Alright.
I fucking NEED to talk about Severence. Spoilers maybe, I guess, if you haven't watched up to Season One, Episode...uh...5? I think we're on 5. Derek checked, we just finished episode 3)
I haven't been this invigorated by solving a show's plot since the first season of Westworld.
Derek and I came into Severence pretty late in the game, and it wasn't even disinterest that kept me from watching it, I'm not really sure at all what it was. Whatever our reason for not watching Severence until a few days ago (I believe we started Friday night. So March 14th, 2025), not watching it or talking about it has kept us from any kind of Severence chatter. The finale for season 2 is this upcoming Friday (March 21st), but Derek and I have stayed in the dark about Severence. No plotlines have reached us, none of our friends or family have asked if we're watching Severence to stoke our curiosity or ask us what we think, no theories have been run by us. I'm repeating the point: the second season finale is in five days, but we have remained exceptionally clueless about anything to do with Severence over the last three years.
I. Am. ENTHRALLED.
And I know there's some kind of fuckery afoot here. I spent 45 minutes hopping around my room today (literally hopping. Derek says I have to put literally in here, because it is important) , bouncing ideas off of Derek. I called my dad to see if he's watching Severence...he is...and to run some theories by him. He inadvertently spoiled something for me and Derek, but it was something we had already plugged into our "Fuckery Going on with Severence" bingo card. According to my dad, nothing I've said I have as a theory is correct, but then he said that you don't actually know what's going on as far as he's in, and he and Caryn just finished season 2, episode 7. They're as caught up as you can be.
Which makes me think there might still be space for me to be right. So I want to log the things I think are going on, like the adamant nerd I am. And I am writing this blog on the heels of spending hours organizing my Magic the Gathering cards today, so. I wish I had logged my journey through figuring out Westworld (I figured out a lot of Westworld, Derek and I fucking LOVED solving that shit, though he did tell me today that my need to "solve" everything is tedious, and he wishes I would just watch things and let them unfold and happen. He corrected me as I read this and said SOMETIMES it's tedious. Not all the time).
Nuts to that shit. Not figuring out the story before it happens is for fuckin' suckers.
Here we go. Here is my log of my guesses about Severence. Hopefully this is not a monument to my wrongness.
My overall assumption is that the goings on here are somewhere between Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Westworld. Some kind of weird mix of those ideas. Memory tampering/mind altering, with a mix of either cloning, or something similar, some sort of duplication process. I'm mostly gleaning this from the black goop. It isn't just that Irving saw it and freaked out (and was brought to the break room for "sleeping"...which Derek and I are currently debating about right now, I think this is a leak from the top sever. More on that later), it's that the goop plays such a heavy part in the credits. It gave me massive Westworld Vibes (in fact, this whole show feels like it's got MASSIVE HBO energy), but I doubt they're robots. But I am starting to wonder if there are clones? Duplicates of the self, and that's what the goop does? The goop really swarms Mark in the credit sequence, and if memory serves, it plops out a copy of him next to him in his bed. AND he's running through very globby copies of a body that I am assuming is his during the credits. So I think there is some kind of copying or cloning or duplication adjacent something going on with the goop. Lumon's logo is also a droplet of some kind of liquid. I think we're all meant to assume it's water, but I think it's the goop. Lumon goop.
I also think there are more than two sever levels. So we noticed that colors are pretty prominant story cues. Like there is a lot of green in the corporate sever (I'm calling it LuluLemons), with blue accents. The clothes are blue, the access cards are blue. Derek says he thinks this indicates the corporate world, the sever. I think what color does is indicate the world ABOVE. "World". Derek and I have quibbled over whether or not the worlds are separate. He doesn't think they are, I think it's a bit more nuanced than that, if not flat out incorrect. At the very least, I think there are at least three severs (well, two severs, but three levels of consciousness). What makes me think that is the colors. So again, we've got green in LuLuLemons with blue accents, and I think the blue accents are showing the sever above it, which Derek thinks is the real world baseline.
