Severance - Season 1

★★★★★

I finally watched the first season of Severance. There isn’t a bad episode in the bunch. The slow burn from Helly waking up with no memory, through Mark finding out about their missing colleague, through the revelation in the season finale of who the rest of the Macro-Data Refinement team’s outside selves are (not to mention the wellness counsellor) is utterly gripping. And some of the curveballs really hurt.

What can I say about the absurdity of the Severed floor? No last names, giant open-floor-plan rooms with a handful of desks in the middle, bright lights everywhere except the hallways to places you really don’t want to go, a maze of empty, backrooms-like corridors keeping departments separate, an incentive structure that boils down to Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) for infantilized adult office workers, and a bizarre company culture that more-or-less worships the founder’s family?

Not that the outside world lacks absurdity. Mark’s brother-in-law the self-help guru (and his friend group), and his relationship with his older neighbor, are probably the most absurd aspects before you get into the what-is-Lumon-actually doing? questions. (Of course most of the outside scenes are dark, taking place after or before work hours.) And then there are the people who cross the boundaries.

It’s the ultimate in worker exploitation. You can’t file a complaint except with management, and your “outie” won’t remember having filed it, so you just have to gamble on management passing it along. Any skills you develop can’t transfer to another job, because you won’t remember them.

And the cast…Christopher Walken and John Turturro are good in everything, of course. Dichen Lachman absolutely nails the odd-but-compelling wellness counsellor. Tramell Tillman maintains an undercurrent of menace even when he’s presenting in dead-on, full-corporate faux-friendly mode. Patricia Arquette has matured into an actress who can be both a sweet old charming grandmother type who’ll bake you cookies and a terrifying force of nature who rules the office as an immovable object with an iron fist. (And sometimes that fist throws things.)

In a weird bit of timing, I picked up There Is No Antimemetics Division around the same time. (Also very good!) A big part of that is making plans you won’t be able to remember in a way that they’ll still happen after you forget them. Something that’s highly relevant here, too.