Severance

The first season of Severance on Apple TV Plus is a sci-fi thriller that combines a workplace drama and existential horror, with a cast that includes Adam ...

Some of this comes down to the way the show looks: the severed floor is like something out of a parallel dimension. The first season of Severance is stressful, but it’s also a lot more fun than a Lumon-allocated Music Dance Experience. We’ve all seen the stories of what tech giants try to get away with in the real world; Severance posits a future where they can do literally anything in secret because employees have knowingly signed up to be lab rats. It’s the kind of show where a celebratory waffle party inevitably devolves into something bizarre and uncomfortable. It’s almost like a cubicle farm ripped out of the ‘60s, but with strange retrofuturistic computers, twisting hallways designed for maximum confusion, and a breakroom that doubles as a psychological torture chamber. The sense of discomfort — and, eventually, outright terror — grows as the show progresses, and you learn more about Lumon and what life is like in the basement. When they leave work, their next memory is of arriving the next day. They feel the effects of sleep, but they never experience it themselves. We’re introduced to the concept through Mark (Adam Scott). On the outside, Mark is grieving the loss of his wife, and he signed up to be severed in hopes of avoiding those feelings for at least part of the day. The work self, meanwhile (the two are colloquially referred to as “innies” and “outies”), is stuck in a life that is nothing but work. Who wouldn’t want to cut that drudgery out of their lives and focus on the good parts? Your life and memories are yours right up until you hop in the elevator at Lumon Industries, go down to the severed floor, and get to work.

The innies have a big day out in the exhilarating Severance season 1 finale. Here is everything you need to know about that shocking ending.

Since Burt is the only person he feels he can trust, he heads over to the address that his outie has marked on the map. While all of these emotionally loaded things are happening at the same exact time, strongman Dylan gets intercepted by Milchick, and the entire experiment gets terminated. He races up to the door and pounds on it, shouting “BURT! BURT!” Unfortunately, Burt doesn’t answer in time to get to chat with Irv’s innie. Unfortunately, Irv finds out that he doesn’t seem to have a family or friends or any sort of social support network on the outside. Innie Irv wakes up and starts to go about the business of snooping through his outie’s belongings. The initial mission that the innies agreed to was to find someone they could trust and tell them everything. An unflinching look at society’s insistence on maintaining a “work/life balance,” Severance introduced us to the idea of the “severance” process, or the process of implanting a chip into one’s brain in order to surgically separate work and life memories. Severance wasn’t going to leave us hanging without first serving up some jaw-dropping reveals, and they disclose the true identity of Helly’s outie in the first few moments of the episode. Full of tension, anxiety, and cliffhangers galore, the fantastic Severance season 1 finale is sure to go down in the history books as one of the best season finales of 2022. In the finale, the innies stage a daring attempt to find out more about their lives in the real world. Ok, all joking aside, the last 10 minutes of this episode are “I-forgot-to-breathe” good. And Helly, ah, poor Helly, no one in her outie’s world is trustworthy, least of all her outie self.

But like anyone who loved the end of 'Lost' season one, Scott knows the power of delayed gratification.

“The discipline it took them to wait until that moment to get that camera to go down that hole and looking up at the actors…it was incredible,” Scott says. “And just how I think I leapt up from the couch and just screamed, ‘No!’” And Irving, having embarked on the year‘s best workplace romance with Burt (Christopher Walken) before Burt is forced to retire, finds Burt out in the real world for the first time—seemingly happy at home with his husband.

Following the first season finale of the Apple TV+ series Severance, “The We We Are,” a look back at all the clues the show has given us about Lumon ...

Maybe the second season of Severance is about the person sent there next in order to help Kier come back. (I am very aware that my “Adam is Javi” theory from Yellowjackets did not pan out!) Maybe I’m taking a leap forward in interpreting lines like Mark’s “We’re people, not parts of people” and Helena’s “I don’t think severance divides us. - The little 2-D animated version of Kier Eagan says “I love you” to the person who successfully sorted all their quarterly MDR data, and that’s what the cult is looking for, right? … In this theory, the larvae eventually eats and replaces you.” So sort of like the horror movies The Brood and Possession, in which host/original bodies are replaced by duplicates? That transference of consciousness and the manipulation of people’s bodies is what I think Lumon has been working on this whole time with the severance procedure, with the end goal of bringing Kier Eagan back to life. “The We We Are” ends on a cliffhanger for the MDR team once Milchick breaks through the door and tackles Dylan, ending the Innies’ rule-breaking excursion.

