At some point we’ve all felt like Dylan G.’s "outie" — slumping through our off-hours, barely interacting with family and too tired to socialize. Once Dylan clocks out of his workday at Lumon Industries’ spartan offices on “Severance," he can barely muster enough willpower to tackle whatever it is that his wife is asking him to do.
This isn't because work has mentally exhausted Dylan (played by Zach Cherry) — or, to be specific, his outie. Since his consciousness is surgically divided between the professional life of his "innie" and downtime with his spouse and children, outie Dylan doesn't remember anything about his workdays. He is just, to put it in his innie's words, kind of a loser.
As the second season of "Severance" nears its finale, the show has become more explicit about cracking open the hollowness of bringing our “whole” or “best” selves to our workplaces.
The savviest thing he ever did was marry Gretchen (Merritt Wever), a woman of bountiful patience, although it’s Dylan G.’s innie, a top producer on Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement team, who most appreciates that.
When Gretchen explains to Dylan's innie that his outside self has had problems keeping other jobs, he’s confused.
“He dumb?” Dylan G. asks. No, Gretchen answers gently. It’s just that “he never quite found his thing.”
That is an entirely foreign concept to innie Dylan, who is proud to have earned enough perks through his diligence and skill to be treated to these occasional visits from the stranger to whom his listless other half is married. Gretchen basks in Dylan G.'s admiration, especially their hugs and the kiss they share – all of which amounts to infidelity in the view of his livid outie.
Zach Cherry and Merritt Wever in "Severance" (Courtesy of Apple TV+)For Dylan G. and Mark S. (Adam Scott), work is where they shine. For the rudderless and lost, whether due to ineptitude or deep grief, the office can be an orderly refuge. Co-workers may become a second family, as Dylan and Mark consider Helly R. (Britt Lower) and the recently dismissed Irving B. (John Turturro) to be.
But as the second season of "Severance" nears its finale, the show has become more explicit about cracking open the hollowness of bringing our “whole” or “best” selves to our workplaces, to paraphrase inspirational jargon some companies adopted before the pandemic.
Lumon gets their severed workers’ best selves, but not their whole selves. There is no such thing for its severed workforce since the company markets its controversial procedure as a means of guarding the so-called work-life balance.
Watching Dylan, Mark and other severed workers from the other side of an era that obliterated that supposed boundary underscores the American worker's lack of willingness to give their all to overlords who would dispose of them in a heartbeat if it improves their bottom line.
Last week, Apple TV+ announced it has picked up a fourth season of “Ted Lasso.” With the economy teetering on the brink of a recession and our collective mental health careening toward mass depression, the timing couldn’t be better. We will need the new season’s sunshine regardless of when it premieres. Remember how we all felt in late 2020, shortly after the show first debuted? Each of us was some version of low, angry or exhausted from pre-election anxiety and pandemic disillusionment. Backlash would hit the show later, but when it was fresh, that gold and blue reminder to “Believe” was the medicine we needed.
“Ted Lasso” was perfect for the pandemic. “Severance” is a product of it.
Before a microscopic killer shut down offices in the real world, the concept of a work-life balance had already been unmasked.
Chronological tracing may poke holes in this thesis, admittedly. Series creator Dan Erickson and executive producer Ben Stiller have been working on "Severance" in some form since 2015, and Apple picked it up to series in 2019 – well before that nasty novel coronavirus ground life to a halt.
Contemplating COVID-19’s impact five years after the World Health Organization officially declared a global pandemic means measuring all the ways it changed us. For one, confronting death on a mass scale we hadn’t seen up close in a century made us think differently about what we were doing with our single precious existence. That started with the estimated 90,000 hours we spend at work over our lifetimes.
It also transformed our perception of time which, in turn, plays tricks on the memory. When lockdowns forced our regular routines into a holding pattern, workdays and weekends slid together. If you’ve hypothetically wondered, “What is time anymore,” it may be both alarming and a relief to know you’re not the only temporally disoriented person out here. To some degree, everybody is.
As the second season deepens the mystery surrounding Mark S., the show presses into this sensation. What feels like a moment between when Mark S. clocked out for the MDR employees' rule-breaking "Overtime Contingency" mission and his return to the office is, in truth, a pause that lasted months. Then again, what is one workday against the next to those who, by design, never feel like they leave the office?
Patricia Arquette in "Severance" (Courtesy of Apple TV+)From what we’ve seen of those who dedicate their lives to their company like Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman), nothing good comes of merging one’s personal life with one’s workplace. Ms. Cobel was raised in Lumon founder Kier Eagan’s insular cult, one that ravaged entire towns built around its labor force. A natural spark she displayed when she was younger led to her being integrated into its white-collar culture. Like the oddly mature child intern Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), young Harmony had Kier in her, whatever that means.
