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S02.E08: Sweet Vitriol

juno

By juno
in Severance

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Affogato

Affogato

5 hours ago, arc said:

Yeah, my loose understanding is that season 2 took about 5 to 8 months to shoot. It's not clear, because the SAG and WGA strikes meant they had to shut down in the middle and restart later. And the opening sequence of Mark running down the hallways was filmed in bits and pieces over that whole time, but it wasn't like they were working a solid five months just on a two minute sequence.

Apparently Apple installed Mark Friedman as a co-showrunner in s1 because series creator Dan Erickson was a newbie, but relations between the two broke down and Friedman was planning to leave -- until Stiller couldn't find a replacement, so Friedman was asked to return. Sounds like a terrible situation if you ask me. Meanwhile Beau Willimon was hired early on to get a big head start on the writing for s3, but then they needed him to pitch in on s2, so Willimon worked on both s2 and s3.

(Friedman was the credited writer on 2x07 though)

They're a megacorporation so vertically integrated they make everything they use internally, per writer's interviews*. But we do have the door factory guy scoffing at how Lumon makes their own doors. We've also seen that they run a fertility clinic, a blood donation drive. I think there were some mentions in s1 about non-Lumon severed offices, so presumably Lumon sells severance as a service to other nearly-as-dystopian employers.

* this is a fascinating and hard to believe idea in itself. Modern car companies, for example, have outsourced or spun off a lot of production, so even things like piston heads might be manufactured by an external company, even if that piston-producing factory used to be a part of the original company. Lumon would have had to buck decades of American industrial trends to keep everything in-house.

There are real-world employers using child labor now.  In America. Not just mom and pop corner stores putting the kids to work, but dangerous occupations like slaughterhouses. It's flat out illegal, but then again there are some proposed bills to undo such prohibitions.

One historian notes that there were 227K child laborers in American agriculture in 1959 between the ages of 10-13, and about a third of them worked 35 hours a week. If we assume Cobel is Arquette's age, she would have been 10 in 1978, which I realize is not 1959, but then again this is an alternate universe.

Also right as we speak states are hurrying to make child labor legal and easier. 

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RedHawk

RedHawk

(edited)
On 3/8/2025 at 1:07 PM, diebartdie said:

[snip]

EDIT BECAUSE I FORGOT MY ACTUAL REASON FOR POSTING (I am not on ether, I swear), check this headline out y'all:

How Ether Went From a Recreational ‘Frolic’ Drug to the First Surgery Anesthetic

We have seen a tattoo of the word “Frolic”. Was it on Irving’s hand or wrist, or someone else’s?

Edited by RedHawk
Further speculation
lovett1979

lovett1979

On 3/9/2025 at 12:43 AM, aghst said:

It may also tie into the tempers thing, like the chip can flip your mood or feelings.

Mark said it helped with his grief.  When he became an innie he wasn’t conscious of the supposed accident and death.  But did it alter his emotions so that he couldn’t feel grief, sadness?

In season one, Petey says "You carry the hurt with you. You feel it down there too. You just don't know what it is." 

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JenE4

JenE4

On 3/7/2025 at 10:56 PM, dwmarch said:

I agree. I liked the episode in the end but I think this could have been shortened down a lot. For example, we have all this yelling and drama about Cobel going into her mother's old room. And what does she do when she gets in there? She takes a nap!

 

After this episode, I think it's because she knows that Lumon knows she's the real inventor of severance rather than Jame Eagan and she realizes they will kill her to keep that secret. Although having said that, if one is paranoid because they really are out to get you, I would strongly discourage taking a nap in Lumon-allied territory that has been recently visited by the heavy she just ran away from!

Well, to be fair, Cobell didn’t just “take a nap,” she huffed her mom’s ether and passed out, seemingly as a way to feel close to her mother, as it sounds like mom spent her life in that bed loopy on ether. The episode also started with Cobell watching someone huff and then die/become somewhat comatose from ether, when she was brushing her teeth by her car. 

As she was driving through town, many buildings as “Lumon” barely visible in faded paint, so this was obviously a company town like Keir, where Mark lives in Lumon housing. You hear about bankrupt “factory towns” across America in which practically the whole town worked for one manufacturer and when the factory closes, these people are left jobless and struggling. Salt’s Neck was so much worse because not only did it leave the inhabitants bereft, it left many of them battling an ether addiction. That old woman in the cafe I thought was on oxygen, but instead she’s probably spent 75 years huffing ether, that she has a constant supply to breathe on the go.

Keir and his wife Sarah met in an ether factory, so which came first: The company or the mythology of Keir?  Or, did the Egans just start off as a regular old chemical company but somehow Keir commandeered it as a religion?

