After two hit seasons, a lot of the mysteries of Dan Erickson’s bizarre anti-corporate sci-fi series “Severance” remain unsolved. Central among them: What exactly does Lumon do? Lumon, as fans of the show can tell you, is a threatening corporate entity that has developed a system of severing its employees from their outside lives while they’re in the office. Lumon employees volunteer to have a computer chip implanted in their brains that erase all their memories of the outside world when they step into the office. While at work, they only have memories of their job. When they go home, the chip restores their outside memories, but masks everything they encountered at work. The “Innies” and the “Outies” have no personal memories they share.
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The premise seems like a drama about work/life balance, but Lumon is clearly up to something far more insidious. The main characters, led by Mark (Adam Scott), work in the “macrodata refinement” department, and their job seems to entail searching for number clusters on a spreadsheet that make them feel fear (?). Mark and his co-worker Helly (Britt Lower) also discover that Lumon has been raising goats for unknown reasons. Most horribly, as revealed in the show’s second season, Lumon secretly kidnapped “Outie” Mark’s wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman), faked her death, and has been performing torturous memory experiments on her in their sub-sub-basement. Naturally, the show’s second season concerns Gemma’s rescue.
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Still, there are several mysteries on “Severance” that remain unsolved. What is Lumon doing? Just how isolated is Kier (aka the city where Lumon’s headquarters is based)? Why do all the characters have hired doppelgängers? Why all the secrets?
In an interview with Buzzfeed, Erickson revealed that he has hidden multiple Easter eggs throughout the show, providing viewers all the clues they need to answer those questions themselves. It seems that the solutions are there. We just need to look hard enough.
The answers have been there all along on Severance
Speaking to Buzzfeed, Erickson implied that he has indeed thought out the entire world of “Severance.” He knows why things operate the way they do and has the answers to every riddle. He is not merely making things up as he goes along; there is a roadmap.
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As of this writing, a third season of “Severance” is officially in the works. It comes as little surprise; given how massively popular the first two seasons have been, it was pretty much guaranteed the story would continue. That means Erickson will be able to drop more and more clues over time. Yet, it seems that we’re already set. Between the first two seasons and the playful, actually-purchasable book “The You You Are,” written by the character Ricken (Michael Chernus), it appears we have everything we need. As Erickson put it:
“I think [people can figure it out]. It’s not like we laid-in proof of it, but we’ve tried to sort of lay in the build-up to it. And so thematically, you know, there are details that I think you’ll look back on when it’s all done and say, ‘Oh, that’s why they did that.'”
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This is, of course, maddeningly vague, but true “Severance” fans wouldn’t want the mystery to be spoiled. It’s at least comforting to know that Erickson and executive producer Ben Stiller have a plan in mind and are just being coy with the information.
The second season of “Severance” ended with “Innie” Mark rescuing “Outie” Mark’s wife before electing to stay inside Lumon’s office building as to remain with his inside-only would-be girlfriend Helly. What will happen to them? Will Innie Mark stay inside indefinitely? The third season will, naturally, shed some light. It will also, no doubt, introduce all-new mysteries.
