In Episode 3 of this season of Severance, Mark and his sister, Devon, have an idea. They need to ask Mark’s innie a question, but Lumon’s famous code detectors make this impossible. Nothing with any letters or symbols on it can pass through the elevator to and from the severed floor, seemingly making communication between innies and outies impossible. But Mark and Devon have a work-around. They figure they can burn a message into Mark’s retinas by shining a light into his eyes. Mark works out that it takes just over two minutes to get from his parked car into the elevator. With a bright enough light, Mark hopes that his innie will wake up to “WHO IS ALIVE?” floating in his vision. It’s brilliant.
But the scheme gets shot down before the episode even ends. One night, as Mark is practicing burning the question into his eyes, Asal Reghabi—the former Lumon employee who performed Petey’s reintegration procedure—shows up and lays into him.
“Are you trying to burn a message to your innie into your retinas?” she shouts at Mark. “Because your computer told you that was a brilliant idea?”
Reghabi goes on to explain that Mark and Devon’s plan is doomed. “It doesn’t work. The switch briefly dilates the pupils. Clean slate,” she says. “Also, you could blind yourself. And how was the innie supposed to send you a message back?” (Mark’s response: “Uh, that’s his problem?”)
‘Severance’ Recaps
So much for that idea, then. One can imagine, based on Reghabi’s insinuation that Mark’s computer “told” him to try this, that Mark googled something like “how to send message to innie” and was presented with this course of action. In fact, in the Severance universe, he may have found a Reddit (or some comparable website) thread eerily similar to one that exists in our universe. In 2022, Reddit user Kwimchoas had the very same suggestion, titling a post, “What if they burned text into their retinas?”
“You know how if you stare at a bright light for a while, it lingers in your vision?” Kwimchoas wrote. “What if the innies looked at a message they wanted to send to their outties, and they looked at a bright light containing that message and then rode up the elevator?”
“10/10 suggestion no notes,” replied one user. Others debated whether the light would linger long enough. Still more argued about whether the code detectors are even real.
Given that Severance creator Dan Erickson has said he peruses the show’s Reddit forum, here’s a new theory: That 2022 Reddit thread did not predict but rather inspired this Season 2 plot point. In any case, this development encapsulates how Severance has perfected the relationship between internet theorizers and the show itself.
Severance has become the current mystery box show du jour, following in the footsteps of series like Lost and Westworld. But unlike those shows, which were sometimes more interested in provoking theories than telling a story, Severance gives answers almost as quickly as it asks questions. A different show could have let the light message idea, for example, linger for weeks before Reghabi showed up to debunk it—Severance didn’t even give it half an hour. Instead of focusing on whether the retina-burning plan will work or not, the show is free to pursue ideas with more heft, such as Mark’s reintegration (a plot point many other shows would feasibly hold for a season finale).
Last week’s episode, “Woe’s Hollow,” brought more mysteries tumbling down. The main question dogging fans this season was whether Helly is her real innie self or rather an imposter “played” by her outie, Helena, in order to spy on the innies. The fan base was split between Helly truthers and Helena conspiracists. Evidence was abundant for both sides.
A different show would have made the Helly/Helena mystery central to an entire season—maybe made the big reveal the season finale. The intent would be to shock the audience—even if half the audience had already figured it out.
But in Severance, Irving solves the mystery after just a few episodes—she is Helena, not Helly—and then forces Lumon’s hand to get Milchick to switch Helena back to her innie. Now, instead of just teasing the Helena/Helly question, Severance gets to explore richer ideas related to the two characters. We’ve gotten some clues that Helena may be warming up to the innies (she willingly sleeps with Mark this episode!). Perhaps they treat Helly better than anyone on the outside treats Helena Eagan. Perhaps she’s seen that her original ideas about innies—that they aren’t really people—were wrong. Either way, we probably won’t have to wait for Season 3 to see how our characters deal with the fallout or how Helena and Helly evolve going forward—Severance will give it to us right away. (Current internet theory: She intentionally organized the ORBTO so she could get pregnant with Mark and create the next Eagan heir, like some kind of severance-fueled Bene Gesserit.)
Other mystery box shows build themselves up with question after question until they become a house of cards and collapse in on themselves. Take Lost. That wasn’t the first mythology-heavy, mystery-forward show on TV (fans of Twin Peaks and The X-Files, we see you), but it was perhaps the first to really collide with the internet. TV recappers had a golden age with Lost, speculating for seasons about its endless clues and mysteries.
But while Lost retains a loyal and vocal fan base, the show was also undeniably frustrating for many viewers. This very website once ranked the most perplexing loose ends that Lost never resolved, 20 years after the series premiered. We at The Ringer also once wrote that one of the five lessons TV has learned from Lost is that shows should “have a plan.”