But I think he's wrong. I think there's at least one more sever level. Red is accenting the blue level, so I think that is Real Reality. Derek mentioned something off-handedly about the fish in Mark's house, he mentioned that the red fish is bigger than the blue fish, and I was like, that's ANOTHER reason I think there's at least one more level up. But also because of Ms. Selvig nee Cabel nee Selving? Who fucking knows yet! Derek and I assumed she was not severed from jump. Not for anything particularly clever, but mostly because like, management SHOULDN'T be severed. Someone down in the sever department needs to know what the fuck is going on to keep the ship from capsizing, right? Just makes corporate sense. It isn't that she's his neighbor (I didn't verify this with Derek, but the second Mark started interacting with Ms. Selvig on the phone I felt pretty confident it was Patricia Arquette and her many aliases that was going to be his neighbor), it's that she's his neighbor with pretense. I don't know why she'd have to have a different name in Severence land if she was ACTUALLY a sever, and she CERTAINLY wouldn't live so close to him. She's a handler of some sort. I can't yet suss out if she's EVERYONE'S handler, or just Mark's. When she goes into Mark's house and takes the candle out of Gemma's stuff, one half is green and one half is red. That was another visual clue that told me there is maybe at least one more level of sever going on. No blue in the candle because they're on the blue sever level, right? That was my thinking.
I think the numbers they're binning are related to something like their personal traumatic memories, but at the very least they are processing shit in their own heads (my dad reports that circa season 2 episode 7, there is no knowledge about what is being done on the computers). I think that this is where the ESotSM bit comes in...I'm wondering if everyone there...all of the innies...have an outie that did something deeply fucked up. My big theory is that Mark is there because he either IS responsible or FEELS responsible for his wife's death. He is either struggling to cope in the baseline real world and has to compartmentalize in order to get through life.
Sidebar:
I just stopped writing to posit to Derek that I think food is another tell about where we are, much like Westworld had tells to subtly demonstrate what timeline we were in. If memory serves, we have only seen Mark eat, and he only ate the once. In fairness, this JUST occurred to me, and I maybe wasn't paying enough attention to food ingestion, but I do think weve only seen Mark eat a sandwich. I am now wondering if taking in food is a clue we're at Red baseline, seeing NO food means Blue sever, and seeing non-descript food products (Raisins! Shriveled!) means being in Lululemons Land. We don't really NEED any visual cues to tell us when we're in LuLuLemons Land, since the area is pretty stark, but I think that's how at least two different above ground severs can exist and fuck with the trust viewers are placing in the storytelling being linear and honest. Food has GOT to play a part in letting us know what we're watching and in what version of Mark we're watching it.
Sidebar over, back to it:
What if that's why they have to say the things they say in the break room? The break room is all about contrition, it sounds like, which struck me as odd, though I think they're masking it as harsh punishment for transgressing against LuLuLemons. But what if it's actually some deeply immersive therapeutic tactic? Asking for absolution until you mean it not for you as an innie, but for your outer outie?
And the candle thing, which Derek reminded me I did not circle back about. I think Ms. Selvig nee Cabel needs to search Mark's house for evidence of sever leaks. Or reintegration. She removed the candle either because it didn't belong there (how would she know to go right to that box, though? Oh, I think it's actually because Mark had been looking through it and it was out and not tucked away, so she investigated. Maybe this bit of my theory is a reach), or because it had popped up from the upper sever (red baseline?), or it's possible the candle is some maguffin related bullshit that really only is there to make us distrust Ms. Cabel nee Selvig and show off a color cue. OR it is something else entirely that we can't know yet because Derek and I are only three episodes in.
I also think that the other head honcho is on it with Petey. I can't yet figure out how else Petey would have been able to smuggle out the tape recording from the break room.
I think this is everything. I will hopefully keep tabs on how my theories are playiing out, or how they are evolving as I watch more episodes.
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