‘Severance’ Season 2, Episode 7 With ‘Lost’ Cocreator Damon Lindelof

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Speaker 1 Hello, welcome back to the Prestige TV podcast feed. I'm Joanna Robinson.

Speaker 2 I'm Rob Mahoney.

Speaker 1 And we're here to talk to you about a doozy of an episode of Severance. We have a lot to get to.

Speaker 1 I could do this for hours, literally, but we will try to do it in our usual allotted prestige time. I will note that.
Don't you say so, Joe?

Speaker 2 I don't know that that's going to happen today, but we're going to try.

Speaker 1 We're going to do our best.

Speaker 1 You might note that the runtime is longer than usual on this episode.

Speaker 1 That's because we've got an interview with Damon Lindelof, who came into the studio this week to talk about his severance thoughts and theories and all the rest.

Speaker 1 This is an edited version of a longer conversation, which is up on YouTube. So if you go to the Ringer TV YouTube channel, you can watch an hour of Damon Lindelof talking about severance.

Speaker 1 And if you listen to this podcast, you get about half of that. You get it like severed, essentially.
So,

Speaker 1 you know, that that is what is going on on this pod today.

Speaker 2 And I'll say a lot of great theories, a lot of great bardo discussion from Damon on this pod, and the exciting debut of Joanna Robinson, NBA Podcaster, which is something that I hold near and dear to my heart.

Speaker 2 So, thank you for joining our space.

Speaker 1 With a script written for me by one, Mr. Rob Mahoney.

Speaker 2 It's a team effort. Look, the best podcasts are two-handers or three-handers, you know? Like, we're all working together in this.

Speaker 1 It's true, it's true. Okay, so listen:

Speaker 1 elsewhere on the Prestige feed,

Speaker 1 you and I are covering White White Lotus midweek. Bill and Mallory and I are covering White Lotus immediately after the episode drops on Sunday.

Speaker 1 So you can watch all of that on the Ringer TV YouTube channel as well.

Speaker 1 We are keeping our eyes on the pit. It's a tough hang sometimes, but we are watching it and we'll be checking back in with that.

Speaker 1 And then also, just to, we get this question all the time, just to reiterate, Mallory and I are covering yellow jackets over in House of R.

Speaker 1 So if you're looking for yellow jackets episodes of Prestige, they don't exist this year. They're over in House of R because we have a lot going on in this feed right now.

Speaker 1 And one last thing I want to say about the Damon interview, and I'll say it again later.

Speaker 1 You know, Rob and I might reference it a little bit as we're talking about it, but it was recorded before either of us had seen episode seven. So,

Speaker 1 there's perhaps a stale take or two in that interview that does not hold up post

Speaker 1 episode seven.

Speaker 2 But some big picture theory from one of the masters of the craft of these sorts of puzzle box shows on how to do it and what you should be looking for and kind of how these strands are pulled together.

Speaker 2 Which, holy hell, Joe, a lot of strands being pulled together this week. A lot of things happening this week on Severance.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. Before we get to that, can we do like a quick zoom through some emails we got? Where can folks find us, Rob?

Speaker 2 They can always find us at prestige TV at spotify.com, but in particular,

Speaker 2 you can find us at pineapplebobbing at gmail.com.

Speaker 1 We got, dare I say, more emails than ever this week. They just keep coming.
And you guys were really quick on the emails this week. So we got a lot of post-episode seven emails.

Speaker 1 We record this the morning after the episode drops. And you guys were burning the midnight oil, watching the episode, and emailing us thoughts about Russian literature, all kinds of stuff.

Speaker 1 So we will be getting to that. But in terms of stuff that applies to last week, I hear all of you.

Speaker 1 You don't want me washing my chicken.

Speaker 1 I will continue to wash my chicken.

Speaker 2 Don't worry about it. Okay.
I thought we won you over, but look, I support you living your truest life even if it is one that's riddled with bacteria i keep a really clean kitchen speaking of kitchens

Speaker 1 a lot of people seem to think that third oven in fields kitchen is a microwave drawer even uh we got a listener shane who is a commercial interior designer sent us some photographic evidence that that is probably what that is so that's does that make you more or less excited about the the three-door situation in the Fields kitchen?

Speaker 2 A little less. I don't like a low microwave, like one that's built into an island or built into low cabinetry per se.

Speaker 2 But if it's, say, a miniature convection oven and not a microwave, then I'm back on board.

Speaker 1 Okay. Speaking of the decor in the fields kitchen, we got several people writing in about the salt and pepper grinders to let us know that, in fact, that collection is quite costly.

Speaker 2 They are cultured swine that we are. They did not realize the design significance of these mid-century modern grinders.

Speaker 1 Famed salt and pepper grinders

Speaker 1 Dansk Donsk. And I should say, I actually own something by Dansk Donsk.

Speaker 1 Do you know what a butter warmer is?

Speaker 2 I don't think I do.

Speaker 1 Okay, so neither did I until I bought this. Basically, I had a, I lived in a place that did not have a microwave in an island or otherwise.
Okay.

Speaker 1 And I had like a bone broth habit and I wanted like a cup of hot bone broth in the morning and I didn't, it felt silly to use an entire pot.

Speaker 1 So I was looking for like a wee pot to put on the stove to warm up some bone broth. And a butter warmer is essentially like a small enamel pot with like a little wooden handle.

Speaker 1 Mine is like a red enamel with a little wooden handle and it is the cutest fucking thing in the whole world.

Speaker 1 And even though I have a microwave now, I like refuse to power. I mean, I presume you warm butter to pour on pop.
I don't know what you would do with a butter warmer otherwise.

Speaker 1 Just like if you want some melted butter and you don't want to put it in the microwave and it's got a little like spout on it.

Speaker 1 So it's like a perfect little like, you could heat it up and then like it looks nice. You could pour it.
anyway. That's my butterwarmer

Speaker 1 side

Speaker 1 chat. Uh, you can find it on the Food 52 website.
That was not a free ad. Um, okay,

Speaker 1 um,

Speaker 1 and then on a much more sort of

Speaker 1 serious, dare I say serious, more serious than a butterwarmer uh level, we got this great email from Zachariah about Mr.

Speaker 1 Milchik, which I think is really interesting to talk about in the context of this episode when we see him sort of barring the way for Gemma when she is on the verge of escaping the testing floor.

Speaker 1 And what I wrote in my notes when I saw that, I was, I wrote, after watching Miss Milchik go through the performance review and the self-lagellation that was the paperclip exercise and the sort of self-beratement in the mirror, all that sort of stuff, I wrote down oppressed oppressor, like what happens when instead of banding together against the person that you're, that is oppressing you, you sort of grab onto whatever little shreds of power you do have inside of the system.

Speaker 1 But something that Zachariah wrote in sort of specifically about the language component of Mr. Milchik's review is he wrote,

Speaker 1 My read, someone like Mr.

Speaker 1 Milchik would have internalized the feeling that he would need to be better, twice as better, three times better as the cure white children to ever bask in his virtuous light.

Speaker 1 He honed his vocabulary to showcase his nimble wit and won't ever be put in a position where he's not polished enough, which is why he was knocked down a peg.

Speaker 1 This is the exact dynamic, I think, that informs this character. And I think the show is actually deeply about race and caste without hardly ever being explicit about it.

Speaker 1 This also applies to Dylan G and Natalie at various times. And then he goes on to talk about the term uppity,

Speaker 1 which is like a racially specific term used to sort of put people in their place. But it is a term we heard earlier this season.
Drummond used it. Drummond used it in reference to Devin.

Speaker 1 He was like, his sister is much more uppity than he is talking about Mark. But it is, it's in the water in terms of what's going on with Milchik and Lumen at this, at this time.

Speaker 1 And in this larger conversation we've been having about like the severed as people who are considered not human

Speaker 1 and all of that. So I really enjoyed that email from Zachariah.

Speaker 2 Well, especially, I mean, we already understand the broadest strokes of why Milchik reacts the way he does to being gifted the paintings of Kir, the racially adjusted paintings.

Speaker 2 But if you are someone who has gone to such incredible lengths to make yourself corporate friendly, all of this code switching he does, all of this like flourishing language that he incorporates, and then when you try to do that to be slapped on the hand for doing it, like he, it's understandable why he would feel as if he the rug has been pulled out from him in that moment because he's a guy who's doing all the right things in a corporate sense and checking all the boxes that they want him to check and yet and still ends up in this place.

Speaker 1 All right, this week's episode is Chikai Bardo.

Speaker 1 I am pronouncing it pretty close to how it's pronounced in the show, but if my valley girl Chikai sounds like a little

Speaker 1 off, you can let me know. Directed by a cinematographer, Jessica Lee Genye.
This is her directorial debut, but she is this sort of main DP for the last season and a half of Severance.

Speaker 1 And I feel like she really showed up and splashed out with the visual, like the flashback visuals and everything. We'll talk about some of the specifics there.

Speaker 1 And then written by Dan Erickson, series creator, and Mark Friedman.

Speaker 2 I want to start here, Rob.

Speaker 1 What do you, Rob, think happens in this episode? Because I think there is some, though not a lot, of potential wiggle room in terms of interpreting what we see. What's your interpretation?

Speaker 2 I guess which part? Because

Speaker 2 there's a lot to dissect. And I think depending on how you take apart the various elements of this show, the texture of the decisions and the reveals can change pretty dramatically.

Speaker 2 So how big picture do you want to go here?

Speaker 1 Okay, let's say: do you believe everything we see on the testing floor is actually what is happening on the testing floor?

Speaker 2 Yes. Me too.

Speaker 1 Do you think that everything we saw in flashback form was that Mark POV, or was that Gemma POV, or was that some sort of combination of the two?

Speaker 2 I think it is a combination of the two. Okay.

Speaker 1 Do you think that sort of collective unconscious combination of the two approach and flashback

Speaker 2 is

Speaker 1 does that sort of help us understand why Mark might be uniquely qualified to refine Gemma if that is in fact exactly?

Speaker 1 We'll get into sort of the specifics of what we may think is happening with the refining process, but

Speaker 1 do you feel like that underlines that sort of connection, collective memory, collective emotional experience that they share?

Speaker 2 Without a doubt.

Speaker 1 Damon will explain it, as you mentioned, in a bit more detail, but how does all of this jive with your understanding of the concept of the bardo?

Speaker 2 I thought you were going to say my concept of death, which that was going to be a much bigger conversation, but it's also not

Speaker 1 early, Rob. I'm not going to make you talk about what is your concept of death.

Speaker 2 The bardo is very interesting in the context of this episode. I think...

Speaker 2 In a manner of speaking, when we do get it referenced by name, Chikai Bardo, it is Gemma looking at these lumen ideographic cards. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And that's her interpretation of it. And as she's saying that, she's also describing the exercises she's doing as a sort of like, is this a duck or is this a rabbit perception test? Right.

Speaker 2 So the fact that she sees that card and sees a bardo, sees a trial, sees a transition into a state of death, sees a manner of acceptance. I think that tells me more about anything else.

Speaker 2 Like she, based on where she is at that point in the story and everything that she is going through, she is interpreting that card specifically as that sort of transition into death.