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Affogato

Affogato

3 minutes ago, JenE4 said:

Well, to be fair, Cobell didn’t just “take a nap,” she huffed her mom’s ether and passed out, seemingly as a way to feel close to her mother, as it sounds like mom spent her life in that bed loopy on ether. The episode also started with Cobell watching someone huff and then die/become somewhat comatose from ether, when she was brushing her teeth by her car. 

As she was driving through town, many buildings as “Lumon” barely visible in faded paint, so this was obviously a company town like Keir, where Mark lives in Lumon housing. You hear about bankrupt “factory towns” across America in which practically the whole town worked for one manufacturer and when the factory closes, these people are left jobless and struggling. Salt’s Neck was so much worse because not only did it leave the inhabitants bereft, it left many of them battling an ether addiction. That old woman in the cafe I thought was on oxygen, but instead she’s probably spent 75 years huffing ether, that she has a constant supply to breathe on the go.

Keir and his wife Sarah met in an ether factory, so which came first: The company or the mythology of Keir?  Or, did the Egans just start off as a regular old chemical company but somehow Keir commandeered it as a religion?

I still come back to the Kelloggs. Two brothers, one business oriented (frosted flakes!) and inpoe wellness center oriented, goat connection, connected to 7th day adventists. So maybe two Eagans, two lineages, starting with Ether. 

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lovett1979

lovett1979

9 minutes ago, JenE4 said:

Well, to be fair, Cobell didn’t just “take a nap,” she huffed her mom’s ether and passed out, seemingly as a way to feel close to her mother, as it sounds like mom spent her life in that bed loopy on ether. The episode also started with Cobell watching someone huff and then die/become somewhat comatose from ether, when she was brushing her teeth by her car. 

I don't believe there's any reason to think that there was ether in her mother's machine. Her behavior WAS to feel closer to her mother, but I think it was just a breathing apparatus, especially because both Harmony and Cissy imply it was what was keeping her alive and then that removal of the tube caused her death. Also, it is after that that the guy comes and offers her ether to get high with and she said she hadn't done it in decades. That wouldn't really make sense if she had just been getting high from her mom's an hour ago.

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tennisgurl

tennisgurl

"I haven't done this since I was eight." 

Good God....

I thought that this was such a fascinating episode, I loved learning more about Lumon's effect on the world and my jaw dropped when we found out that Miss. Cobel was the real inventor of Severance. It makes total sense, of course a child laborer who's work is so miserable that its normal for kids to huff drugs to deal with their work would invent something that totally separates her from her horrible job, and of course the Egans stole her idea so that it can be just another brilliant Egan idea, another in a long line of Egan geniuses and not a poor scholarship girl from their company town. No wonder she's so bitter about being kicked off of the Severance floor. 

I don't think this was filler at all, it gave us a ton of backstory on a major character, on the world, and on the Severance technology itself. I sometimes feel like there is a self fulfilling prophesy in people wanting to skip episodes that focus on world building and character and "get to the answers" in shows like this. Networks hear this and decide to make shorter seasons to give the people what they apparently want, but then people complain that the seasons are so short they don't have time to get all of the answers they crave. 

Its interesting that, in what is seemingly not a really long amount of time, Lumon was able to basically create this factory town, build a local economy/cult around it, and discard the town leaving it in ruin.

Devin is really lucky that she called Miss. Cobel now that she's seemingly ready to turn against Lumen, while she was doing it I thought it was the worst possible thing that she could do but now they might actually be able to work together. 

There were a few times when Miss. Cobel was listening to her crazy aunt ramble on using that weird archaic Lumon speak and it looked like she was wondering if she sounds that crazy to other people. 

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JenE4

JenE4

2 hours ago, lovett1979 said:

I don't believe there's any reason to think that there was ether in her mother's machine. Her behavior WAS to feel closer to her mother, but I think it was just a breathing apparatus, especially because both Harmony and Cissy imply it was what was keeping her alive and then that removal of the tube caused her death. Also, it is after that that the guy comes and offers her ether to get high with and she said she hadn't done it in decades. That wouldn't really make sense if she had just been getting high from her mom's an hour ago.

I mean, the extreme close-up of the liquid in the apparatus and the fact that she passed out for several hours after inhaling the liquid was enough for me to assume it was ether. I took it as that’s just how addicted her mother was, that she couldn’t live without it. Similar to how a lot of older people are addicted to OxyContin to deal with all of their aches and pains of aging.

