The work is mysterious and important

The celebratory fruit head of mourning

Let's talk about Severance for a minute. I have questions.

If you haven't been watching the utterly fantastic Apple TV+ show, you're missing out. A friend who hasn't seen it asked me a while back, "what other shows is it like?" as a shorthand way of seeing if she'd like it, but the answer is, "none, there are no other shows similar to Severance." I mean, it's a workplace drama, sort of, I guess, but don't look for any other connections to, say, ER or Hill St. Blues. The closest parallel to it that I've seen is probably the film Being John Malkovich, which is still very much different. It's uniquely weird and incredibly well-written. So check it out if you haven't already. (Or if you kind of forgot about it because it took three years for season two to drop after COVID and writers' and actors' strikes combined to delay production.)

Then maybe you too will be wondering:

• Just what is Milchick's backstory? At times he looks to be a gung-ho Lumon partisan, but with his new supervisory gig he seems to recognize himself as a sort of Uncle Tom, and not just because of the racism-tinged gift he got from the higher-ups. He appears to really want to make things better for the severeds, and aware that he's balancing on a knife's edge to do it, but is now doubling down on being the good employee. I think. He's a tough nut to crack.
• What the hell has Irving been doing all this time on the outside with his research into Lumon? Who has he been talking to on the pay phone?
• How much, if any, of Burt and Fields' religious rationale is for real and how much, if any, is a cover story? What's Burt's real history with Lumon? Is he an OG Lumon architect or was he doing something else with them pre-severance? Or is Fields just drunk?
• Who was the guy with all the keys that was going through Irving's things? Is it Donovan? Someone else? How does he know about Irving's research? (I don't recall if that might be something Helena learned while "undercover"; I don't think so.) Is he in cahoots with Burt, going into the apartment while Burt had Irving occupied elsewhere? And what did the guy do, if anything, to Radar? Radar wasn't growling and barking at the intruder?
• WTF is up with the goats?
• Why is Gemma/Ms. Casey "essential?" What is she doing in that sub-basement when not doing wellness sessions with the severeds? We know that "Ms. Casey" only exists on the severed floor, so is she just, I don't know, comatose or something down below, or does she have a third persona? Or is she Gemma down there?
• Is Helena doing what she's been doing all season just as a way to spy on and manipulate the gang, or is she also motivated by intense loneliness and jealousy of Helly R. and Mark S.'s spark for each other? I think her line that she "didn't like" who she was on the outside was at least partly honest, and when she joked with Mark Scout that he would "be the first" guy she'd ever introduce to her father she wasn't making that up. Britt Lower plays that double role with uncanny subtlety.
• Is Miss Huang severed? If so, holy moly. If not, also weird, as Dylan has asked multiple times, "why are you a child?" She's on a fellowship? What's "wintertide material?" Is Wintertide some sort of Lumon college, maybe?
• What were Ricken's other books? That's not really important to the plot, I just wonder. I want more revelatory observations like, "Bullies are nothing but bull and lies," and especially like, "What separates man from machine is that machines cannot think for themselves. Also they are made of metal, whereas man is made of skin."
• Will Dylan tell his co-workers about his family visits? If he does, will Milchick cancel them?
• Why didn't the production crew make the hole in Mark's head more realistically tiny? Big as that seemed to be he (and all the severeds, presumably) would be at constant risk of massive infection. :) (Yeah, yeah, nerdy nitpick that means nothing, I just think it wouldn't have been that hard to put a magnifying lens in the shot for a hole that more realistically would have been about 1/16"-1/8" in diameter.)
• And, of course, what is the macrodata, why is it being refined, and what's the "Cold Harbor" project intended to do? (I think we can safely assume it's not, as Irving once postulated, to take the swear words out of movies.) If even the upper echelon at Lumon says the work is mysterious, how much do they even know about it?

Tune in Thursday for probably no clear answers and even more questions, because that's how good this show is.

 

Tagged TV, Severance, Posted on February 23, 2025 at 6:37PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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