Speaker 1 She also mentions ego death.

Speaker 1 And do you want to talk about where we've seen that card before?

Speaker 2 Boy, do I. Okay, great.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 2 So you may remember this card as the one that Dylan G pocketed at work. in season one when the MDR team was visiting O and D.

Speaker 2 And Milchik has to jar him awake off the clock to find out the location of that card. And if you don't remember what it looks like, it's roughly a guy doing like a warrior two yoga pose,

Speaker 2 standing opposite another man, like hand to his chest, effectively. And yeah, Jem has interpreted this as some kind of ego death, as a person fighting within themselves or combating themselves.

Speaker 2 Very interesting to revisit that episode in retrospect, the one in which Dylan takes that card. Milchik's response, not unlike in this episode, very panicked.

Speaker 2 High stakes for a guy who took a card out of a department who doesn't have any idea what it is. And his quote from that episode is, Dylan, listen, you have no idea how sensitive this information is.

Speaker 2 If someone paid you to smuggle out that card, dot, dot, dot. And then Dylan interrupts him.
I think we're getting a sense of how important these kinds of cards might be.

Speaker 1 And Gemini just got it in the mail. She's got it in the mail.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 1 Basically, we're taking, so this idea of the bardo, which is this liminal space between life and death, and again, once again, Damon Lindelof will do a great job of explaining in more detail what that is.

Speaker 1 But we could interpret, we could apply that to

Speaker 1 Mark, who's on the verge of collapse,

Speaker 1 you know, throughout this episode. His

Speaker 1 after hitting the floor pretty hard last week. Like there are, there is a version of the story where he doesn't make it on the other side of this episode.
And

Speaker 1 then also Gemma, who is post-death of a kind,

Speaker 1 living out her afterlife.

Speaker 1 And this idea of the bardo as a space where you will meet all the people you ever knew in your life

Speaker 1 or versions of yourself, I guess, is sort of more applicable to what is going on here.

Speaker 1 I like to think of this as like a new circle of hell, the testing floor. We've been talking about Lumen or, you know, the severed floor as an underworld, as a hell sort of space.

Speaker 1 And this is just like another,

Speaker 1 another trip to another circle

Speaker 1 in the Dante sense of hell. And our listener, Katie wrote in, this is her recap of what she feels like is happening on the testing floor.
Okay.

Speaker 1 She also recommends we watch The OA,

Speaker 1 you know, especially if we are like fiending for more Jason Isaacs in our life.

Speaker 1 She says, is this Lumen's game to sell severance to the masses to cut out plane rides?

Speaker 1 Did you have a moment where you're like, plane rides? We talked about that on the screen.

Speaker 2 We kind of talked about some of these things in a way that is disconcerting.

Speaker 1 Like that we were joking about it and they're like, no, but seriously.

Speaker 2 But guess what? What if you did it and then sold it to people?

Speaker 2 Wouldn't that be valuable?

Speaker 1 To sell severance to the masses to cut out plane rides, root canals, abusive family dynamics, sexual trauma is Lumen's future one where everyone is a chip in their head and brothels are legal again because who cares?

Speaker 1 The women won't remember what you do to them. No pain meds for surgeries or procedures because those are risky and expensive.
Better to just do it while severed.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so once again, a spooky new layer to our what would you sever game that we've been playing.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I, I mean, this is my interpretation. There's a couple options here.
I think that that seems to be the main one. Or

Speaker 1 because we saw in season one a woman who sort of severed herself out of her labor experience, right?

Speaker 1 So that's an option. But also, in terms of having a workforce that you sever

Speaker 1 and knowing that you can do the most horrendous, extreme things to them and they will not remember it at all.

Speaker 2 Or you won't be liable for any of those things. Right.

Speaker 2 You know, there's, I think there's all of these corporate benefits to abusing your employees to an inch of their life and then them not remembering it. Tough.

Speaker 1 That's an understatement.

Speaker 2 Grim.

Speaker 2 Quite grim, Joe.

Speaker 1 Grim.

Speaker 1 And I think, you know, we've seen it a couple of times, like when Mark in season one gets an explanation for why he has like a bump in his head when he's an Audi, or most recently after the Orpo, has an explanation for why he was all wet,

Speaker 1 you know, sort of explained to him.

Speaker 1 But if the severance practice is sort of, if the walls are holding even firmer or even higher, sort of what more could they do that an Audi wouldn't even know that they did.

Speaker 2 And that is one of the big questions raised by this episode. We see Gemma going through all of these very unique torture mechanisms, effectively, right? Ways to create negative emotion in her.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 We already know, as you just said, that severance is strong enough to withstand the physical, emotional, psychic pain of childbirth.

Speaker 2 We know that it's effective on that level to the point that a new mom would have zero memory of the labor she just experienced. And so what are we doing here?

Speaker 2 Like the limits already seem quite high, but I would say the incredible distinction within this episode is we have gone so far beyond innies and outies at this point.

Speaker 2 Like Gemma is going into each of these rooms with a distinct consciousness. Person.
A distinct persona where the version of her that is going to the dentist just left the dentist.

Speaker 2 And the version of her that's going on the plane just left the plane. And they are just living in a loop of that exact thing over and over and over.

Speaker 2 And so Gemma's consciousness, unlike Mark or Dylan or Irving or anybody else,

Speaker 2 is fractured into who knows how many pieces.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Like there are so many, we find out in one of her intake sessions with Dr.
Mao, who we'll talk about in a second, but like that she did six rooms in one day. Yes.

Speaker 1 But there are so many rooms down there.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 place names that we've never seen on an MDR monitor on these, on these doors and stuff like that. Cold Harbor, though, still remains a secret, right? She has not been in the Cold Harbor room.

Speaker 1 This is like a new room for her.

Speaker 1 And she saw the label on it but she has not been inside it right that she knows has not been inside what do you think is in there joe what do you think it's it a room of puppies what do you think is happening oh for sure yeah uh rainbows sunshine lollipop something like that well

Speaker 2 real talk on that front i think it's it's not hard given the structure of the show to draw a line between what is happening in these rooms and say the four tempers that we've been

Speaker 2 put right before us so often in severance and if that is the case we're getting all negative emotions in this episode. We're getting the Christmas card thank you writing.

Speaker 2 We're getting the plane turbulence. We're getting the dent, the two-hour dental exam.
We're not getting anything that looks a lot like frolic.

Speaker 2 I'll say that. And so I'm not ruling out the possibility that whatever's happening in Cold Harbor could be a positive emotion.

Speaker 1 How optimistic for you?

Speaker 2 No, I am not feeling good about it. I'm just saying this is a thing that is possible.

Speaker 2 But if the end game of this sort of severance is shielding out negative feelings, there would be no need to sever out positive feelings.

Speaker 2 So it's probably still absolute shit, whatever is happening in there. But the absence of frolic is noted.

Speaker 1 Well, we'll always have it tattooed on Drummond's hand if we need it. Certainly will.

Speaker 1 Okay, so we mentioned that Gemma has a number of not only personas, but also she has wigs and costume changes. And something that you texted to me, Rob.

Speaker 1 Rob is very assiduous about not talking about the episode. He does not burn pod.
We don't pre-chat about the episode.

Speaker 2 Only talk for money, Joe.

Speaker 1 But what you did text me is you said, we're going to need to talk about Dollhouse. We have to.

Speaker 1 And also our listener, Mike, coincidentally wrote in to us about Dollhouse just last week. So shout out, Mike.

Speaker 1 Dejin Lachman, who plays Gemma, a.k.a. Miss Casey, you and I both, I think, were introduced to her on the TV show Dollhouse, which ran from 2009 to 2010 for two seasons.

Speaker 1 Do you want to tell the people at home who maybe did not catch this quickly canceled gem what Dollhouse is about?

Speaker 2 I would love to. Even Gem might be strong.
I would say it's overall quite an uneven show. Patchy, patchy.

Speaker 2 Quite patchy Joss Whedon series that is about, not unlike Severance, the creation of a technology, except in this case, it's a technology in which you can program a person.

Speaker 2 clients will hire the company that owns this technology to program these people, these dolls, into whatever they want them to be, whatever persona they want them to have.

Speaker 2 And so, yeah, Deeshin Lachman spends that whole series going episode to episode in wildly different personas, doing wildly different things.

Speaker 2 Spoiler alert, many of the clients just want to have sex with these people with very specific kinks or very specific personalities or appearances.

Speaker 2 And so there's something, certainly in my brain, about watching.

Speaker 2 Decian Lachman put on wigs, put on outfits, put on heels, go to room after room after room and be subjected to torture that certainly feels a lot like dollhouse to me.

Speaker 1 The main doll on that show is Eliza Doucheku of Buffy Vampire Slayer fame.

Speaker 1 And like, you and I both agree that she's not the greatest part of that show, but Dejin Lachman and Enver Joker, who played two of the other dolls, are like phenomenal.

Speaker 2 Uncanny. At exactly this thing.
Her ability to

Speaker 2 transmute into exactly what they need to be for any year characterization.

Speaker 1 Different, whatever it is. And so that was like a pure pleasure of watching Dollhouse.
I have been waiting for Dejin Lachman to have like another opportunity to really show what she can do.

Speaker 1 And she's popped up here and there, but I don't think she's been, and even in season one of Severance was not, you know, she's great, but not given a lot to work with.

Speaker 1 And then this is just a Dejin Lachman showcase, this episode, and she's phenomenal in it.

Speaker 1 And one other thing I want to say about Dollhouse is that ostensibly in that show, Everyone who is a doll has volunteered, has signed up for five years of this

Speaker 1 in exchange for a good deal of money or to make something bad in their life go away or whatever it is.

Speaker 1 Except for our main character who, you know, there are questions about whether she's there consensually. And, you know, I would say

Speaker 1 a similar case for

Speaker 1 Gemma here, where my interpretation of what we see in this episode is that...

Speaker 1 Lumen has been lurking in Gemma and Mark's life since they're very meet cute. They're at a blood drive run by Lumen.

Speaker 1 When they're having fertility issues, they go to a fertility clinic run by Lumen, where Dr. Maurer, who we spend a good deal of time with in this episode, is at that clinic.

Speaker 1 We see her have a miscarriage. We see that take a toll on their relationship.
And

Speaker 1 it feels to me by the way, the nature of her goodbye to him that night, that she has voluntarily signed herself up for this. Yes.

Speaker 1 But that she is being kept now.

Speaker 1 Like, it feels like to me that Dr. Maurer is unlikely to let her go.
He's lying to her about what's happening in the inside. Outside, she is asked to leave.
She's being told she can't leave.

Speaker 1 So however,

Speaker 1 you know, however, she was directed into this path, you know, there are some theories already out there that like Lumen might have caused her miscarriages in order to push her in this direction.

Speaker 1 Like it's certainly within the wheelhouse of the nefarious shit that they do. But

Speaker 1 whatever pushed her in here, there was a choice that was seemingly hers, but now she's trapped in a scenario that she doesn't have the ability to say, I would like to stop now.