For Innie Irving (John Turturro), it is a chance to find his would-be lover Burt (Christopher Walken) after Outie Burt “retired” his Innie self. And Innie Helly ...

I think there’s a logic to all of the technology of the show. But it was really important to find that stark structure, and when we found the Bell Labs building [in Holmdel, NJ], we went off of the details of the interior of that building. We knew we had to find the exterior of the building. Dan and I talked about it the whole time: “Do we do it, do we not do it?” We figured out a way to make it integral to the story. I was really taken with her reading, because she had this depth to her and this look that to me felt like, Helly is rebellious and the one who creates the change. We had to make these decisions, and part of the fun of the show is what bleeds through that they’re not aware of. The great thing about Chris is he’s aware that he’s Chris Walken, and that everybody is just fascinated with his acting and his speech patterns and how he does it. And he said, “No, I really feel like this is the guy.” Credit to him that he can take this affected accent and it became a real character. The Innie world is so unusual and so specific to this show. Adam’s so good and so specific that he looked at everything on the inside very differently than he did on the outside, including the notion that the guy on the inside is only a few years old. There’s a scene that I added that I really wanted to have, where he gets sent to the break room and she’s leaving it, and they pass each other in the narrow hallway. Originally, we were going to go further and answer more questions, but I felt really strongly that there’s something about the mystery of the show that you want to live in.

"Severance" creator and stars on the finale's very big Eagan twist and where the show will go for Mark, Helly and Lumon gang in Season 2.

And when he arrives at that party, he is finally ready to move on from severance and from Lumon and also ready to move on from Gemma and heal a bit. Stiller: There is this growing connection between Mark and Helly happening during the season, and then on the outside, Mark is trying to get over his wife’s death — and then we’re going to find out that his wife is still alive. But it is a disconcerting sort of start to that journey. But I should actually get promoted.” So I think part of that is also trying to get back in their good graces and make them understand, I’m not just a crazy person over here, I’m right. And that’s where it comes in with the hallway paintings and his trove of Lumon files that he seems to have collected. So I think she is angry and petulant and wants to punish them and is hurt and all of these things. That’s the big question, what is special about Mark? And is it actually that there’s something special about him or is it more about Gemma, and he was sort of pulled in? It’s that idea that it’s happening over the course of an hour or so. And the first thing he sees when he comes to in the outside world is Cobel. But she looks different and he can’t quite put his finger on it and doesn’t really have time to. Tramell Tillman: Listen, these are high stakes, OK? He is willing to bet the house for this. Innie Mark has pieced together that Gemma is actually Miss Casey and is still alive, but he knows she has been fired from Lumon and sent down to wherever that elevator takes her. There’s a question of sort of who was targeted first: Was Mark targeted because of his relationship to Gemma, or was it the other way around?

Anthony Flagg reviews the first season of Severance now streaming on Apple TV. Severance was directed by Ben Stiller and stars Adam Scott.

In the last 20 or so minutes of the season one finale “The We We Are” I should have worn my Apple Watch to see the leaps my heart rate was making as the final moment intensifies and cuts to black. His alcoholism more than once drove people away from him and it was interesting to see this depicted quite accurately throughout the season (one example is Mark eating minimal food to drink more instead). Even when in his “innie” mode, others notice things such as the smell he sweats off to help underscore the severity of his drinking. As the work and the season progress, the uncoverings of Lumon are horrifying – aversion therapy that hammers away at their apologies until they actually “mean it” as Milchick urges them on for the 1,287th time. So back to Data Refiners. In the MDR (Macro data refinement) wing, the team gathers clusters of numbers on a screen and categorizes them into certain digital buckets based on their interpretation and emotional connection to what they are seeing on the screen. Currently in the spotlight for his portrayal of Carmine Falcone in The Batman is John Turturro as Irving, the longest-tenured “innie” as they refer to themselves, the 8-hour split that works within the walls. The show discussions on the subreddit have been incredible and as of this writing, Variety has confirmed that it will be renewed for a second season.

