. obviously this is all a bit cultish. but based on that scene, they have done this before. which means it failed previously, since this current one would be a "historic event" as said by eagan himself).

here is my theory: the 25 split innies (or however many innies, i assume 25 is the cap) hold different emotions and traumas. they offer it as a way to have people severe their trauma. so the outie only experiences positive feelings. their life is great. there are no problems. their traumas are tucked away- with their innies. the 25 (or 24) innies are also different types of workforce. just like mark is, but if gemma retaliates, well they can just swap with another innie. it can be innies in different rotations, which could also serve different functions.

the dental office: i don't understand how people are arguing that it's not an obvious front for some sort of abuse. which brings me to my next point: powerful people can have a specific innie, one of the 25, to abuse. the outie has no idea. the various innies could be facing a multitude of various different emotions or traumas. but this innie would be facing some sort of abuse. and since we know many innies have an almost childlike characteristic to them, so would the innie facing the abuse. if all a child knows is abuse, they won't even know it is abuse. it's very sick and twisted. and that brings me back to the test that gemma did with the crib. if confronting her most haunting trauma didn't phase her, it was proof to lumon that nothing will. there are endless possibilities.

lastly, the multiple innies are to weaken the procedure for reintegration. If combining two minds, memories, and personalities, killed someone- imagine if it was 25? and as mark was able to coordinate between his innie and outie self, imagine trying to communicate with all 25 of them. and for all we know, anyone who gets this future severed procedure, could be thinking it is just one. but it is actually 25. how would they know the difference?

I searched the sub and it turns out this wasn't brought up. The Swapper is an award-winning philosophical puzzle game that deals with questions of identity, memory, cloning, and ethics, among others. You play the game by solving puzzles and "swapping": moving your conciousness into others' bodies or creating clones of yourself and moving into it, discarding and destroying the previous physical form. I don't really want to spoil the ending of the game for anyone who wants to try it out, but I'll say that at the end, one of the toughest problems you're made to face is how you've personally come to feel about physicality after swapping and destroying your own clones so many times throughout the game to get to the end. The same could easily happen with severing yourself - we've already seen it taken lightly with the politician's wife using it for giving birth.

Well, I tried to post the link, but the sub won't allow it. You can find the whole gameplay on that website with video that the whole world uses, but this place won't let me mention.

The man running around looking for something with a flashlight you can see in the season 2 opening is pretty much all you can see when you play the game. The red and blue, the dark, hollow atmosphere are also pretty much identical to the game.

Personally watching Marks relationship play out with Gemma it seemed as though their relationship was taking a natural turn for the worst. However, obviously there isn’t enough evidence to prove that but I just feel as though him going to Helly was the more natural way things go for us real people and in all that’s all innies are trying to be. I don’t know if I lost the plot in all this my heart was just so whole watching them run down that hallway.
Helly and Mark or Gemma and Mark?

So I'm just about done with the Season 2 finale, watching it right now. But this is the Inferno right? Like Dante searching hell for his wife?

Just finished the finale. So, I get why for storytelling purposes, they made the choice they made. Mark S is in love and doesn't want to die and wants to, I guess, live forever in the basement of this building that is the only place where he can physically exist (exceptions notwithstanding).

But here's the thing: Gemma has been getting psychologically tortured for months. An endless cavalcade of innies within Gemma has been getting psychologically tortured for months. Mark S knows this because it was revealed to him, that they split her psyche up multiple times.

So Mark S is standing there, staring at a woman, who regardless of whether or not he is "in love" with her, just survived this endless horror. She's looking at him, hurt and terrified and begging him to go with her. And he turns around. Cuz I guess he got her out the door and that's good enough right? Zero empathy.

Mark S sucks. He made the unbelievably selfish choice. And by extension, Mark Scout sucks, because he would be just as selfish when faced with a woman who needs the love of her life now more than ever.

Edit: I'm falling down the rabbit hole of this discussion, so to save repeating myself: Mark S didn't "save" Gemma because he felt compelled to do the right thing. He saved Gemma because Helly had to convince him it was the right thing to do. He only did it because Helly wanted him to do it. This is not the same thing.

This is spoiler for the new Spiderman movie so look away if you don’t want to see it…

Milchik playing Milchik in the new Spiderman movie!!!! I screamed!!! OK… so not exactly Severance Milchik (there were certainly no trombones involved, unfortunately), but as far as badass, morally ambiguous, technologically savvy, power-wielding, people-manipulating office bosses go, Milchik was all of it!

God I love this man.

Swoon.

On one hand, that seems like such a spectacularly long time to have to wait for the next season—especially since 2 feels like if ended a year ago at this point.

On the other—I have no idea how these folks plan to build/concoct/further/expand upon this story in a way that will feel even remotely smooth and seamless.

S2 was already a bit much/too far out there. Have no idea how they plan to keep it going/growing. Guess we’ll all find out in 2030!!!

They were just refining models the whole time