Speaker 2 That would be my read on it. I think it's fair, if not entirely founded by the subtext of the show, to think that maybe she was straight up taken, right?

Speaker 2 That she did go not to execute a charade, but to go play charades. Like she was honestly going to her friend's house.

Speaker 2 And based on Maurer's appearance earlier, as you said, at the fertility clinic, like there was a scouting,

Speaker 2 like recruitment effort happening. The mailers, like there's something happening here that is, I'm sure, subconscious, right?

Speaker 2 That is them trying to influence her in some ways to do what it is they want. We don't exactly know yet, other than to be here and be a guinea pig.

Speaker 2 And so, this is the sort of big like A or B to me about this episode: is did

Speaker 2 Gemma taken by Lumen or did she choose to leave and got more than she bargained for? I think it's much more likely to be that outcome.

Speaker 1 I think it's the latter mostly because, again, of that that re-watching that scene where she says goodbye to mark yes and she's like i could stay and he's like no go you know it just seems very much like a she knows she's leaving for something though i i don't believe this episode gives no indication that she thought it meant forever or even for years you know

Speaker 2 i would say a couple of data points on that front we do hear

Speaker 2 in some of the dialogue between Drummond and Maurer, that Gemma has tried to break Maurer's fingers before. Like she has tried to escape her captivity before.
So

Speaker 2 she did not sign up to be a guinea pig indefinitely. Right.

Speaker 2 Also, I don't know if we want to get into Russian literature corner this early.

Speaker 1 Oh, I do.

Speaker 2 But we simply must.

Speaker 2 And if we're going to talk about the death of Ivan Ilyich, a story about how maybe being dead isn't always just being dead, but living in a way that is untrue to yourself and unfulfilling in a way that makes you dead before you actually die.

Speaker 2 It's name-checked several times in this episode, specifically with Gemma, who is teaching Russian literature.

Speaker 2 And I don't know how to read that final exchange with Mark and the slow deterioration of their relationship other than a woman who is dying, even if she is not actually dead.

Speaker 1 You know, we've cited the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind several times, but I was so reminded of it in

Speaker 1 this flashback sequence, watching them go from like the giddiness of, you know, the meet-cute and first love love and the idyllic early days of their relationship and their marriage into,

Speaker 1 you know, it's

Speaker 1 with the added

Speaker 1 harrowing infertility

Speaker 1 story that is part of their story.

Speaker 1 But, you know, you think about each one sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you think about them getting to the point in the relationship where they're like at a Chinese restaurant and they can't even talk, you know, we are the dining dead, like they can't even talk to each other.

Speaker 1 Yes. You know? And so,

Speaker 1 yeah, there are ways in which Gemma is,

Speaker 1 again,

Speaker 1 infertility is a very touchy subject. So I don't want to like make presumptions for anyone.
But inside of this character, inside of this episode,

Speaker 1 I would say there's certainly something going on there. Like Haley, our listener Haley wrote in for Tolstoy Corner.

Speaker 1 And she said, she sort of summed it up this way. She said, Tolstoy decided that death, if you lived a true, authentic life, isn't something to be feared.

Speaker 1 But if you do fear it, it's because you lived artificially or focused on the wrong things. And that can lead us to try to hide from ourselves and death and shut down.

Speaker 1 And Ivan, at the end of the story, quote, dies, but because he learned that death isn't something to be feared, he doesn't die at all.

Speaker 1 Lots of the fear of death and hiding from it can be traced into Mark, and lots of the artificial authentic stuff can be traced into Helly and Helena.

Speaker 1 But what I thought was interesting was the idea that death, the ending of oneself, only happens when authenticity is lost completely. So, like, when we think about Gemma, is Gemma alive?

Speaker 1 She's alive is like the big, the big line at the end of season one.

Speaker 2 And Rigabi gets one in this episode. We're at our like fourth different she is alive variation at this point.

Speaker 1 And like, certainly in the spirit of her breaking fingers and trying to escape and saying Mark's name a few times, there are ways in which Gemma is still alive.

Speaker 1 But there are also indications that like,

Speaker 1 um,

Speaker 1 when she's getting her sort of vitals read

Speaker 1 by this nurse played by the great Sandra Bernhardt great casting we'll talk about Robbie Benson as Dr.

Speaker 1 Bauer in a second, but like when she's getting her vitals read, one of the questions she asks is like, did you do your reading today? And she's like, yeah, 50 pages.

Speaker 1 But I was just like, and 50 pages isn't nothing. But for an academic, I think, I think of all the like.

Speaker 1 In terms of showing us their life in the span of just a few minutes of an episode of television, the

Speaker 1 really clever effect of the stacking up the books and the papers and stacking down, which is a huge part part of that montage.

Speaker 1 These are two academics who like fall in love talking about their respective fields.

Speaker 1 And you really get the sense of what is lost with these brains when they're neutered and severed into docile complicity. And so, like,

Speaker 1 the um

Speaker 1 the compliance is what I meant, not complicity. So, like, so

Speaker 1 Gemma saying, Yeah, I read 50 pages, like, yes, but like, is she

Speaker 1 for someone else? Yeah, how much is she? he, is she still Gemma at this point? You know, I don't know.

Speaker 2 It's hard to say. I think one of the interesting images to reference on that is the thank you cards, which by the time we see her writing one is so illegible.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Like not, not, does not look like understandable writing in any sense. And is that granted?

Speaker 2 Because she has now written hundreds of thank you cards and her hand is cramped beyond like any kind of recognition in the thing she is writing or is there something going on with Gemma more existentially, more spiritually?

Speaker 2 Is there something going on with the sub-severed brain that she's now working with where she is losing some of her fine motor skills?

Speaker 2 She is losing control of some of the, even the verbal elements that as an academic would come so easily to her.

Speaker 1 One of our listeners, Todd, pointed out, and I missed this, that Gemma's a lefty and that Todd was like, there's a particular form of torture of making a lefty write with a fountain pen because the smear factor factor is just off the charts.

Speaker 1 And so she's writing and he's like, the nib is all like upside down and backwards. And yeah, the writing like looks nearly like gibberish,

Speaker 1 which you're right might be a reflection of declining mind, or it might be a reflection of making her write as many thank you letters as she wrote.

Speaker 1 I thought that was like sort of a, it's always fucking Christmas, but I thought it was like a really diabolical,

Speaker 1 alongside the dentistry, writing endless thank you notes sounds like absolute torture to me.

Speaker 2 But overall, I think as far as the how alive is Gemma question,

Speaker 2 taking the Tolstoy elements and taking the Chakai Bardo specifically, really the idea of a Bardo, right? This not just transition stage, but one that involves the acceptance of death.

Speaker 2 I see that as like a pretty clear indication of where Gemma is throughout this episode. And we cover a lot of time.
We cover the nature of her entire relationship with Mark, basically front to back.

Speaker 2 I'm sure there's some plenty of things missing and we may get those gaps filled in over the course of future episodes.

Speaker 2 But this is someone who is coming to terms or has already come to terms in a way with the death of, if not who she is, then certainly her relationship and certainly the person she was with Mark.

Speaker 1 And I think what's interesting to me is I agree with all of that. I think all of that is true.
And yet she is more alive than we've seen her so far. Yeah.
We believe this is actually physically Gemma.

Speaker 1 I am sort of out on Miss Casey as a clone theory. Like this is physically her body.

Speaker 2 Also, this is a little extra textural. So if you don't like kind of cast interviews, maybe skip ahead a little bit.

Speaker 2 Basically, everyone making this show has been incredibly emphatic to the point of insulting that

Speaker 2 this is not a clone situation. So maybe that's them all covering up for the thing that they know to be true.
But at this point, I think it's much less likely.

Speaker 1 I agree.

Speaker 1 Though I really did like... Damon's clone theory.

Speaker 1 If you want to hear it,

Speaker 1 I cut it out of the episode just because of that.

Speaker 1 But you can see it on the on the YouTube interview. It's pretty solid, except maybe not actually true.
But anyway,

Speaker 1 she's more alive than we've seen her thus far. And so, you know, and this is something I had talked to Damon on the full interview that you can watch.

Speaker 1 Like previous to watching this episode, so mere days ago, I was like, I think it matters that Miss Casey, like that the Gemma's dead and she should stay dead and et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1 And now I'm in conflict. And now our love quadrangle polygon has gotten so complicated because at the end of this episode, you're like, Mark and Gemma have to be united.

Speaker 1 Like he wakes up with tears in his eyes thinking about her. She's like feebly saying his name, you know, in tears on her way back down to the testing floor.

Speaker 1 Like, of course they have to be put back together.

Speaker 1 Except we still care so much about Heli. Like, you know, it's this is exactly where they want us, which is deeply conflicted about what the outcome we're most rooting for is.

Speaker 2 So deeply conflicted about those outcomes and also deeply conflicted about as we're going through what is happening in the mechanics of this show.

Speaker 2 And like, like, again, I would argue that Gemma is dead in a lot of senses, that she is not the person that she was, that she is going through a kind of spiritual and existential transition, if not a physical death in the way that Mark understands it.

Speaker 2 And Severance is so good at having it both ways. It's so good at making us ask a lot of these questions.

Speaker 2 And we kind of jump straight into the mysteries of this week's episode and the substantial answers of this week's episode.

Speaker 2 I don't want to zoom past the fact that not only is this the best episode of Severance, Joe, I think it is the best episode of any show that you and I have covered together.

Speaker 2 I just think this is masterful, astonishing, staggering work.

Speaker 1 I really agree.

Speaker 2 Like Hall of Fame stuff in its own category, but it's definitely top five.

Speaker 1 It's definitely top five.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure I'm willing to like unsee Crimson Sky yet, but like, um, because we did cover Shogun together, but like, it is definitely top five episode television we've ever covered and you know, probably top three at least.

Speaker 2 I think it's just it's perfect in the way that is only this because the kind of story that can only be told with soft sci-fi, right?

Speaker 2 There are these incredibly human elements in there, there are these wonderful sci-fi constructions, including maybe most heartbreakingly, the fact that Gemma does stage this huge escape, finally gets her jailbreak moment and turns into Miss Casey as soon as she gets out of the elevator, which is just an incredibly gutting turn of events.

Speaker 2 And then is returned to the floor without ever even seeing what's on the other side or knowing what happened.

Speaker 1 But there's a part of her inside.

Speaker 1 This is why I'm like, I can't fully ascribe to your Gemma is dead theory because there is a part of her that is alive even inside of Miss Casey that's like, but I, and especially when we flash to

Speaker 1 the season one scene where she had been monitoring the mdr team and she was like i really liked being here today yeah dejan lockman on the official podcast that dropped this morning was talking about how when we see miss casey or when we see gemma in all of these rooms it's just her and fucking dr maure and uh nurse cecily and that's like that's all of our interaction so there's something inside of miss casey even though she doesn't actually know it that is

Speaker 1 so happy to be around other people. You know, there's just something inside of her that is still alive and gicking and is Gemma despite all of the tinkering that they're doing with her brain.

Speaker 2 You know, I completely agree with that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't want to overstate the death thing so much as I think that that's the experience Gemma was going through in the outside world as her, as her relationship was falling apart, as she was dealing with her, like the infertility.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And then she gets to this hellscape.
and these torture rooms.