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lovett1979

lovett1979

19 minutes ago, JenE4 said:

I mean, the extreme close-up of the liquid in the apparatus and the fact that she passed out for several hours after inhaling the liquid was enough for me to assume it was ether. I took it as that’s just how addicted her mother was, that she couldn’t live without it. Similar to how a lot of older people are addicted to OxyContin to deal with all of their aches and pains of aging.

Ok, I just re-watched the scene because I hadn't remembered any liquid at all. I do see what you're referring to. After she has taken many breaths through the tubing, there is an amber-colored liquid in a vessel with a necklace hanging over it. I'm not exactly sure what that is, but I don't see it being connected to the breathing machine in the wide shot. 

I also don't recall any mention of her mother being addicted to the ether. Can you point me to when that was said?

And I still maintain that that would make no sense for her then to be all "I haven't done this in forever" when Hampton shows up later.

Also, neither the wikipedia description or the NewRockstars YouTube breakdown for this episode interpret the machine as having ether in it.

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JenE4

JenE4

(edited)
13 minutes ago, lovett1979 said:

Ok, I just re-watched the scene because I hadn't remembered any liquid at all. I do see what you're referring to. After she has taken many breaths through the tubing, there is an amber-colored liquid in a vessel with a necklace hanging over it. I'm not exactly sure what that is, but I don't see it being connected to the breathing machine in the wide shot. 

I also don't recall any mention of her mother being addicted to the ether. Can you point me to when that was said?

And I still maintain that that would make no sense for her then to be all "I haven't done this in forever" when Hampton shows up later.

Also, neither the wikipedia description or the NewRockstars YouTube breakdown for this episode interpret the machine as having ether in it.

This seems to be a recurring theme on this board that some people are complaining that the show doesn’t explicitly tell us certain things and instead leave it up to viewers to make inferences on what is happening, so I’m going to chalk it up to one of those differences that, sure, the machine didn’t say “ether” in bold letters, so maybe it wasn’t. I have no idea who the NewRockstars are. Are they involved in creating this show? Since you wanted some sort of proof, I just did a quick google of Corbel’s mom and ether, and here’s an article interview with Patricia Arquette giving backstory on her character and explicitly saying her mother was an ether addict.

Read in Variety

Quote

I knew that Harmony had gone to a school and that she had worked at this ether factory, and that her mom had become an ether addict, and that Lumon had environmentally poisoned the town through their industrialization of everything. We had always talked about this as being an origin story aspect of it.

 

Edited by JenE4
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lovett1979

lovett1979

16 minutes ago, JenE4 said:

This seems to be a recurring theme on this board that some people are complaining that the show doesn’t explicitly tell us certain things and instead leave it up to viewers to make inferences on what is happening, so I’m going to chalk it up to one of those differences that, sure, the machine didn’t say “ether” in bold letters, so maybe it wasn’t. I have no idea who the NewRockstars are. Are they involved in creating this show? Since you wanted some sort of proof, I just did a quick google of Corbel’s mom and ether, and here’s an article interview with Patricia Arquette giving backstory on her character and explicitly saying her mother was an ether addict.

Read in Variety

 

Thank you for the link. There must have been something there, then, if the actress is saying it. I remain unconvinced that the breathing machine was ether-related, though, based on my other points, but we can agree to disagree about that. I don't think it is paramount to understanding or enjoying the show.

New Rockstars is a YouTube channel that does phenomenal breakdowns of entertainment media. They're primarily focused on Marvel-DC-Star Wars stuff but have expanded to other shows/films worthy of deconstruction. They're doing wonderful videos about Severance for each episode. I highly recommend watching them.

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seank941

seank941

On 3/9/2025 at 1:15 PM, AstridM said:

It’s not JUST this show, though.  Can’t they try for more like 6 months between seasons?

I would be ok with 12-18 months. These long waits aren't just annoying for the viewer, it actually hurts the show. Cast members age, especially younger ones. It's usually most obvious with adults playing high schoolers, but still. Trying to explain why Ms. Huang looks so much older just brings up another question to resolve.

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Dev F

Dev F

(edited)
10 hours ago, JenE4 said:

This seems to be a recurring theme on this board that some people are complaining that the show doesn’t explicitly tell us certain things and instead leave it up to viewers to make inferences on what is happening, so I’m going to chalk it up to one of those differences that, sure, the machine didn’t say “ether” in bold letters, so maybe it wasn’t.

I've been complaining as much as anyone about people who insist that the series tell instead of show, but in this particular case I just didn't get the impression that the device was meant to be some sort of ether infuser. I assumed it was some sort of old-fashioned respirator, and looking into it further, it seems a strong match for something like the Bird Mark 7 Respirator from 1957, with a red and green dial above a glass or plastic cylinder presumably containing a bellows.

