Severance has a deceptively simple premise: What if you could separate your consciousness between work and your personal life? The ‘you’ at work would be completely separate from the ‘you’ not at work, each with no knowledge of the other. The drama of the show comes from teasing out the implications of the setup: Would your work-self (Innie, in the show’s parlance) long to know more of the outside world? What sort of person would want their work life to be totally divorced from their personal life? What kind of company would do this to their employees?
As the first season progresses, some questions are answered and some of those answers raise further questions. Mysteries abound in the show, be it the secretive nature of Lumon, the goats, or what exactly is Macrodata Refinement. With season two now upon us, we’re probably going to get answers to those questions, which will be fun, but at the same time, it’ll be a shame to see that mystery go.
Answers are finite. A yes or a no leaves no room for maybe. When we don’t know what exactly the Innies are working on it could be anything. It could be weapons manufacturing, it could be waste management. There is an allure to a mystery that captures the imagination. Myriad theories and possibilities are so much more enticing than actual fact.
When Bionicle showed up it was a world of contradictions: robots, elemental powers, a tropical island. The world captured my imagination when I was ten. What secrets did this island have? Could they find those Masks of Power to defeat the Makuta? The story continued and the island contained more mysteries, then the world beneath the island came into play too, then there were more islands. Narrative threads were introduced to tie everything together and flesh out the background and Bionicle became a far cry from the island in the beginning. It had to change, though: a story that was just the characters running around a tribal island year after year would quickly become repetitive and wouldn’t have developed the wild lore it did. Was Bionicle better in its earlier incarnation? That’s a debate that’s taken over forums for years, but a Bionicle that chose not to pull on its threads and instead stay where it started would not have lasted ten years.
Lost had a mysterious island (this feels like a trend) with a monster of some sort, polar bears, and a buried hatch. When we found out the Dharma Initiative was responsible for a lot of the weirdness on the Island, the show lost some of its initial appeal. Even as it stopped being about a bunch of crash survivors on an unknown island, Lost shifted its focus away from those mysteries and to a more character-focused drama. I consider it a wise move — answering every question would have robbed the show of what mystique it had left, letting it be about the characters left room for questions about the world to exist while still giving the audience closure through the characters. The show changed because it had to offer some answers to all those mysteries it presented at the start.
I wonder where Severance will be after the end of this season. Will it be able to walk that tightrope of delving deeper into its world without losing that aura of disquieting mystery it built up in the first season? Or will it change its focus from that mystery to exploring its more existential questions around consciousnesses and work? Or will it do both? And is this blog post just me trying to reckon with the fact that Severance will probably change and I’m gonna have to accept that?
Essays, Not Rants! 