Speaker 2 And our experience with this episode, I mean, we get answers to some of the biggest questions that Severance has been posing, including, what is Gemma alive, period? Yeah.

Speaker 2 I guess that's a question mark.

Speaker 2 Where is she? What has her existence been like? What was Mark and Gemma's life like before we met them, or at least met Mark over the course of the show?

Speaker 2 It's answering all those questions while raising the emotional stakes in such a huge way. And it's doing it.

Speaker 2 in this really electric fashion that makes you reconsider basically everything we've seen in the show.

Speaker 2 Like I've been going back and just thinking about so many different scenes and so many different characters and so many different interactions, knowing what we know now.

Speaker 2 And it just, it feels like even though the show is exciting, even though we were thrilled to cover it every week, like it has new life now after watching this episode.

Speaker 1 And I told you I was daunted to do this podcast episode with you because I was like, it's too big. Like, how do we talk about everything?

Speaker 1 Let's talk about this. You mentioned that this is like, this is one of the best episodes of television we've ever covered, if not the best.
Part of that is sort of like

Speaker 1 just filmmaking technique. Yes.
So let's talk about what Jessica Lee Gagnier does here.

Speaker 2 Which standing fucking ovation, genuinely, like incredible, incredible work, especially for, granted, a long time director of photography, cinematographer, but first time directing credit on this show.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 One thing that they mentioned on the official pot, basically she

Speaker 1 at a certain point conscripted Ben Stiller to be like her second unit DP and she gave him a Bolex camera with which if people don't know what a Bolex camera is a 60 millimeter like one of those things you have to like crank sort of handheld camera it's been used recently in films like Sean Baker's the Florida project and Biller's the the love witch a gorgeous film Paul Schrader's first reform david lowry's a ghost story so basically like directors who really just want to like

Speaker 1 flex how to do something cool and weird, they'll go for the Bolex camera. So that's something that she decided to use for these,

Speaker 1 to give us these sort of like warm, golden flashbacks from a production design standpoint.

Speaker 1 I think the warmth and the sort of like lively clutter of Gemma and Mark's house, not to mention their offices

Speaker 1 in compared, like piled with books and books and books and plants and plants and plants, compared to the soulless corporate housing that we have watched Mark exist in for the last season and a half is devastating.

Speaker 1 Like it's a a, it's a brilliant point of contrast, you know?

Speaker 2 This is where the two inner robs are at battle because there is the inner rob that loves

Speaker 2 monochromatic design.

Speaker 1 Oh no.

Speaker 2 And I'm looking at that bookshelf. I'm like, there's something aesthetically pleasing about the order of this, but also soul-crushing about the lack of life in it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I think you're really onto something with that. Again, especially for someone who like their home is so bookish.

Speaker 2 It is so like riddled with plant life and sunlight and like the steepling is off the charts.

Speaker 2 Like there's just so much happening in those flashbacks from a filmmaking perspective and a set deck perspective.

Speaker 2 I am preconditioned to love a kaleidoscopic, bittersweet view of a relationship. Yeah.
Rise and fall. Like that's just going to hit me.
That's going to work for me basically every time.

Speaker 1 You're a Blue Valentine kind of guy.

Speaker 2 I don't know that anyone wants to identify as being a Blue Valentine kind of guy,

Speaker 2 but perhaps I am.

Speaker 2 I think it's just executed at such a high level here. Yeah.
To the point of transcending whatever you think about these sorts of montages.

Speaker 2 Joe, we have official dead dog wife territory here, which is something that usually you and I roll our eyes at, but here it is executed to such a beautiful and wonderful effect. I simply cannot.

Speaker 1 I didn't, it wasn't until the episode that it was over that I was like, wait, that was a, oh, that was a usually as soon as the dead dog wife montage starts, I'm like, oh, here we go.

Speaker 1 But there was just something like so special about

Speaker 1 the meet cute, the like the interaction in the office, the ant farm. Do you think the ant farm was a West Wing reference? Do you remember that in West Wing? Where's the ant farm in West Wing?

Speaker 1 There is no ant farm, but in West Wing, Timothy Busfield's character brings Alice and Janet. Yeah, goldfish.

Speaker 2 I would love to think that that's the case.

Speaker 1 He brings her a goldfish in a bowl, and she's like, I like goldfish crackers.

Speaker 2 Just a classic misunderstanding.

Speaker 1 A great moment in TV dating.

Speaker 2 On the litigation of whether this is an official dead dog wife montage or not, can it be if Gemma's not dead?

Speaker 1 Great question. I want to zoom in on

Speaker 1 the plant imagery.

Speaker 2 Please.

Speaker 1 We've noted that it is like the land of always winter in and around

Speaker 1 Keir from what we've watched for a season and a half of this show.

Speaker 1 Watching, and we've got a Persephone name drop earlier in the season between Devin and Mark, and we talked about that at the time. But watching Gemma, like poison ivy plant goddess,

Speaker 1 you know, surrounded by her houseplants or out in the garden with the various flowers that are blooming, like it is springtime.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 When, so this is this: the story of the myth of Persephone is that Persephone was stolen away by Hades, dragged down into the underworld, and her mom, Demeter, goddess of the harvest, had to negotiate basically shared custody with this asshole who stole her daughter.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 when Persephone is above ground, it is summer and springtime. And when she is below ground, it is winter and fall.

Speaker 1 So the fact that it has been land of always winter, because Gemma slash Miss Casey is below ground, but in our hazy flashbacks, it was springtime. There were plants everywhere.

Speaker 1 Everything was in bloom when she was around. So

Speaker 2 I got to say, Joe, at this point, my Persephone's and my Eurydice are getting crossed.

Speaker 2 Like, there's so much hell imagery going on and so many different roles that Gemma is playing within this show to various characters and these kind of like mythological archetypal constructs.

Speaker 2 I'm, my head is spinning.

Speaker 1 On that note, we did get a, we did get a note from our listener, Mikhail, um, mentioning that. So, Dr.

Speaker 1 Maurer, again, I do promise we'll talk about Robbie Benson, the great Robbie Benson, which is absolutely

Speaker 1 thrilled to see, and I think is phenomenal in this episode. Um, Maurer means wall in German, is what she pointed out.

Speaker 1 And in the musical Hades Town, which is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and Persephone and Hades all intermingled together, Hades has this, Hades is depicted as this like

Speaker 1 evil lord of industry. The underworld is this sort of like

Speaker 1 smokestack-filled gears-turning hellscape of constant working. And he has this whole song about why we build the wall.
And basically, he is like

Speaker 1 duped all of the residents of the underworld into believing that they have to build this wall to keep people out and build the wall because work is what gives us meaning.

Speaker 1 And if that isn't lumen, I don't, I don't know what is, you know?

Speaker 2 Wait, are you telling me capitalism is like a hellscape or a prison? Bad question mark? I don't know, Joe. That seems far-fetched.

Speaker 1 On the MeCute front, what do you make? Our listener Molly wrote in asking, saying that she thought it was really odd. I mean, I loved the way it was done.
Yeah. but the fact that when um

Speaker 1 mark meets Gemma at the blood drive he says who are you and he says it in this like really sweet sort of like incredulity of like you are so hot and so smart where did you go

Speaker 1 cool who are you right yes so that's all in there but she was she made this really interesting connection between that me cute and mark s meeting helly r on the table and how that intake is very much like who are you right who are you is like an odd way it's not like what's your name yeah uh nice to meet you i'm mark anything like that who are you is not usually how one uh interacts but i liked that idea as like a connection between the two if you want to call the helly sprawled on a table losing her mind a meet cute uh in a way yeah in a way not a lot of helly in this episode obviously right Right.

Speaker 2 One thing I want to Dylan. Yeah, one thing I want to flag on pregnancy watch,

Speaker 2 not our favorite subject. I don't know how Helly or Helena would be pregnant three days after having sex with both Marks.
I don't know how any of this works.

Speaker 2 I don't know if that's where we're going to go. I was struck a little bit by Gemma's miscarriage, and she's in the shower, sat on the floor, holding her legs.

Speaker 2 in almost exactly the same position and fashion we saw Helie last week in the hall when she's removed her shoes and is kind of going through a crisis. And is it, look, Severance loves a mirror.

Speaker 2 Severance loves recursion. Severance loves playing Gemma and Helly opposite each other, visually speaking.
I don't know what to make of any of that, but I think we got to throw it out there.

Speaker 1 I didn't even consider that. My mind went immediately to Vesperlind in a Bond movie.

Speaker 2 No Daniel Craig around to suck her fingers, but question mark.

Speaker 1 But wow, upsetting. Thank you for raising that.
I'm sorry. That's okay.

Speaker 2 But on that front, like talking about Ellie,

Speaker 1 something that like actually a couple of our listeners pointed out that I thought was interesting was this idea that,

Speaker 1 you know, if sort of building on something that Damon was talking about in our conversation about this idea of like,

Speaker 1 if you're attracted as innies, you're going to be attracted as outies. We get this with like

Speaker 1 our guys, Berving.

Speaker 1 We get this with Helena and Mark and Hallie and Mark, you know, that there are sparks of flying no matter what the combination is because there is something in you that is attracted to something in them.

Speaker 1 Does it mean anything? And again, we got a couple emails about this. Does it mean anything that Mark had no real spark with Miss Casey?

Speaker 2 Maybe. I think it certainly could speak to the state of their relationship by the end, where I want to say this, like we get

Speaker 2 this incredible, not just montage sequence, but the scene spliced throughout the entire episode of them stage by stage, from these two professors falling in love at the blood drive to their amazing, adorable house and this life that they're building together to this like two prospective parents who are struggling with the process of that and trying to figure out how to be there for each other.

Speaker 2 And then as people who are just deeply, deeply in pain and drifting apart so, so clearly, like right out from under each other's grasp.

Speaker 2 And I think one of the things that I love about this episode is we get a very new understanding of Mark. and who he was at the time when he was with Gemma.

Speaker 1 And something we should say is there was a line or a line or two about this in season one. I think when he was dating that other woman and like often drunk.

Speaker 2 Oh, you have it. Okay.
No, I actually want to talk about that other woman. I have some revised thoughts, but let's get to that as we talk about the music later in this episode.

Speaker 1 Okay, great point. Oh, creepy.
Gotcha. Okay.
I know what you're going for. Anyway, I believe there were lines in season one both about

Speaker 1 having trouble conceiving. Yes.
And Mark saying, implying that he was not always the best husband to Gemma. That was all seated in season one.

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Speaker 2 Should this whole podcast just be me eating cheese-it?

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You could think about how salty and savory and delicious they are. You could just get cheese-it on the brain.

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Speaker 1 Can we talk about Robbie Benson?

Speaker 2 We simply must,

Speaker 2 again, we simply must.

Speaker 2 One of the most immediately contemptible characters in terms of just speed from introduction to hatred that I can remember seeing on TV.

Speaker 1 Robbie Benson is best known to me as the voice of the beast from Beauty and the Beast.