When the scene cuts away to an amber liquid in a glass container, I didn't take that to be connected to the machine. I think it's a canister of perfume or something from her mother's better days, with a discarded pendant hanging over the top of it. (I considered that it might be her mother's ether stash, but I think diethyl ether is clear, not amber-colored.)

Anyway, here's a wide shot of Ma Cobel's room with the contrast and brightness adjusted. You can see the breathing device marked in green, and it doesn't appear to have a liquid reservoir attached anywhere. And marked in yellow is what looks like the glass container with the amber liquid.

Cobel.thumb.jpg.f6bab5225bab007cc26c7e0a09ea8035.jpg

None of which is inconsistent with your basic reading, that Ma Cobel died from her ether addiction and Harmony indulges in the drug itself as part of her grief. I just don't think it happens twice in a row; I see Harmony weeping into her mom's respirator as a separate aspect of the grieving process than her getting high with Hampton later in the episode.

Edited by Dev F
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AheadofStraight

AheadofStraight

I also didn't understand that the machine was supposed to be ether, especially since the aunt said Harmony's mom removed the tube on her own to die. Maybe she was on a respirator and also still doing ether? The Variety article linked above makes it pretty clear that Mom was an ether user and mentions an ether mask.

Quote

 

How did you construct the scene where Harmony lies on her mother’s bed and holds her mother’s ether mask up to her face and finds comfort in that while simultaneously wailing in pain?

She had done some ether a few times when she was a kid with James’ character, Hampton. But her mom was such an addict, and it had taken her away into this dream state so much, stolen her mother from her, basically. So we had talked about just the awkwardness of the apparatus and how we were going to shoot that and so on. And then also incorporating historical things like, throughout time and throughout cultures, women have talked about keening — the sound of mourning, which has like animal kind of elements of loss. Going back to our essential animal self, the sadness and the pain that comes with loss. Ben and I talked about whale sounds, almost, and how he wanted to use that. So we talked about it and there was some freedom in it, and we did it a few different ways and different times.

 

 

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ombre

ombre

I rewatched the first half of this episode today and I've got to say, I think it is one of the strongest arguments the show has made for just *watching* and absorbing and reacting to the visual elements.  The very first shot - the surf crashing in over uneven rocks and thus breaking in absolute chaos - felt like a defining statement.  In this world, there is a force as driving and implacable as the ocean itself, but its movements get bent around the foundations that already exist, so the results are completely unpredictable.  We are watching the ripples and richochets.  We are seeing how they play out.

I love how they mark the town as a company town by having *everything* be either blue or white - company colors.  And I'm stuck thinking hard about how the clues we see and hear convey meaning.  The coffee shop is pretty damn glam for a shitty little has-been diner.  Hampton may be huffing, but he cares deeply.  They have matching plates, beautiful tables, a gorgeous blue frosted cake (has to have a regular baker to have that).  And he interacts with his regulars with humanity and kindness.  Of course, there are not-subtle implications that he's serving up ether along with the coffee, but... he's also making a real place in a place that has been left to rot. 

There's a really beautiful book that came out a couple years ago called The Mushroom at the End of the World (Anna Tsing is the author, iirc), which talks about matsutake mushrooms - a type of mushroom that has immense meaning for many Japanese people and is considered a culturally important luxury good.  Matsutakes only grow in conjunction with various conifers which, in turn, generally grow in areas where the soil has been terribly degraded (in more nutritious soil, other trees outcompete the conifers, so they don't grow and thus the conditions for matsutakes don't come to exist).  In other words, and somewhat simplified, a matsutake is a precious thing that grows in the aftermath of absolute ruin and ruin is a necessary precondition for its growth.  The little community sketched out in the diner felt like that.  One of the most human, caring spaces we have seen in this show, and existing only in the aftermath of Lumon destruction.  And I can't stop wondering if that's a place of possibility.  (More likely, we only see it here, to give Cobel's backstory, but nevertheless, I wonder.  Hampton's Eagon-blue eyes make me wonder if we'll see him again.)

I also wonder what happened to the younger generations?  We simply don't know enough to begin to ask questions.  In our world they'd have left for greener pastures.  Did they do that?  Or did they somehow get swallowed up my Lumon - to labor, to company schools, to severance, to...?