Erickson is one of those Lost fans, as he told The Ringer in January. But he’s also stated that he wants to avoid the pitfalls of that show and that Severance already has “the end point and the big structural answers ready in the chamber. It’s just a matter of how to get there.”
Executive producer and director Ben Stiller said something similar to The Hollywood Reporter, telling the outlet, “People don’t want to be led down a path or be messed with. With a show like this, there’s always that question, ‘Do they know where they’re going?’”
Look at Westworld as an example of what Stiller is talking about. By Season 2, it felt like Westworld was being written for Reddit. Our coverage of the show always incorporated a piece asking about “the most pressing questions” from that week’s episode. And by the end of Season 3, we still had few answers—in fact, we listed out 44 more questions the show had raised. Four of those questions asked whether certain characters were alive or dead. That piece ultimately concluded that “the show is due for another reset.” Severance, like Westworld, may be a mystery box sci-fi series that deals with themes of human consciousness and existence, but I feel pretty confident it will never, for example, end a season using the life-or-death statuses of four different characters as a cliff-hanger.
By the end of Westworld Season 4, we still had questions. But those questions will never be answered. Westworld declined in viewership and critical favor, and the series was canned by HBO after four seasons. (And then unceremoniously wiped off the Max streaming platform altogether.)
But let’s get back to Severance—another great example of its relationship with theories and questions also occurred in Episode 3. Midway through the episode, innie Dylan is granted the opportunity to meet his outie’s wife, Gretchen, for 18 minutes as a reward for “good behavior and output.” The two are awkward and stiff at first, but they soon open up to each other. For the duration of their time together, viewers were probably asking themselves: Is that really his wife? Or is Gretchen a Lumon plant there to spy on Dylan? (Redditors were already speculating that Lumon would plant a fake wife for Dylan prior to the episode.)
A lesser show would have let the mystery linger. Maybe just for an episode, maybe for an entire season. But minutes later, we get a scene from the outside world that confirms that Gretchen is, indeed, Dylan’s wife. This allows Severance to not just avoid wallowing in speculation but to mine a much more interesting situation: the complex relationship between a wife and her severed husband. We see that outie Dylan has become something of a deadbeat—Gretchen has to give him step-by-step instructions on how to make cookies from a tube, a task he was supposed to have already accomplished—while innie Dylan is confident in his skills as a macrodata refiner. Gretchen shows a warmth toward innie Dylan that is totally absent in her interaction with outie Dylan. She seems more attracted to the former. Maybe she sees the man she once loved who, in the outside world, has become beaten down by so many years of an unfulfilling professional life.
Severance takes what would be twists in other shows and simply treats them as plot points. The writers don’t want the audience to treat the story like a puzzle to be solved. That work is best left to the innies.
And, boy, do the innies have theories. In Season 1, Dylan tells Helly what he thinks the macrodata refiners are actually doing: cleaning up the sea. Dylan’s logic is that if people are willingly severing their brains, things must have gotten so bad that humans need to populate the oceans. “But first, they gotta send probes down there to clean up all the deadly eels and shit, because we can’t cohabitate with that,” he says. “So we send the probes down, they send us the data coded, we sense what’s eels, and then we tell the probes what to blow up.”
On the other hand, Dylan tells Helly that Irving thinks they’re cutting swear words out of movies. Do either of those sound plausible? For the show’s audience, the current leading theory seems to be that macrodata refinement has something to do with the severance procedure itself (possibly by culling emotions or removing memories). It could also be nothing—just a metaphor for work.
The innies speculate about how much they’re being watched, about how the code detectors work, about what their outies do, and about pretty much everything else. Innies in other departments believe the macrodata refiners have pouches and carry larvae. When the larvae reach maturity, it’s said, they eat and replace their host macrodata refiners. It sounds ridiculous, but you can’t tell me you haven’t once read a theory equally as bizarre on Reddit.
Taken together, these innie theories feel like the showrunners poking fun at the internet theory economy. I’ve seen speculation that Helena’s father is actually Kier himself, the board members are made up of dead former Lumon CEOs, the brain chips alter what the severed employees see, and the pineapples contain “symbolism regarding asexual reproduction and the connection to Kier.” And, of course, everyone—audience and innies alike—is wondering about the goats.
In so many mystery box shows, the questions end up being more interesting than the answers. Lost had its polar bear; Severance has its goats. But Severance is the rare mystery box show with answers that are even more compelling than the theories. And everything is planned out in advance to maximize the payoff. As Erickson told The Guardian: “I was not allowed to put the goats in there until I had a pretty damn good explanation for how it would pay off.”