Speaker 1 But I remember when

Speaker 1 he was sort of announced or when they, you know, I don't know, I was watching like the Wonderful World of Disney or something as a kid. And it's like, Robbie Benz is a voice of the beast.

Speaker 1 I remember my mom being like, oh my God, it's Robbie Benz. Cause he was like a heartthrob in the 70s.
So 70s heartthrob, voice of the beast from beating the beast to,

Speaker 1 you know, creep dentist doctor with a wig fetish.

Speaker 2 Is he a dentist?

Speaker 1 Creep doctor with a dentist side habit.

Speaker 2 I'm going to claim victory on those not being dental tools because they are torture devices. He is not a dentist.
He's not a dentist. He's just a guy jabbing her teeth.

Speaker 1 He is using dental tools as a torture device. And

Speaker 1 what did I say when we talked about it the first time? I mentioned Marathon Man and dentists as torturers.

Speaker 2 You're right. You're right.

Speaker 2 He was right there the whole time.

Speaker 1 There's a tortured dentist, an alias. Like, this is a well-worn trope.

Speaker 1 A friend of mine was texting me very excitedly last night while I was like trying to put together notes for a fight of her podcast. So I do apologize to him.

Speaker 1 But he was like really delighted by the meta casting of the voice of the beast playing this guy who's like keeping this woman,

Speaker 1 a bookish woman, captured in his lair

Speaker 1 and who sort of believes that they have

Speaker 1 a romantic connection beyond his purview as her doctor.

Speaker 2 It's certainly really creepy. And like the when he sort of parrots back the I love you catch as she's trying to leave the Christmas card room.

Speaker 1 Just was there house bugged then? Surely, yes.

Speaker 2 It seems like it might be, or

Speaker 2 they are able to, in some way, view or listen to or reconstruct some of Mark's memories based on his MDR work. I don't know exactly what's happening there.

Speaker 2 What is clear is he seems to be relishing playing house with her and the power that he wields over her.

Speaker 1 So disgusting.

Speaker 2 You know, in a really like,

Speaker 2 honestly, my whole body just recoils watching his scenes, which is an incredible performance.

Speaker 2 And I think it's sold in part by the demeanor is in part sold by like Robbie Benson's just like piercing eyes and his presentation in this episode.

Speaker 2 It's just a perfect affect for a creepy doctor you want to hate. And the absolute rage that swelled up inside me when he is telling her the lie about Mark moving on in the outside world.

Speaker 1 As a daughter.

Speaker 2 I would like to think that I have seen enough TV and movies to not be so moved by something like that, but I felt so angry.

Speaker 1 You were like, break his fingers again, Jeff.

Speaker 2 Legit, straight up.

Speaker 1 On the like, it was their house bugged front.

Speaker 1 The I love you, I love you two, stolen from there, last goodbye, in that

Speaker 1 nightmare Christmas room scenario

Speaker 1 is one thing.

Speaker 2 We should say, I don't think we've noted yet, that was the Allentown room, which was the file that Mark completed in record time prior to just prior to season one.

Speaker 1 Great shout.

Speaker 1 Here's the other question on the bugging front. This is where we're going to do, we're going to do music corner.
We've got three three entries to music corner this week.

Speaker 2 A surprising amount of music commentary happening.

Speaker 1 Alexa

Speaker 1 wrote in to say, I've noticed that we've heard the song I'll Be Seeing You by Billie Holiday three times now throughout the series. The first is when Mark is on the date with Adoula.
Yep.

Speaker 1 Second is when Mark reassembles the pieces of the torn picture of Gemma.

Speaker 1 Now we hear it again in a much more prominent way in episode seven, playing in both the flashback scenes of Mark and Gemma being cute and in love and their to their current horrific state of being trapped in Lumen, where the doctor abruptly cuts off the stereo.

Speaker 1 What do you want to say about that? You mentioned that you wanted to talk about the duel of date. Like, do you feel like she's a lumen plant? Like, what do you, what do you think?

Speaker 2 I think the breadcrumbs are there in a different way than I noticed before.

Speaker 2 At the time, that character is presented so empathetically and is one of the few people who seems like an actual human living in Kir.

Speaker 2 You want to believe that Mark is just so damaged he can't have a functional relationship with a normal person. But revisiting it, and especially through this lens, right?

Speaker 2 You have, that is diegetic music that's being pumped into the restaurant for their date as this woman is being very understanding, asking Mark to talk about his dead ex-wife on basically their first date.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And she's connected to the birthing retreat and maybe even connected to how Miss Cobel gets hooked up with Devin in the first place for the lactation consultancy, the fraudulent lactation consultancy.

Speaker 2 Thank you. Thank you.
An epidemic in this country. Huge problem.

Speaker 2 It certainly feels like it.

Speaker 2 And I would say even more so in conjunction with another email we got, Joe, from Adeline, who pointed out that the music that's playing in the Chinese restaurant when Helen and Mark meet in the outside world is the same music that's being played during the Egg Bar social in season one within The Severed Floor.

Speaker 2 And so like well observed all around.

Speaker 1 Such a sharp observation.

Speaker 2 There's these big pointing arrows to the idea that Lumen is running so much more of the outside world than we even may have understood based on the long grasp of a company this big. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And like now it really feels like that date and that whole conversation and everything that he's most of the people that he's been involved with outside are in some way prompting him to remember Gemma, think about Gemma.

Speaker 2 Like they are trying to keep the memory of her alive subconsciously in his head, whether he wants to move on or not.

Speaker 1 Well, and how much is that, how much of that is Lumen at large?

Speaker 1 And how much of that could be Harmony herself? Because Harmony sort of off

Speaker 1 assignment

Speaker 1 was pushing this with Mark, like stealing that scented candle and putting it in the room with Miss Casey.

Speaker 2 A girl can't have a hobby.

Speaker 1 I mean, you would think that baking disgusting chamomile cookies would be enough to occupy you, but there you go.

Speaker 2 I advocate for other hobbies other than that, even if it involves a little light BE. Okay.

Speaker 1 The third and final music.

Speaker 2 Okay, so a peek behind the curtain.

Speaker 1 These episodes drop on Thursday nights.

Speaker 1 We do have screeners.

Speaker 1 We can watch them advance, but we like to record Friday mornings that we can get emails from you guys and read the Reddit theories and all that sort of stuff like that, listen to the official podcast.

Speaker 1 But it's like kind of a tight turnaround in terms of like early morning Friday prep. So I was up quite early this morning reading emails.

Speaker 1 And so it was just not the time of day

Speaker 1 for my experience that I had with this one email we got, but it's not our emailer's fault. So Yael wrote in about the music that's playing during the sort of idyllic flashback montage.
Yes.

Speaker 1 It's a French song, Carousel.

Speaker 1 And he says it's a Jacques Brel song and it is used in this musical. There's a movie musical and a stage musical called Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.

Speaker 1 So in the 1975 film adaptation of it, the song Carousel Carousel

Speaker 1 in the sh in Severance, it's in French. In the film, it's in English.
And a woman is singing it. And

Speaker 1 Yell wrote, it's honestly kind of gives me strong waffle party vibes. It's dark.
It's surreal. The characters discover that

Speaker 1 there are really terrifying marionette versions of themselves. There's a dead puppet master here and so much more.
So I watched this video early this morning and it gave me like full body tremors.

Speaker 1 It is so upsetting. And I think it's so interesting to,

Speaker 1 you know, both, both inside the context of this episode and in that video that I watched and it's on YouTube. You can watch it.
Carousel, Ellie Stone, Jacques Brella is Alive and Well in Paris.

Speaker 1 The song just gets faster and faster. And so, you know,

Speaker 1 Yael is pointing out like part of it is like.

Speaker 1 the in and out of the various rooms that Gemma is doing. Part of it is sort of like this whirling exhilaration of, you know, early romance between a couple.

Speaker 1 But there is a deeply sinister quality to this song,

Speaker 1 which makes it a really interesting choice.

Speaker 2 I would just say like also just from a word cloud perspective, Carousel is jumping out at me because it also appears in this Billie Holiday version of I'll Be Missing You.

Speaker 2 Like it's, there's a, there's a lyric specifically about, sorry, I'll be seeing you. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 About like,

Speaker 2 it's like listing out all of these places in which you would see someone that you're missing, right? In the cafe, in the park across the way, the children's carousel.

Speaker 2 And with that song, too, I think it plays just so beautifully as, you know, Mark going through his version of grief and how he would see Gemma or how he would experience the loss of Gemma in his life.

Speaker 2 And also Gemma, whether she knows it or not, and I suspect not, reliving

Speaker 2 these horrible torture scenarios, but also in Allentown specifically, something that is so specific to her, right? This idea that she hates writing these thank you notes.

Speaker 2 And so she is living a hell in his memory based on what he knows that she hates to do. And how twisted that idea is for, you know, a big company like Lumen to wield that against somebody.

Speaker 1 Somehow, the creepiest part of Dr. Maurer's whole thing,

Speaker 1 actually, I don't know, I'm not sure I'm ready to call it this. It's like it's a long list.
It's the wigs and the costumes. Like, it's so

Speaker 1 gross.

Speaker 1 The plane crash one was actually like kind of the weirdest one for me.

Speaker 1 Like, even though, like, the Christmas one is and the dentist one are also like very sinister, it was the way he was like having so much fun with this like plane crash scenario that just like really fucking doesn't have to do it.

Speaker 2 She's not going to remember anything about the way you look. And in fact, I would argue for scientific purposes, might be more constructive if you didn't look different.

Speaker 2 You know, control one of the variables here.

Speaker 1 A listener Dan asked, do you think there's a reason why we cut away before we see Gemma's last name?

Speaker 2 I don't think so. I think it is canonically understood that her name is Gemma Scout.

Speaker 1 But, yeah, they're at the clinic, so she would probably be Scout at that point. But we don't know what her last name was before

Speaker 2 they got married. No, I don't.
But I think if it was something of macro note, like if she was Gemma Egan. I don't think so.

Speaker 2 He would have already had a lot of reactions to her being an Egan because he knows Helena Egan.

Speaker 2 He sure does know Helena Egan.

Speaker 1 What did you think of the sequence we got with Devin and Ricken and the foursome of them together?

Speaker 2 I thought this is one of my favorite parts about the overall flashback construction is how different all four of them are and how different Devin.

Speaker 2 Mark is laughing at Ricken's jokes. Like, that's how far we have come from the people that they used to be.

Speaker 2 I adored that sequence.

Speaker 1 Like the genial nature of Mark saying, yeah, Ricken, what's wrong with you? Like, it's just like the bitterness isn't there, that, that impatience isn't there.

Speaker 1 And this, you know, I had mentioned that I had listened to the official podcast and the actor who played Ricken was on and he was like, we don't know what Devin and Ricken's relationship was like before,

Speaker 1 you know, basically he said that knowing that this scene was coming where we would see what the foursome were like together.

Speaker 1 We have heard Devin say we were all very close together, that this is grief for her too.

Speaker 1 The near silent communication of the news that Gemma is pregnant. So So, that connection between Devin and Gemma, like it was just really,

Speaker 2 I think, just striking that we, yeah, we never hear the word pregnant in this episode.