As I say, I'm just halfway through re-watching.  I don't watch *all* that much tv, but I do like a few minutes of something with lunch and there's not all that much tv that really grabs me, so I've watched the first season twice (once a few years ago and again just before this season aired) and each ep of this season twice in the week that it airs.  Through this season, I've been struck by how much I *don't* want to go back to any previous eps once I've moved on to the next episode.  This episode, however, is making me want to rewatch the first season, to see what I think of Cobel with this new knowledge.  Not just the knowledge that she created severance (though yes that too), but more having seen this version of this person - so broken, so overtly manipulative, turning on a pin to try a different tactic with Hampton when one seems to not be working, and clearly so aware of being the fish-out-of-water in the Eagon world - how does that change my understanding of her actions when she was within the company?  I am trepidatiously looking forward to seeing how her story plays out.

 

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diebartdie

diebartdie

6 hours ago, ombre said:

I love how they mark the town as a company town by having *everything* be either blue or white - company colors.  And I'm stuck thinking hard about how the clues we see and hear convey meaning.  The coffee shop is pretty damn glam for a shitty little has-been diner.  Hampton may be huffing, but he cares deeply.  They have matching plates, beautiful tables, a gorgeous blue frosted cake (has to have a regular baker to have that).  And he interacts with his regulars with humanity and kindness.  Of course, there are not-subtle implications that he's serving up ether along with the coffee, but... he's also making a real place in a place that has been left to rot.

 

Your entire reply is beautiful, I apologize for snipping it so much...but I highlight this part because I just wanted to say, not all drug dealers / users relish squalor, violence and being mean. I've known more kind, caring, compassionate drug dealers than mean ones (although to be fair, the mean ones will just outright kill you so there's that). I think this is a very sad commentary on our society but in MANY instances, drug dealers are a communities one and only source for any sort of health care! That's sick, let's be real honest but for fuck's sake, our entire civilization seems to be deathly ill. If I had my way, it would not be like this but also, if I had my way, all drugs would be legal but clean, safe, well regulated with clean, comfortable drug houses where social workers and nurses would be there 24/7 to help people! Care for them! Sorry, this is a weird rant and I know people will be so mad. "My brother/mom/best friend/child died of a drug overdose! Your idea will KILL PEOPLE!!!" when the opposite is true.

Hampton most likely looked around his community, saw all these people hopelessly addicted to ether and decided to CARE FOR THEM and yes, that includes some level of ether maintenance provisions. That one elderly lady, if she's been on ether for decades, the best thing for her is a regular low dose. William Burroughs was a heroin addict for his ENTIRE adult life, using it regularly and he lived to his 90's. It's about compassion and radical acceptance, not judgement and punishment.

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ombre

ombre

(edited)
1 hour ago, diebartdie said:

Your entire reply is beautiful, I apologize for snipping it so much...but I highlight this part because I just wanted to say, not all drug dealers / users relish squalor, violence and being mean. I've known more kind, caring, compassionate drug dealers than mean ones (although to be fair, the mean ones will just outright kill you so there's that). I think this is a very sad commentary on our society but in MANY instances, drug dealers are a communities one and only source for any sort of health care! That's sick, let's be real honest but for fuck's sake, our entire civilization seems to be deathly ill. If I had my way, it would not be like this but also, if I had my way, all drugs would be legal but clean, safe, well regulated with clean, comfortable drug houses where social workers and nurses would be there 24/7 to help people! Care for them! Sorry, this is a weird rant and I know people will be so mad. "My brother/mom/best friend/child died of a drug overdose! Your idea will KILL PEOPLE!!!" when the opposite is true.

Hampton most likely looked around his community, saw all these people hopelessly addicted to ether and decided to CARE FOR THEM and yes, that includes some level of ether maintenance provisions. That one elderly lady, if she's been on ether for decades, the best thing for her is a regular low dose. William Burroughs was a heroin addict for his ENTIRE adult life, using it regularly and he lived to his 90's. It's about compassion and radical acceptance, not judgement and punishment.

No argument from me on any of that! I suspect that you were picking up on a touch of caginess in my writing but the caginess was actually because - after all the long fights about whether Cobel was huffing her mom's ether* - I didn't want to set off an argument about whether or not Hampton was slinging ether along with the coffee. I don't know and it doesn't much matter to what I read from the scenes. 

