Severance’s finale leaves fans–and Mark S–at the edge of our seats, as he’s blinked out just seconds after revealing that his wife is (seemingly) alive inside Lumon. But how is she alive? What do the goats mean? And what can we expect for next season?

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Written and Hosted by Ryan Arey (http://twitter.com/ryanarey)
Edited by Harriet Lengel-Enright and Ryan Arey

Spoilers are obviously ahead for what has been my favorite TV show of the year.

So we’re going to talk about the ending of the episode, every character’s story in thie finale, and at the ebd of the video we’ll explain some of the show’s bigger mysteries, like Mark’s wife, the goats, and what the heck Lumen actually does. Also, there were quite a few clues that Helly R was an Eagan, all along.

First I want to talk about what this show is about and its main overarching themes. Because, I won’t be able to break down this ending if we don’t have a mutual understanding of what the show is trying to say.

Severance is about the demands that capitalism places on our everyday lives–specifically, the capitalism practiced in corporate america. Your job requires you to be a kind of different person. You dress differently at work than you do at home, you’re more careful with your words, you pretend to like certain movies to get along with the people you work with.

No, Roadhouse is awesome.

But Severence’s metaphor hits home for us, because it is kind of weird that we mostly live two lives. And, each corporation has some version of corporate propaganda. Like look at this 80s McDonalds training video

Using a song to make employees feel a certain way about the company and their jobs is the first step to indoctrinating them into a cult. In the same way that corporations like McDionalds or Disney revere their founders with paintings and statues, Severance has created a full on religion for its workers.

And, it's easy to indoctrinate people into this cult when you wipe their minds. But this episode has some enormous reveals that the cult of Kieer has been around even longer than the practice of severance.

The actual workplace in the show is also a metaphor for the human mind. Peter is trying to map the workplace, and his brain, to better understand himself and his job. His map even says “mind” at the top. But mind has another meaning–it can also mean to watch over the place, to mind the store–to keep watch over one another.

So when we talk about Severance, remember that this is a show about people trying to understand their literal jobs, but also trying to understand their own minds. Of course they can never understand their minds, because they are all only half a person.

People go to extreme lengths to have others define who they are.


For instance, Irving. He is the most devout member of the group. When we first step into his outtie’s life, the camera shows it from the first person point of view, to give us the feeling we’re in someone else’s body–which is how he must feel.

From contextual clues, we find out that his father served in the Navy in world war 2–and that maybe, he is a military man as well,judging by the medals in his home. On a surface level,this makes me wonder if he suffers from PTSD, and that’s why he chose to be severed. Last week we saw that his outie does not sleep.

At first I thought this caused his chip to glitch out, making his two selves bleed into one other. The outtie is painting the dark corridor weather Ms. Casey lives–more on that later–and Irving sees the black paint ooze out of his workplace. In the same way, this image of the workplace, the dark hallway, is oozing from his outtie’s mind.

You can see his two halves transferring traits to one another. Like how his innie loves artwork [clip, talking to walken] This makes sense, because certain base functions and motor skills are shared by both identities–like the ability to speak, read, and drive a car.

It might even be that he has one of the first Severance chips. Later on, Papa Egan talks about bringing one to Helena when she was little. Maybe the military were the first to use the chips, to send people on covert missions, or to better train soldiers to be soulless killing machines.

#Severance #Finale #EndingExplained