Speaker 2 We never hear the word miscarriage, we never hear the words fertility clinic, and yet it's all very clear what is happening because the filmmaking is that strong.

Speaker 2 Like, you absolutely do not need to do that, and it's a testament to what severance holds back in its execution. Obviously, from a question and answer standpoint, it holds back quite a lot.

Speaker 2 But there are all of these little openings where because you're not explicating, you let emotion and you let character fill that moment.

Speaker 1 Do you have

Speaker 1 time in your life and space in your heart for a little bit more mythology?

Speaker 2 Always, Joe. What are we doing here if not that? Always? Okay.

Speaker 1 Damon mentioned this concept.

Speaker 1 It's also a Greek concept.

Speaker 1 The river of Leith being this like river of forgetting in the underworld. There's, I

Speaker 1 didn't know this, so fun to learn.

Speaker 1 I knew about the river Styx. I kind of knew about the river Achuron.
I knew about the river of Leith. There's like five infernal rivers.

Speaker 1 And I just want to say that the phrase infernal river is the life.

Speaker 1 But the river of forgetting

Speaker 1 in Plato's Republic, it's like the souls of the departed were made to drink.

Speaker 1 the Leith before their reincarnation, that they are meant to forget their previous life before they move on to this other life. So is

Speaker 1 Cold Harbor, is the final step like a full wipe of who Gemma ever was?

Speaker 1 We know the clean slate protocol exists inside of Lumen's network. To go back to that Eurydice play that I was encouraged to read

Speaker 1 by our listeners, that has a whole plot about drinking from the river of forgetting and like what it means to die and forget or or die and be forgotten and all of that sort of stuff.

Speaker 1 So this idea of like

Speaker 1 Gemma,

Speaker 1 to go back to this idea of them like slowly somewhat scrambling her brain is part of this sort of like river of forgetting underworlds, you know, losing touch of who she actually is or ever was, which is devastating.

Speaker 2 I think that's definitely there.

Speaker 2 I also think there's the read where the severed floor itself is the river of forgetting, where she like she is going into into the space where as soon as she gets there, she forgets who she is and becomes Miss Casey.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And the only way she's going to find her way out is presumably with someone like Mark's help.

Speaker 2 I, we're told in this episode, Drummond kind of chides Maurer about the idea that when she does go into Cold Harbor, you're going to have to say goodbye to Gemma. Right.

Speaker 2 So we know something dramatic is going to happen in there. I'm guessing, again, it's not the puppy room.

Speaker 2 But I do.

Speaker 1 And Maurer's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem.

Speaker 2 I know. Yeah, he's totally cool with it.
I'm sure it's not going to be an issue. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But yeah, to get out of here, she is going to probably going to have to pass through the severed floor as Miss Casey in some fashion. It doesn't seem like there's any other way out.

Speaker 2 And so in doing so, that feels very Eurydicey to me. That feels very, this idea of like, you have to be let out of this place.

Speaker 2 And until the moment where you cross this threshold, you're like a shade version of your actual self until you can finally get clearance on the, on the topside world.

Speaker 1 Rob, that's so good. I love it.

Speaker 1 On the one hand, I love every single syllable you just uttered. On the other hand, I really loved that it was like Gemma nearly saving herself.
Yes. There's so many people who like ended this episode.

Speaker 1 We got emails on the internet who were like, oh my God, Mark has to save her. And it's like, yeah,

Speaker 1 I mean, obviously

Speaker 1 she has to be saved. But I was like, but I like it even better if she can save herself.
I think that is.

Speaker 1 even cooler.

Speaker 2 I thought this episode was kind of Gemma's version of the season one racing the clock finale where all the members of the MDR team have these like critical missions about their own like individual selves and are trying to solve them as fast as possible.

Speaker 2 And she gets this like absolute race to the elevator in a way that I think also mirrors, you know, this season opens with Mark racing around these white, bright hallways looking for Miss Casey and ends with Gemma racing around these dark, terrifying hallways trying to get to the elevator to get out.

Speaker 1 I think that, and also, I mean, we should say the construction of the testing floor, which on the official podcast, they talked about at length, that they wanted it to be of a piece with lumen so it's still like all white and bright but like very distinct in terms of like we're not doing straight hallways we've got these weird triangular jutting shapes and then the lighting and this was uh you know this was the directors of this episode's idea um

Speaker 1 to do the floor lighting. She was like, the first thing I envisioned in this floor, knowing that Jem was going to have to do this run through it, was

Speaker 1 lighting up the floor from underneath so that as she goes, she's lighting up the, we've seen the overhead lighting, but this is like underneath lighting, and it was visually quite stunning.

Speaker 1 And here's, here's a quote from the inside the episode that airs after the episode that I just, I think is important to underline. And this comes from Dan Erickson.

Speaker 1 He says, what's going on on the severed floor somehow contributes to what's going on down below. But we still don't know why.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So I know that the Redditors are going to be pouring over every single like freeze frame, but we should point out that we've got

Speaker 1 the four people

Speaker 1 who aren't quite the doppelgangers, but still doubles of our MDR team. They're credited, they're building the credits as like Mark Watcher, Irving Watcher.

Speaker 1 So like their job is to watch our team as our team refines

Speaker 1 something.

Speaker 2 I see them as refiner refiners.

Speaker 2 They're here just overseeing it all, just really trying to get these guys to be their best possible selves.

Speaker 1 They're, they're, they're, they're paying attention to things on a granular level, and uh, we love that for them.

Speaker 2 One takeaway from that, like in addition to the doppelgangery element, which is just goofy and creepy and wonderful,

Speaker 2 uh, I feel like we learned that maybe the severed floor itself is not as surveilled as we might have thought.

Speaker 2 Because as they are trying to figure out why Mark's progress on Cold Harbor has stalled, Drummond's explanation is, oh, that nosebleed really put us back.

Speaker 2 And not, oh, oh, the fact that Mark and Hallie are refining each other's data really put us back this week.

Speaker 2 You know, like, they don't know everything that's going on, but they do know that Mark went to Miss Wong for a nosebleed.

Speaker 1 Beautifully put.

Speaker 1 I believe them that there aren't video cameras on the floor anymore.

Speaker 2 It seems that way.

Speaker 1 Because they thought they had a spy,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 1 that's all gone to shit. Back to book corner, back to academic corner.

Speaker 1 We did get, we actually got a couple emails from listeners about the the literary works of George Saunders. Now, I know that you don't like a piece of fiction.

Speaker 2 Only Russian novellas, I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 Well, on that note, so George Saunders wrote a book called Lincoln and the Bardo,

Speaker 1 which is about Lincoln mourning at his son's crypts and Lincoln sort of slipping into a Bardo space. So that's something that was on their mind.

Speaker 1 And Ben Stiller owns the rights to one of George Saunders' earlier stories, Civil War, Land, and Bad Decline, which is about a fucked up workplace, even more fodder for the Civil War theories, Becky writes.

Speaker 1 But though, the one that a lot of people have been writing in about is this story called Escape from Spiderhead, which was turned into a really bad Chris Emsworth film, Spiderhead.

Speaker 1 But this is Becky's description of Spiderhead: quote, shadowy pharma corps with corp with, quote, employees test subjects inside who did not really have the full knowledge, knowing consent of what they were signing up for.

Speaker 1 Experiments involving love and sadness and human relationships performed on these employees who grow reluctant to participate as they become more aware of what's going on.

Speaker 1 Even some elements of any versus outie and the dangled reward of limited communication with the outside world.

Speaker 1 And spoiler alert, a subject embracing suicide rather than continuing with the experiments. So

Speaker 1 what Becky wrote is, I like to think of severance as what we might have gotten if George Saunders had been asked to write a TV show.

Speaker 1 And the one thing I will add to that, I think George Saunders is a great, if you're like, hey, I want to read more stuff that's like reminds me of severance.

Speaker 1 I think George Saunders is a great uh pick and a book that i read that actually i read because damon lindelof recommended reading it like several years ago is a book called a swim in a pond in the rain in which four russians give master class on writing reading and life and this is this is based on george saunders uh

Speaker 1 a class he teaches at syracruz university about tolstoy chekhov gogol and turganev so it's about it's about analyzing their work and how it gets to the root of how we tell stories.

Speaker 1 It's a really, really good book. But basically everything I know about Tolstoy, I learned from that book.

Speaker 1 So I just think it's really funny that Saunders came back around this week in a couple different ways.

Speaker 1 And all of that is,

Speaker 1 I just am really grateful for our emails from our listeners.

Speaker 2 I think they've been so good for Severance in particular.

Speaker 1 This is really great stuff.

Speaker 2 And what a Ringerverse recommends from you, Joe? Just smuggling a whole ass segment into this podcast.

Speaker 1 The book about the Russian Masters was really fucking incredible. I read it with a, like, I have notes in the margin, which I haven't done since like college.
Okay. Last but not least is a theory.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 And I would love your thoughts on it. Danielle writes, what do you think about the possibility of Irving being a prior test subject like Gemma currently is? And somehow it involved Bert.

Speaker 1 Severance has been around for 12 years at least, and Gemma has only been there for two

Speaker 1 years.

Speaker 1 Thoughts?

Speaker 2 Seems entirely possible. And we have yet to see so many of the functions of the Severance chip, including the blank slate, which just kind of looms over all of this.

Speaker 2 It feels like Irving could be the kind of guy whose innie has been blank slated several times, even maybe with his knowledge.

Speaker 2 It may have even been the kind of thing where they informed him of what was happening. And that maybe contributed to him wanting to investigate the company, but he's been around for so long.

Speaker 1 If we get to experience a montage of John Dutoro in several different wigs and several different accents and several different costumes.

Speaker 2 Could we even be so lucky? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, all right. We loved this episode.
Anything else you want to say about it before we go to the Damon conversation?

Speaker 2 Only, well, I have, I have, I guess, big picture, small picture. Yeah.
Let's start small on the most granular possible level. Okay.

Speaker 2 During some of these very flashy, uh, very athletic, as our friend Amanda Dobbins would say, bits of filmmaking in this episode. Yeah.

Speaker 2 A camera moving down the dark hallways, kind of like almost stop motiony effect. I'm wondering if this is coming from that kind of hand-cranked camera situation.

Speaker 2 We get a lot of random, like one-frame insert shots of bits and pieces of Mark and Gemma lore. I did my best to scrub and to see what these shots are.
This is one of the Mahoney. All right.

Speaker 2 We see a split second of Mark's hands from season one as he's sculpting the tree that Gemma crashed into very quickly.

Speaker 2 One of our earliest reminders in the show of the kind of like fragments of memory that might be seeping through for someone like Mark.

Speaker 2 We see Mark standing outside near some woods at night, which he does in season one when he revisits the place where he thinks Gemma has died. And also kind of the bend in the road.

Speaker 2 We see a flash of that as well. You see a man, you can't see his face just reaching out and putting, it looks like his hand on someone else's chest or someone else's shoulder.