What I do read from the scenes is that we're being *told* that the town is empty, but we're seeing a lot of evidence that there's more than meets the eye. The town has architecture from a comfortable 19th century fishing town, so it wasn't initially a company town. It had something. And then Lumon came and used (I presume) the assets that made the town prosperous (distribution, perhaps an existing factory and trained workforce from, say, canning fish? And for whatever reason it then started using child labor. (adults weren't compliant? Adults were hooked on ether?) but there's still something to the town. There are enough people relying on roads that they are plowing. There's someone with the resources and skills to make that cake. Might be Hampton, in which case it's showing more depth to him. Might be someone else, in which case it's more depth to the town. And it shows that they expect there's a purpose for that cake - someone who can afford to buy it or some other anticipated end. Hampton trusts his community enough to leave his lovely Cafe at a moment's notice. It's important to him to not disturb the folks in there by just shoving them out the door. Again, it just says that the town isn't just the wasteland that we are being *told* it is.  And since I'm already interested in how Lumon doesn't recognize the strength of the non-hierarchical structure of the mdr team, I'm also interested in this little pocket of kindness and support... Of strength.

(my family is primarily architecture/city planning adjacent. Can you tell? :P). 

While it's *possible* that the show's creators didn't mean to convey all that info, they have made such studied choices in the rest of their setting that I rather think they did mean it. 

I'm now stuck musing on how Cobel is a former child laborer who got out through a rigid, controlling, possibly abusive school. No wonder that - under her leadership - the innies are treated as children. More to think on there. 

Apologies for any typos. I'm writing on my phone and literally the whole screen is filled with ads. 

 

* for my two cents, I read Cobel as trying to be close to her mom by breathing her last breath. She was so sure that her aunt had yanked the tube out. It felt to me like she was trying to get that last lost moment back. But hey, I watch in bright sunshine, so some days I really miss important visual information! 

Edited by ombre
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Cotypubby

Cotypubby

On 3/10/2025 at 2:49 PM, JenE4 said:

This seems to be a recurring theme on this board that some people are complaining that the show doesn’t explicitly tell us certain things and instead leave it up to viewers to make inferences on what is happening, so I’m going to chalk it up to one of those differences that, sure, the machine didn’t say “ether” in bold letters, so maybe it wasn’t. I

Sorry, but you are 100% wrong here.  Nothing about this scene is supposed to be left up to interpretation, you just misunderstood. The machine in the mother’s room is a simple respirator, and the tube was the breathing tube that had kept the mother alive. It has nothing to do with ether! The liquid you saw was a perfume bottle on the dresser. The two are not connected at all and neither are ether. It’s not an “the audience will decide what it is” situation. 

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ombre

ombre

Between one thing and another, I didn't quite get all the way through the second half of the episode today.  I watched from when Cobel storms into the house to when she finds her old plans.

I'm actually glad to have had to focus on just this bit.  It's a piece of story-telling that makes no damned rational sense.  "She's on the run, scared for her life and she stops to take a nap?!?" has been the response from so, so many people who write about this show.  Okay.  It makes no rational sense.  So then what kind of sense *does* it make?

Well, it sure makes emotional sense.  I can imagine Cobel's situation in this moment.  Her life's work has been stolen and co-opted.  She was in charge of at least over-seeing its implementation but shit went horribly wrong and now she doesn't even have that.  She's made some kind of plan, but in these circumstances, any plan has to have an edge of insanity and prayer to it. She's on the run from an unimaginably powerful corporation that has its tentacles in everything.  She finally gets to where she can act on her plan... but it means facing her deepest darkest pains.  And now that she's in the house, having stormed past someone who was both hugely important to her younger self and hugely painful to her present self, she realizes she has no idea where to look for what she actually needs.  And she's overwhelmed by feelings of the past.  And she's got to switch gears, the way a biathlete has to calm their heart rate and nervous system from the skiing to access the fine motor control of the shooting.  So she closes her eyes for just a moment... and becomes one with her grief and pain.  And in that state, hours just disappear.  And then she has to pull herself back together and get on with things.  

It sounds dumb and trite when I spell it out like that.  But I think there's an honesty to it.  And I think it's getting at one of the biggest themes of the show (*the* biggest theme?) through a fresh perspective.  The show seems to constantly circling one idea - anaesthetizing yourself to the pain of living.  It seems like Lumon's big idea is that severance lets you avoid pain.  It's not clear *how* that works.  People keep mentioning that the happiness and peace of life as an innie will bleed over to the outie.  Maybe that's the idea.  Maybe it's repeated exposure to the stimulus (endless loops of plane crashes).  Maybe it's enslaved people working behind the scenes to delete your fears so you never even feel them.  The mechanism isn't yet clear (and might never be).  But one way or another the main theme seems to be what we do with these big emotions that can just take over our lives.

So far, we've seen this most clearly with Mark.  Outie Mark is an absolute *dick* because he's so broken by his grief.  And while he thinks he's giving himself time to just live without pain by being severed, he's so damned stuck that it's hard not to think that *he* could really use that time to work on his own shit.  Innie Mark's life may just be elevator ding to elevator ding, but outie Mark doesn't even have that escape.  It's *good* to have things that keep you buys and distract you when you're working through big stuff.  He just has his sad, sad house.  Meanwhile, Innie Mark is suffering his own traumas and becoming more and more like Outie Mark.

