Severance Understands Human Nature

Who are you?” That’s the opening line of Severance, one of the most successful shows in recent history. It’s also the question all humans start asking themselves as soon as they become conscious of their own existence. Severance answers the question by making the compelling—and countercultural—case that the human person is a unity of body and soul. 

In season one, we’re introduced to the fictional U.S. town of Kier, where the powerful tech company Lumon has developed a procedure known as “severance,” which allows its employees to sever their experience of life at work from their life outside it. This creates an “innie” and an “outie.” The outie is the original self, retaining all previous memories but only experiencing life outside of work from the moment the procedure takes place. When Lumon employees go down the elevator to reach their offices at the start of the working day, the chip inserted into their brains makes them switch from the outie’s consciousness to the innie’s. For innies, their memory begins when they start working for Lumon, and they only ever remember what they do there. As soon as they step into the elevator, they find themselves stepping out again at the start of another working day.  

Splitting his memory in two sounds ideal to the show’s protagonist, Mark Scout. As he puts it, that way there are eight fewer hours a day of grieving the loss of his wife Gemma, who died in a car accident two years before. His innie, Mark S., is seemingly content; from his perspective, his “life” began when Mark Scout started working at Lumon. He spends his days with his co-workers, Dylan G. and Irving B., sorting numbers into different categories (which they call “macro data refining”); he doesn’t understand the nature of his work or what Lumon is trying to achieve. He’s almost like a child: following the rules he’s been given by his superiors, unquestioningly. 

It’s no surprise that Severance, with such a premise, has inspired responses focusing on its critique of contemporary corporate America. And yet, after watching season two, what struck me most is the show’s insistence that body and mind cannot and should not be separated. 

For example, Mark Scout may believe that working at Lumon is a way to escape the pain of losing his wife. But in a company mandated therapy session, the very morning after he visits the site where his wife crashed her car into a tree, his innie Mark S. ends up shaping a tree out of clay, not knowing why he feels compelled to do so. In season one, Irving B. keeps hallucinating black paint dripping down from the ceiling. We later discover that his outie, Irving Bailiff, is a keen painter. In season two, when Dylan G. is allowed to meet his outie Dylan George’s wife Gretchen, he immediately falls in love with her, even though he’s supposed to have no memories or connection to her. 

Their severed selves keep seeping into each other. Their conscious memories may have been split, but the body remembers.

Although season two leaves many questions about Lumon’s wider goals unanswered, it slowly becomes clear that one of their reasons for developing the severance procedure is the seemingly noble goal of eliminating pain. Without spoiling the whole of season two, a large part of the plot revolves around Lumon’s attempts at splitting a woman into multiple consciousnesses to entirely erase her traumatic memory of a miscarriage. In fact, pain and memory have been key themes since season one. Not only did Mark Scout undergo severance precisely to escape painful memories, but it is also implied that wealthy women are now opting to be severed just before labor and childbirth, effectively outsourcing suffering to a “person” they create for the sole purpose of experiencing pain on their behalf. Severance consistently portrays the promise of being able to escape pain as sinister, because it inevitably involves a rupture in the human person. 

It also consistently shows that being alive is inherently good. In season two, a depressed Dylan G. tells Irving B. that he wants his outie to stop working at Lumon, which would effectively end Dylan’s consciousness (and thus, from his perspective, “kill” him). Given the current push to promote assisted dying in many countries—especially in the U.K., where I live—you might think a show that has struck a chord with so many people would celebrate Dylan’s choice to stop living, in keeping with the rhetoric of bodily autonomy. But it does not. Instead, it shows his closest friend, Irving, urging him to stay, to keep living even within the restraints of their existence at Lumon. 

This is a show that values human life, regardless of how much suffering we may have to endure. In season two’s most moving scene, Mark S. is given the chance to record a message to his outie, telling him what life is like for him as an innie. He ends the message by making it clear that he wants to keep living: “whatever this life is, it’s all we have, and we don’t want it to end.” 

I doubt the showrunners were consciously drawing from Christian beliefs about the unity of body and soul in the human person. But the show’s intuition that you can’t define a person as a disembodied collection of memories is a deeply Christian one. So is the insistence that it is good to be alive, even with suffering. Severance’s widespread appeal may well be a sign that the right intuitions are already there in our culture.