Being Lumon management, however, is a 24/7 gig. Outie Mark knew Ms. Cobel as his next-door neighbor, Mrs. Selvig, never recognizing that she was also his boss — ever present, always watching. Like corporate spyware.
Bizarre as the sci-fi mechanics of Dylan G. and Mark S.’s situations may be, they are not so far removed from the way workers live in a post-pandemic society.
One stumble reduces her to an outsider, forcing Cobel to return to the desperate company town where she grew up and designed inventions that Lumon stole, including the technology enabling the severance procedure. She gave Lumon her whole self, and they took it.
While “Severance” writers have expanded the show’s mythology well beyond Mark, his outie’s search for his wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) is the second season’s main throughline. Mark’s presumption that she died in a car crash led to him agreeing to undergo the severance procedure since his anguish over her death and the miscarriage that preceded it led him to lose his university job.
The twist is that not only is she alive, but that she and Mark are two sides of Lumon’s grandest experiment. The seventh episode reveals she’s being dropped into an assortment of existences and innie personas while her outie is trapped in a sterile Lumon dormitory. Just like those fancy condos in your local business district advertise, she works at Lumon and, therefore, she’s already home.
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Before a microscopic killer shut down offices in the real world, the concept of a work-life balance had already been unmasked. Many of us are still navigating the division between who we are in the office versus who we are in our personal lives – that is, unless unspoken societal restrictions require a person to master the art of code-switching.
The rest of the culture was already partly there, what with our jokes identifying close co-workers as work spouses and the many TV shows legitimizing the concept of the office family. Insofar as that is true, we should say.
When The Great Resignation kicked off in 2021, a quarter of respondents to a 2022 Pew Research Poll listed a lack of flexible work hours and poor benefits such as no paid time off as their primary reasons for quitting. A majority, 57%, simply had enough of feeling disrespected.
To that end, Milchick’s arc shows that the “whole self” invitation only really extends to certain people. The recently promoted deputy manager of the severed floor lives Lumon’s ideals. Milchick follows the company’s worship of its mysterious founder to the letter. His work and home selves are one and the same.
Dichen Lachman in "Severance" (Courtesy of Apple TV+)For that he’s rewarded with an aggressively negative work review that his supervisor Mr. Drummond (Darri Ólafsson) tries to lord over him, specifically policing his “overly complex” language and inability to control his workers around the clock. There are cultural and racial overtones to an exchange in a recent episode wherein Drummond abusively demands Milchick apologize for using complicated words to . . . apologize.
A traumatized Milchick complies at first until he realizes neither he nor his very best efforts will ever be fully accepted. He visibly straightens and says to Drummond, “Devour feculence,” establishing that this is how he naturally speaks. Then he helpfully tells Mr. Drummond what that means in simpler terms.
“I am manager of the severed floor, which means two things. First, I am owed a measure of respect, even by my superiors. Second, and more obvious, that said floor comprises the whole of my jurisdiction. To put that monosyllabically,” Milchick says, pausing on each beat of that word, “it's not my fault what Mark Scout does when he is not at work. It's yours.”
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Our sourness on living to work predates COVID, but remote work accelerated our rejection of pouring our souls into our jobs since, for more than a year, there was no divide between work and home.
Hence, watching reactions to major companies instituting return-to-office mandates has been enlightening. Turns out people enjoy working from home as long as the rest of the world isn't shut to them. Data from WFH Research indicates that while 13% of full-time employees were remote workers by late 2024, another 61% were back to working full-time at an office, with 26% in hybrid situations. But nearly a third of workers expressed a willingness to strike over work-from-home benefits.
If a company truly wants its employees to bring their whole or best selves to their work, it would welcome them to put in their hours from wherever they feel the most comfortable and transition smoothly into their leisure time.
Don’t just take our word for it (especially since, in the spirit of full disclosure, Salon’s newsroom is fully remote). Business Insider has covered the disgruntled responses from JP Morgan Chase remote and hybrid employees since its CEO Jamie Dimon announced the company's return-to-office mandate earlier this year.
The outlet also spoke with Amazon employees, including a few recommended by the company who, shocker, love being back in the office.
Among those who expressed dismay at the mandate is a man who is a primary caregiver for his disabled spouse and requires the flexibility of a remote commute, and another facing four hours of commuting to and from work every day.
Bizarre as the sci-fi mechanics of Dylan G. and Mark S.’s situations may be, they are not so far removed from the way workers live in a post-pandemic society. Everyone’s expectations of how we work and live are changing, and this show highlights why giving our whole or best selves to a paycheck is folly. People may get extra perks from pouring their all into work but what we lose may be worth much more, because if we take our "best" or whole selves to work, what’s left for living?
The season finale of "Severance" streams Friday, March 21.
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