Mark (Adam Scott) and Helly (Britt Lower) stand in front of the Mark and Helly, plotting. Apple TV+. You may not have ...

We cannot ignore what happens to us at work, even if we’d like to, and even if our overseers do their best to facilitate the idea that our work lives are separate from the rest of our lives. It’s a narrative that puts the brutality of work front and center, and through stories, we can learn that what seems impossible is not. A union cannot solve every problem workers face, but it wins us a seat at the table to determine at least some of the conditions of our working lives. (TV writers are represented by the Writers Guild of America West; as an editorial employee of Vox, I’m represented by their sibling, Writers Guild of America East.) There’s a reason the saying “an injury to one is an injury to all” has stuck around in the labor world, and Hollywood writers are especially good at using their collective power to secure better conditions for everyone in their industry. “You’re not a person” — the message Helly’s outtie tells her innie — brutally epitomizes the loss of dignity and humanity we endure in the workplace. Severance is a road map of organizing, a revolution in progress, and it begins and ends with caring about your fellow worker, who in turn cares about you. In Severance, Helly, newly severed and rebellious, represents the audience surrogate and an unadulterated reaction to all this, and perhaps what everyone’s reaction should be to spending their days doing pointless tasks for the profit of others: rage, repulsion, and determination to escape. Macrodata Refinement is a perfect example of a job that doesn’t really need to be done, and one brought about by Severance creator, writer, and showrunner Dan Erickson’s real-life temp job entering data. There seems to be a direct correlation between how necessary your job is and how low you are paid and indecently you are treated. While the workplace sitcom has been a staple of TV for decades, no show about work has captured quite so accurately how damaging work can be in real life. Entire sectors of the economy are based on a large pool of low-wage workers, aided by state governments run in large part by business owners. With no personal memories and no context of the outside world, attempts to understand their jobs and surroundings are childlike and naive.

There are still lingering concerns about the baby goat department, the Lumon Board, and the Eagan family, though fans have some solid theories about the ...

Later in the series, Dylan requests a crystal cube with the new MDR group photo engraved on it as his prize for being Refiner of the Quarter. He takes it to the waffle party, and then carries it to the security office and sets it down before enabling the overtime contingency. Helly set that Lumon gala ablaze, Mark's sister Devon wants to take his story to the press, and Outie Burt and Outie Irv are about to meet face to face. When the overtime function is enabled, Irving's Innie wakes up in his Outie's house and uncovers a box of his father's U.S. Navy memorabilia in his closet. When Dylan broke into the security office to enable the overtime contingency, we got quite a bit of insight into Lumon, its employees, and other ways that those severed chips can be used. In Episode 7, we learn that Mark's wife Gemma — who supposedly died in a car accident shortly before he started at Lumon — is actually Ms. Casey. Cobel and Milchick know this, and that the two don't remember each other as severed Innies, but right before the finale ends Mark's Innie sees a photo of Gemma and connects the dots. The Eagan family and philosophy doesn't just run Lumon. Cobel's shrine proved that for some it's essentially a religion, and we come to learn that the Eagan presence overlaps with education, medical facilities, banks, and more. Just when you think her existence can't get any bleaker, Milchick sends her down a dark hallway (the same hallway Irv's Outie paints) and she takes the elevator down to (what I believe is) the department Petey told Mark about; the "one where you don't get to leave." Perhaps the most noteworthy item here is a breathing tube/hospital bracelet that bears the name "Charlotte Cobel" and the birth date "3-17-44." Fans wonder if Charlotte was a family member, such as Cobel's mother. Later that night, Milchick enabled the overtime contingency and woke up Dylan's Outie in hopes of getting the card back, so you know those cards have to be important. We finally got to see some of our favorite Innies in the outside world, but the finale ended on a major cliffhanger and left fans with a slew of new questions. Vocal egg-hater Ben Stiller mentioned in a Twitter A&A that the egg bar was "necessary for the story," and perhaps that's just because Irv needed something soft to smash inside the handbook. One leading theory is that MDR is teaching Lumon how to potentially manipulate emotions of severed people (!!!). Kier Eagan's statue explained "the four tempers" that define human beings are woe, frolic, dread, and malice.

While season one may be over, you still can enjoy a bit more of the Apple TV+ show Severance with these Lumon inspired wallpapers.