Speaker 2 Not unlike the other lumen ideographic cards that we've seen. Like it's not quite one-to-one, but maybe reminiscent.
Interesting. You get just kind of like a general icy road.

Speaker 2 You get the headlights through the woods at night. You get the snowy road from a first-person perspective, as if someone were driving down it.

Speaker 2 You get a a sort of soft table lamp, a red flower, which, look, if that's not bell and beast coated, I don't know what is. And just some associated shots of Gemma along the way.

Speaker 2 A lot of it seems like things we've already seen and things they've already shot, but I'm curious if any of those will take on newfound significance as we go.

Speaker 1 I love that. Thank you so much for doing that work.
That is, yeah, it's very, it's very like

Speaker 2 crash.

Speaker 1 Not the terrible best picture winner, but,

Speaker 1 you know, let's invoke what happened here without showing you specifically like,

Speaker 1 this is how Lumen planted a body or anything like that. You know, what's your big picture?

Speaker 2 I think I just want to underscore again that this episode turned me into a complete mess,

Speaker 2 was really emotional in a way that I wasn't expecting. And that honestly, I was kind of wondering if Severance would be capable of.

Speaker 2 This is a process in a show I find very like intellectually stimulating, right? You and I bandying about these theories. I love the sci-fi concepts.
I love the execution and the filmmaking.

Speaker 2 I wouldn't say this is a show I felt like a really strong emotional pull to. And in one episode, all of a sudden, like my whole emotional relationship to this show has been turned upside down.

Speaker 2 And overall, seeing the arc and the painful incremental way that Mark and Gemma came together and came apart, it just really had an effect on me. And I can't salute this episode enough.

Speaker 1 It doesn't personally bother me when Chris and Andy don't like a show that I like. Like, I think that's fine.
We're all allowed to like different things.

Speaker 1 I don't need them to like Severance in order for me to like Severance, but I am curious if this episode moves the needle for them in any direction in terms of how they've been receiving this season.

Speaker 1 Because I think that has been part of their critique is like, this feels like

Speaker 2 clever

Speaker 1 without being emotional in the way that they might want it to be.

Speaker 1 And I feel like I've felt, you know, like

Speaker 1 the Irving stuff in episode four, like I feel like I've had emotional moments. This is a leveling up for sure.

Speaker 2 I completely agree.

Speaker 2 This is the kind of thing to segue into our interview that the leftovers had in spades, especially by the end, but starting with season two in particular.

Speaker 2 And that I was just like wanting Severance to hit that other gear. And Joe, we are, we are here.

Speaker 1 Well, let's go now to our conversation with the leftovers co-creator, lost co-creator, watching co-creator, David Lindala.

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Speaker 5 The thing that I love about severance, and I'll start many sentences with the one of the things that I love about severance is the idea of like the body sharing aspect of it is that HeliR is saying, Helena used my body to do this thing.

Speaker 5 But Helena's position is that

Speaker 5 Heli R is like, was threatening to injure my body or like was going to cut off my, and so this kind of idea of like, who possesses the body, the answer is both of them, because I, you know, this isn't a theory of severance, but it is definitely my position, which is I disagree fundamentally with whatever Lutheran pastor sold this line of bullshit to Fields and Burt that any's have souls.

Speaker 5 There's only one one soul, baby. Like, that's the way that it works.

Speaker 5 And regarding Henry, like, just because you've lost your memory doesn't mean that you're off the hook for all the bad things that you did.

Speaker 1 I'm so grateful to you

Speaker 1 for raising my favorite Harrison Ford film.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much.

Speaker 5 Written by J.J. Abrams at age 23.
Correct.

Speaker 5 But, but basically, like, the idea that it would be viable if you murdered someone to erase your memory and that would be justifiable,

Speaker 5 like, a

Speaker 5 method of punishment. It would erase the deed.
I'd be like, that may work for you, but let's have a chat with the victims.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 I'm a one-soul, per-body kind of guy.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 as all these kind of triangles and quadrangles, where it's like, I really hope something special happens when Mark Scout has sex with Helena Egan on the outside because that completes the quad.

Speaker 5 And it seems like everybody else is now hooked up except for the.

Speaker 1 It seems like sparks are flying at the Chinese restaurant.

Speaker 5 It seems to be on. Yes.
At

Speaker 1 At zoo food.

Speaker 2 They have just

Speaker 5 or foo as because the zoo is out.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay.
So we should clarify that you have not seen episode seven as we're recording this. You've seen episode six.

Speaker 5 That's the last one that has dropped at the time of the conversation.

Speaker 1 At the time we're having this conversation. So you have not, I have not watched episode seven.
You have not watched episode seven. We're recording this clean.

Speaker 1 Chikai Bardo is what that episode seven is called.

Speaker 5 Oh, the one that's coming up. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Do you want to explain to people who don't know what a bardo is? Because I learned it from you.

Speaker 5 I will.

Speaker 2 I learned it from watching you.

Speaker 5 Through the lens of a Western

Speaker 5 white fellow in his early 50s trying to explain the grand

Speaker 5 space of Tibetan and Buddhist philosophy. I think it's

Speaker 1 the fourth bardo is the Chikai Bardo.

Speaker 5 Oh, okay. So

Speaker 5 um, that just goes to show you how much I know about bardos. But I read the Tibetan, the Tibetan Book of the Dead when I was like in college.
Right.

Speaker 5 And then like the, the, the, the thing that stuck with me through the haze of pot smoke was this idea of the bardo.

Speaker 5 And that, and it, and it, and it aligns with, um, with other sort of like afterlife constructs, um, like kind of most notably,

Speaker 5 in Egyptian mythology, there's this thing called the river Leith, L-E-T-H-E, where when you drink from it,

Speaker 5 you forget your entire life.

Speaker 5 And then that allows you to kind of like, for your soul to kind of transcend and move on to whether you're going to be reincarnated or move into some sort of higher state of light and being.

Speaker 1 Like in the Robert Dye Jr. film, chances are.

Speaker 5 Exactly like

Speaker 5 that film.

Speaker 5 And not like the film where Nicole Kidman hooks up with a nine-year-old

Speaker 5 in a tub, right?

Speaker 2 Exactly. Birth.

Speaker 5 Different. Pretty interesting movie.
Jonathan Glazer. That's a cool movie.
It is weird and very uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 Is it as good as chances are with Robert Tenny Jr.

Speaker 2 and Sybil Shepard?

Speaker 5 It's the exact same plot as chances are, which is why I'm referring to it,

Speaker 5 but is not a romantic comedy.

Speaker 1 Less age-appropriate. Even less age-appropriate.

Speaker 5 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 5 The general idea of the bardo is that when you die,

Speaker 5 you enter into the space that is called the bardo. And in that space,

Speaker 5 you aren't aware that you're dead.

Speaker 5 You're just sort of like, it's a little bit like being in a dream, right? You're not, you don't know that you're dreaming unless you're lucid dreaming.

Speaker 5 And in this space, the bardo, you're interacting with all the people that you've known in your life,

Speaker 5 who you've met, maybe even some strangers, people who died before you died, and then people who died long after that you died, because it's a timeless place. Like there's no,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 there's a similar sort of like approach to this movie Presence that Soderbergh just did. It's a ghost story, but

Speaker 5 it mixes in a small degree of time travel in the sense of like you can enter into an afterlife where people who are still alive are also there because they will eventually die and the afterlife is timeless.

Speaker 5 The objective of the bardo.

Speaker 5 is for you to identify that you are dead, for you to remember that you died and that, but no one is allowed to tell you so it's like it's kind of like an elaborate prank show it's like jury duty um

Speaker 5 with james yeah we're all we're all ronald okay um in the bardo yeah some people like are still kind of like just wandering around the bardo forever they never they they they never move on to the next they never they never do the things that they and and and and part and my understanding always was that in order to gain this sort of like sense of illumination that you are in fact dead you kind of have to own your your shit.

Speaker 5 You have to, uh, you have to have to say, these are the things that were holding me back as a person. These are the people that I hurt that I have to kind of like atone for.

Speaker 5 And like, if you, if you, if there's no sense of, of like knowing thyself, and this is like, we're kind of like getting into the leftovers of, you know, I've been playing around with that mythology and international assassin.

Speaker 5 We talked about like the river leave and, and, and if you drink the water, you forget. Like, these are, I only have one idea, Joe.

Speaker 5 I just keep applying it not only to the stuff that I do, but everybody else's shows. But it's like this sort of idea of forgetting and remembering.

Speaker 5 And once you remember, then you take ownership and then you move on. That is, spoiler alert, like what the

Speaker 5 final season, not the final episode, guys, the final season of Lost, that was the intention was that this thing that we were calling the flash sideways is a bardo.

Speaker 1 If people haven't seen Lost, and I hear from from people all the time that they're just starting Lost the first time

Speaker 1 daily, and it's amazing, and it makes me really happy. Me too.
If people have not watched Lost,

Speaker 1 the film Jacob's Ladder is another sort of good example of that, you know,

Speaker 1 of this.

Speaker 5 That's like incident in Owl's Creek. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. This, like, it was all a dream, or it was all happening while the person was dying sort of idea in that short story.

Speaker 5 But to clarify, they were not dead the whole time on Lost. If you even

Speaker 5 say it into a camera, this is a spoiler alert that it's okay to know. Yeah, if you've heard they were dead the whole time, they weren't, they weren't correct.

Speaker 2 Do you want to talk about Bert?

Speaker 5 Well, yeah, let's talk about Bert. As you mean, is he evil?

Speaker 1 Yeah, or are we just uh, are we just um are we just looking into Christopher Walken always play someone kind of twisty? I mean, he's definitely a bad guy, right?

Speaker 2 Our guy, Bert.

Speaker 5 Well, here's the question:

Speaker 5 um, it feels

Speaker 5 if your fundamental approach to severance is that their innies

Speaker 5 are the closest thing to

Speaker 5 the they they are.

Speaker 5 That is to say, that's the purest you.

Speaker 5 It's unaffected by the nature versus nurture argument, right?

Speaker 5 So it's basically like, if you're a nurture believer, you basically like, you're burdened by all the fucked up shit that your parents did to you, like where you were raised, any traumas that you visited upon others or were visited upon you.

Speaker 5 But then when you sever, all of that stuff goes away. They erase your memory.

Speaker 5 You know how to drive a car, but you've never driven a car. You know how to have sex, but you've never had sex.
And so, like, you're, you're, you're wiped clean. And so it's pure you.

Speaker 1 You become the Dylan that your wife met at the beginning of your life.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 5 And that Dylan is hot. Like, Merritt Weaver is like, give me some of that.

Speaker 1 Give me some of that.

Speaker 5 And so Bert

Speaker 2 is

Speaker 5 any Bert.

Speaker 2 That's my belief. I agree.

Speaker 5 And so if he is evil, if Audi Bert is

Speaker 5 well we know at the very least he is a liar yeah you know I'll also say I've come to believe Joe in the course of my life there's a direct proportion between people who know a lot about wine and evil that that's just it's a hot take okay I stand by it piping hot all right it doesn't mean there are people who appreciate wine who are not evil right if you know a lot about evil if you know your grapes if you know your varietals it yeah if you know your wine shit and particularly if you have a seller there's no one more evil on this planet than Somalia's.