But we're so used to seeing Mark in that state that it doesn't really have an impact any more.  And the other severed folks we've met aren't using it that way.  So this Cobel story is our first chance to see such profound trauma anew.  And what do we see?  She has to face her trauma (mom's death, hometown's devastation, etc) and in facing it she... checks out as fast as she can.  She holds people at a distance, escapes into sleep, into ether, and then gets the heck out of dodge - each action its own kind of severance.

A lot of people I find interesting have been wondering where the great art is that deals with the covid era or with the political era of the past decade or so.  I'm starting to think that this is a pretty good effort.  It's felt like a period where there is so, so much pain and nobody can deal with it because a) that's scary and b) everyone's terrified of Financial Stuff and feels the need to just work work work.  Severance feels like an attempt to say, yeeeeaaaahhhh... this just isn't working.  There are other shows that seem to be trying to explore this emotional world (actually... a lot of them are on Apple - Sunny, Ted Lasso, Shrinking, etc) and from what I've seen they mostly seem to be trying to model "this is how to get through this stuff." Severance seems to be taking a slightly different approach - "things will be super, super bad if you don't deal with stuff."  Stick rather than carrot.

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Pi237

Pi237

Great question re: where is all the art reflecting the major changes in the recent past/covid, weather caused disasters, the dire political climate? I’ve been wondering where is this generations Rage Against the machine? Where are all the punk bands?  Of course, everything is online..voices are heard in 30’ second snippets on TikTok, etc.  music and movies are more leaning toward escapism. Too soon, I guess. But I love your premise that the show is a reflection of this willful ignorance and how unhealthy that is.  Very interesting take. 

  • Like 2
diebartdie

diebartdie

I can only speak for myself but my dad died 3 days before my 30th birthday (that's the only way I know exactly when  he died), my mom died 25 years later, a week before her birthday.

Sometimes, out of the blue my heart will break because I miss them so much...because I miss my mom desperately, the pain can still sear me and she's been gone now for almost 5 years?!?!? FIVE?!?!? How can that be.

See, that's how my grief over losing my mom gets me, Cobel's keening on her mom's deathbed made perfect sense to me, as well as her accepting some ether after waking up.

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desertflower

desertflower

On 3/11/2025 at 10:43 PM, Pi237 said:

The ads are ridiculous. They make this page on your phone unreadable and crash it constantly And none of the free blockers seem to work for me. 

I used to come to this site all the time to follow and comment on many shows. Now I stop by rarely because of this. Constantly crashing, I’m lucky if I can get a comment typed out and submitted before the page goes crazy again. Can’t they do better?

  • Fire 1
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desertflower

desertflower

13 minutes ago, desertflower said:

I used to come to this site all the time to follow and comment on many shows. Now I stop by rarely because of this. Constantly crashing, I’m lucky if I can get a comment typed out and submitted before the page goes crazy again. Can’t they do better?

Ok update, I just installed Adblock after reading someone else mention it here. It works!! Yay! Thank you!

Just wanted to add how awesome it was to hear the Cult’s “Fire Woman” at the end of this ep. 🔥🔥🔥🔥

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Pi237

Pi237

4 minutes ago, desertflower said:

Ok update, I just installed Adblock after reading someone else mention it here. It works!! Yay! Thank you!

Just wanted to add how awesome it was to hear the Cult’s “Fire Woman” at the end of this ep. 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Any idea if its safe to download adblock from the app store on an iPhone? Is it adblock plus a the red one?  Too many options online . I dont want to download the wrong one. 

JenE4

JenE4

51 minutes ago, desertflower said:

I used to come to this site all the time to follow and comment on many shows. Now I stop by rarely because of this. Constantly crashing, I’m lucky if I can get a comment typed out and submitted before the page goes crazy again. Can’t they do better?

 

30 minutes ago, Pi237 said:

Any idea if its safe to download adblock from the app store on an iPhone? Is it adblock plus a the red one?  Too many options online . I dont want to download the wrong one. 

I use the Duck Duck Go browser for this site—and this site only. It was widely recommended when the site got the new format with the insane ads breaking the functionality a couple years back, and it works perfectly. You can download from the App Store.

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desertflower

desertflower

35 minutes ago, Pi237 said:

Any idea if it’s safe to download adblock from the app store on an iPhone? Is it adblock plus a the red one?  Too many options online . I dont want to download the wrong one. 