Share your thoughts in the comment section below. After nine episodes, Apple just ended season one of Severance. The show is based on the premise of a mysterious company called Lumon Industries, which features a severed floor wherein workers cannot recall their personal memories. Parker has created some nice wallpapers inspired by the show.

As for Severance, this is a deeply weird, extremely brilliant series concocted by of all people, Ben Stiller. It is not a comedy. At least not outright, though ...

Helle – We learn that Helle is actually Helena Egan, daughter of the current head of the company, and she has severed herself in order to prove a point that severance is a good thing that anyone can undergo. Mark – Learns that Outie Mark’s wife is still alive, and exists as Miss Casey at Lumon. We learned that last week, but Mark himself learns it this week when he sees a photo of her for the first time. You slowly start to realize how horrifying this is over the course of the series, and yes, there is some extremely good commentary in here on the state of corporate life and how workers are treated. If one version of you never has to deal with work, the other version of you that the severance process creates, only exists at work. The story follows a company, Lumon, who uses the practice of severance on certain employees. Oh, and Apple managed to have the Oscar Best Picture winner on its service this yeartoo, with CODA.

Adam Scott missed out on a screening of the finale of his hit show "Severance" because he was stuck in Costa Rica recovering from COVID-19.

“If you aired that on TV no one would get a shot ever.” He went on to thank the show’s director, Ben Stiller, and creator, Dan Erickson, along with a host of other people. “I am stuck in Costa Rica with good old COVID.”

'Severance' director Ben Stiller, creator Dan Erickson on the season one finale cliffhanger and season two plans for the Apple TV series.

“Hopefully they can at least see their story told here and see some of their struggles voiced and understood.” It’s fun to think about how the events of this episode change the world and change the game for all the characters and how they’re now going to have to contend with that.” Erickson added of their current conversations about what comes next, “You start to see what people are reacting to, what they’re liking. Don’t tell me, I don’t want to spill the beans,” she joked on the carpet, after explaining her initial conversations with Stiller and Erickson about the project. At a Los Angeles finale celebration for the show on Friday, the cast and creator answered some of them, while hinting that there will be plenty more to come. The sci-fi show, starring Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, Britt Lower, John Turturro and Zach Cherry, follows a company that surgically divides its staff’s work and personal lives, which begins to come undone throughout the first season.

Talk about a rude awakening. As the Severance Season 1 finale got underway, as Dylan inside the Lumon control room triggered the Overtime Contingency protocol ...

and in case we do?” “In case we dont come back… We were doing a whole comedy bit on the side, like, “Oh right, Helly and Mark are essentially going through puberty right now.” For a hot second I speculated that Lumon might have a separate “mind wipe” product to kind of “reset” everyone — but would they really send them back into the company, knowing them to be wild cards? I’m really looking forward to Season 2 to find that out for myself! Given what happens in the finale — especially Helly’s outburst, and the fact that Cobell knows that Mark “woke up” — have we seen the last of the Macro Data Refinement room? Zach Cherry, who plays Dylan, I think he was actually the smartest of us at “refining.” He came up with all these cool ways to make the numbers move around that none of us could figure out. You know, I’m purposely keeping myself in the dark about that. Some people might flail a bit, be like, “What’s going on, where am I?” But she was a cool cucumber and took in the situation. I won’t let the ending affect my arc, I can’t know what my character doesn’t.” But you fell into the other camp? But she barely got a few angry words out before Dylan lost control of the OT protocol, and the Innies presumably went back to “sleep.” As the Severance Season 1 finale got underway, as Dylan inside the Lumon control room triggered the Overtime Contingency protocol that “awakened” his coworkers whilst they were in their Outie worlds, Helly R. found herself glammed up at a company gala, where she was about to give an awaited testimonial.

'Severance' creator Ben Stiller joined stars Patricia Arquette and Britt Lower on stage for a panel with Adam Scott joining virtually - Contenders TV.

“We thought about it in a variety of different ways,” says Scott, “but what ended up being really important to Ben and to Dan [Erickson] and I was that it feels like one person, because it is. how do you behave in upper management in a corporation like this where the sands are kind of always shifting underneath you?” Mark (Adam Scott) is an employee that went through a controversial “severance” procedure, which separates his work and non-work memories, who starts to unravel conspiracies about Lumon.