Yes I downloaded the Adblock Plus, it’s free for just blocking ads. It has the option to upgrade to paid if you want to block other things but I’m just doing the free for now. And apparently it just works with Safari. 

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Milburn Stone

Milburn Stone

2 hours ago, JenE4 said:

I use the Duck Duck Go browser for this site—and this site only. It was widely recommended when the site got the new format with the insane ads breaking the functionality a couple years back, and it works perfectly. You can download from the App Store.

Extremely grateful for this recommendation. Works so much better on this site than Safari. FWIW, I find that the DDG browser downloaded from DDG’s website works a million times better than the one downloaded from Apple’s App Store.

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SoMuchTV

SoMuchTV

4 hours ago, Pi237 said:

Any idea if its safe to download adblock from the app store on an iPhone? Is it adblock plus a the red one?  Too many options online . I dont want to download the wrong one. 

I’m the one who mentioned Adblock. I did get it from the Apple App Store.

The one I’m using is just “Adblock” or “Adblock for Mobile”. The icon is a stop sign with a white hand over it. I got it several years ago and it was the only one that worked for me at the time. I think there are more now, that others have mentioned here. I’ve had zero problems with it, though, so I haven’t looked for anything else. 

It does only seem to work with Safari, though, so I only use Chrome or Firefox for sites that I know don’t have uncivilized ads. 

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ombre

ombre

I finished rewatching the last few minutes of this ep yesterday. The first time I watched it I liked it just fine, thought it did good narrative and character work, and was blown away by the images of the landscape. After rewatching it I'd say that it will prove vital for the show. Without getting back story on Cobel we'd never really believe a change of heart. Because they took the time to do that work, I suspect we *are* about to see her getting on board with Mark. 

Because of this ep, I have started rewatching the first season (which is good, because my mom wanted to watch it but would never make the time to do it herself :D) and I see Cobel in an utterly new light. Before she came across as a bizarrely unhinged, petty tyrant. Now she comes across as an exhausted, worn-down scientist who has had a big cool insight but is now stuck in a years-long slog of overseeing endless observations on lab mice. I've talked about how fascinated I am by the depiction of innies as children. I didn't pick up on it as much in those early eps, but it's *so* there. But it's bizarrely not such a big leap between viewing the severed floor as a bunch of lab mice and viewing it as a kind of replica of the Lumon school that Cobel went to. In each, clearly, strange things wild happen to the inhabitants for no reason they could discern. Their world is mysterious and they try to make sense of it but simply don't have enough info to do so. They have little control. They can only try to comply with unpredictable overseers to avoid punishment. 

I was also struck by the two conflicting versions of her mom that Cobel presents to mark. She tells innie mark that her mom was an atheist. She tells outie mark that her mom was a catholic. There's truth to the first version. I wonder if there's also a truth to the second version (ie, mom had an inner belief system in conflict with Lumon crap). 

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ombre

ombre

(edited)

Rewatched the fourth episode of the first season tonight. The whole thing makes much more sense after sweet vitriol and the previous ep about Gemma. If you view the severed floor of season one as the result of being an invention of an abused (and thus abusive) scientist with a deeply stunted emotional development, then the it's almost hard to see how you wouldn't end up with something like the severed floor. Especially when having to jump through weird hoops like having the head of the company's daughter as an underling all of a sudden. 

I'm also struck by cobel's actions around the funeral : sussing out that mark is feeling especially emotional towards his dead wife and devising tasks to see if any part of outie mark is bleeding through. He might not overtly respond to seeing his wife or even smelling her candle (smell generally having a deep connection with memory), but I - having just watched mark get super up close and personal with ths tree where she died - wonder if his sculpting a tree doesn't actually show that, yes, he is having some bleed through. 

All of which is to say, this ep is making me trust the show a lot more. It really makes sense of things that felt like an absurdist pastiche of a bad workplace. 

Edited by ombre
  • Like 6
Jack Shaftoe

Jack Shaftoe

(edited)

I am late to the party and not much to say other than concur with the opinion that the episode could have twice as short and achieve the same impact. Yeah, the cinematography is amazing but that doesn't mean that most scenes have to have glacial pace.

Furthermore, I am getting tired of evil entities that don't take simple precautions, like, I don't know, tracking Cobel's phone (why is Devin dumb enough to talk openly about Mark' reintegration on the phone anyway?) or getting rid of her altogether right after she left the company. There is so much on screen incompetence at Lumon that I can't help but wonder how it got away with keeping all its dirty secrets for so long.

Edited by Jack Shaftoe
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