Speaker 5 So I think like Bert has the hots for Irving.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And in a real sort of like sweet way. And also

Speaker 5 he's up to no good.

Speaker 1 Well, here's the thoughts. It's like,

Speaker 1 I love everything you said about the you you are. Your any is your purest self, not sort of.
beaten down by life or corrupted by things that have happened.

Speaker 1 I like this idea that if you're in love with or attracted to someone in one state

Speaker 1 in another state um and i love this idea that uh and this is something that one of our listeners posited with last week's episode this idea that mark s

Speaker 1 as we see him experience more in his life he the loss of irving the betrayal of helena stuff like that is getting closer to

Speaker 1 the sardonic version of mark that we know on the outside adam scott is so good at playing both of those things and he's moving one character closer to the other as we're doing active reintegration at the same time, which I think is really interesting.

Speaker 5 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 What's your big codified theory of severance that you want to lay on me?

Speaker 5 My hope is that what is driving the creative team behind severance

Speaker 5 on every level, music to

Speaker 5 craft to actors to writers is the question that always drives me, which is

Speaker 5 their investment in the show is, are these people going to be okay? Yeah. You know, they, like all the stuff that I try to write about and am attracted to,

Speaker 5 it's the idea of coping mechanism, using genre for coping mechanisms. And severance is the ultimate coping mechanism.
It's the title of the show.

Speaker 5 So that everybody that we, as we learn, why did they get severed,

Speaker 5 understandably and intuitively, it's some kind of a coping mechanism. For Mark, it's very obvious grief, but there's more nuance in someone like Dylan or Irving

Speaker 5 in terms of like, why, why would you do this radical,

Speaker 5 this radical thing? It's not just so you can skip the boring part of your day. Right.

Speaker 5 We've all seen that Adam Sandler movie where he fast forwards through the boring parts and it does, it never pans out.

Speaker 1 It doesn't work out.

Speaker 5 So that's what they care about. So you and I talking about theories, like it's this is, it doesn't mean that what Lumen is actually up to doesn't matter or that they don't care about it.

Speaker 5 I'm just saying like, I want I want a level set that

Speaker 5 all that I want from Severance is to tell me, are these characters going to be okay? What do they need to do to be okay?

Speaker 5 And along the way, sure, tell me what the fuck the goats are about, et cetera, et cetera. What Lumen is really up to.

Speaker 5 But all the nefarious, like, so the, so, so my theory is not a unified theory of like, this is everything that I think is going on. And, and, and I've come to understand,

Speaker 5 you know, both by listening to you and Rob and

Speaker 5 going down the rabbit hole on like think pieces that I'm that I'm reading from people that I love and respect that a number of the ideas that I'm about to advance are are not unique but um that is to say it dovetails with them but I but I do have one thing to say that I have not read or heard okay

Speaker 5 I I do think that like the play here is to bring Kir

Speaker 5 back to life.

Speaker 5 It's a resurrection play, or I can't remember what the exact word that

Speaker 5 but what is, is that that the word that

Speaker 5 Hellyar's dad used? I hope you should, I hope you're there at my revolution.

Speaker 5 My revolving okay, so it's like that, it has very like Logan's runny, but it's like, but this sort of idea of like, and it's not just because there's a baby cure at the end of the new end titles, it's like this is a straight-up kind of spirituality play.

Speaker 5 This season has been getting much more into like scripture and like, um, and it's like we've transcended like weird waffle parties and we've gone right into like, oh, Milchik is like not

Speaker 5 too far removed from Paul Bettney like whipping himself in the Da Vinci code with his paper clips. 100%.
We're using, you know, this is like Catholicism in the office. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Like, you know, writ large. And I am so there for it.
And I fucking love every bit of it. So yes, at the end of this all,

Speaker 5 is there cloning technology happening? 1,000%.

Speaker 5 Like clones growing new bodies.

Speaker 5 My belief is that Gemma,

Speaker 5 Mark's wife, did in fact die. Right.

Speaker 5 He identified her body. The outside world did whatever testing they needed to do.
I don't think Lumen was so nefarious as to go grave rob a corpse and like, and then like doctor all of the things.

Speaker 5 But I do think that they grew a new body for her. And that's the person that we know as Mrs.
Casey. It's why she even has a different name.
Like, you could just call her Gemma. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Mark still wouldn't know. Right.
Like, if he doesn't recognize her, he doesn't recognize her. So they are making clones.
They are growing new bodies. And they're, and ultimately, like,

Speaker 5 the severance play is

Speaker 5 we will put a chip in your head. That chip will basically absorb the you you are.
And then and then that chip can be transferred into a new version of you when you begin to age.

Speaker 5 And we are all living in the perpetuity world.

Speaker 2 And you can just revolve. You can revolve forever.

Speaker 5 Revolve, revolve, revolve. That's the game.
In season one,

Speaker 5 Bert

Speaker 5 makes.

Speaker 5 He's heard this rumor in optics and design, they've all heard this rumor about MDR

Speaker 5 that they have pouches. Yeah.
And it becomes this kind of like very silly joke that has like a punchline and they're all sort of like chuckling about it. And I thought it was hilarious at the time.

Speaker 5 But now, and we come into season two

Speaker 5 and we enter into the goat room.

Speaker 2 With Gwendolyn Christie, yeah.

Speaker 5 And with Gwendolyn Christie, the amazing Gwendolyn Christie. And

Speaker 2 she asks them to show her belly button.

Speaker 5 And how do, what are the physical definitions? What are the descriptors that we use to describe what a belly button looks like?

Speaker 1 Innies or outies.

Speaker 2 Bro.

Speaker 5 Clones don't have belly buttons. Okay.
Because they're not and they're not carried in utero. They don't have an umbilical.

Speaker 2 They don't have a cord to snip.

Speaker 5 So the only way so smooth. Yeah.
Like

Speaker 5 they're using this story of pouches as like cover to do belly checks.

Speaker 1 And we've belly checked.

Speaker 5 And I'm telling you, someone is fucking. Mark and Halley are clean.
We saw, we got, we have have full navel.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we got belly checks, but we have not seen Irving's navel.

Speaker 5 We haven't. And if I'm just going to go out on a limb and say, if I haven't seen your navel, you might be a clone.
You might be a clone. We're in Battlestar Territory.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I was going to say, this is Battlestar Galactica Territory.

Speaker 5 This is my thinking.

Speaker 1 This is pod people stuff.

Speaker 5 Okay. You and I are pod people right now.
That's true.

Speaker 1 Okay, I love this. Okay.
The belly button theory. There it is.
Is that what you want to call it?

Speaker 2 It's, yeah. We'll call it the belly button theory.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay. The belly button theory.

Speaker 5 We're trying to do some kind of play on, let's call it, we're navel gazing.

Speaker 1 We're navel gazing. There it is.
Punching it up as always. Love it.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 Hashtag navel gaze. If there's a unified field question around severance, it's what does Lumen do? Yeah.
What is Lumen up to? What's their end game? And the unified

Speaker 5 theory of lost is what is the island? And I always like struggled with that as like, I don't even know how, like, do I have to explain that? And over time, became to believe that we had to explain it.

Speaker 5 it and in hindsight go our efforts to explain the answer to that question all failed and maybe we should have just dealt with the frustration of like once you're once you're talking about corks and you know like it i i always felt like not entirely confident in saying in answering that question but i also understood why the audience is like hey buddy we're 75 episodes into this you better tell us what the island is but then you get to the leftovers and you're like let the mystery be yeah but openly like like openly displaying.

Speaker 1 We're not going to, we're not going to explain this to you.

Speaker 5 And I, I would say, like, conservatively, for every 25 people who watched lost, one person watched the leftovers. That's probably being generous.
But it's sort of like people,

Speaker 5 if you're selling them a puzzle and you go like, hey, all the pieces might not be in here.

Speaker 2 Yeah. You go, what?

Speaker 5 No, I want, it's like, I want, it's a 1,000-piece puzzle. I want to know that they're all in here.
It's like, maybe they are, but wouldn't it be exciting if they weren't?

Speaker 5 No, it wouldn't be exciting, you fucker.

Speaker 1 I love both the ending of loss and the leftovers, as you know.

Speaker 1 I think I have a slight preference just in general, in terms of puzzle boxes or theory craft or all that sort of stuff, for there to be a question that I, the audience member, have to answer for myself in terms of what I believe.

Speaker 1 Do you know what I mean? Which is like what the leftovers gives us is like a question that we can decide. Choose your own adventure of what the ending of this is.

Speaker 1 And you might feel differently the next time you watch it through. Right.
You know, and so then you are an active participant in the crafting of the story.

Speaker 1 And I think that is like, among other things, the genius of the leftovers. And so for something like Severance, I get really worried and protective of theory craft shows.

Speaker 1 I get really worried and protective of shows that have huge, booming Reddit threads going because I am worried that nobody's going to be satisfied with what the ending is.

Speaker 1 And so that's why I almost prefer to a certain degree that we never quite exactly know, you know.

Speaker 1 But that will piss off, you know, its own subset of people.

Speaker 5 Right. And

Speaker 5 I think to some degree,

Speaker 5 like for those kinds of shows,

Speaker 5 you know, puzzle box shows or mystery box shows, whatever it is you want to call them, you can't really hold those alongside like the breaking bads and better call saws and sopranos because those shows didn't,

Speaker 5 they had to end. And the endings were based around what's going to happen to these characters and like, how good is the final episode.

Speaker 5 But it, but, but they weren't, they weren't based around like the Encyclopedia Brown skipped to the back of the book, like, not just why did Bugs Meanie do it, but like, why are we alive?

Speaker 5 You know, like, why do we exist on the world? And I think Severance is playing with much more interesting metaphysical questions that it has no interest at all in answering, like, what is the self?

Speaker 5 It's much more interesting, interested in kind of like exploring. But this is why I kind of go like the end game of Severance just has to be like, is Mark going to be okay? Is Helly going to be okay?

Speaker 5 Like, now I'm sort of like, I have no investment whatsoever in Mark and Gemma's marriage because you haven't shown me the episode of them being together.

Speaker 5 But if you showed me that episode, I'd start to feel quite torn about who I wanted him to be with.

Speaker 1 When you get explicit, seemingly explicit, references to lost on this show.

Speaker 1 Like when people are like, hey, those are the numbers.

Speaker 1 What does that do to you as a Severance fan?

Speaker 5 But they're not the numbers.

Speaker 1 There are the numbers on their lockers. Oh, really? The MDR team, in the scene when they are all going into their lockers and going down the elevator one by one,

Speaker 1 each person had a lost number on their locker.

Speaker 5 In what's in this season,

Speaker 5 in the first couple episodes,

Speaker 5 this is a new data point.

Speaker 2 This is new information for you.

Speaker 5 That's very exciting. And I look at that as like,

Speaker 5 you know, I know that Dan is a fan of Lost.

Speaker 1 Dan Erickson, who runs this.

Speaker 2 Yes. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 5 And so I look at that as like, it, it's, it's just a nod towards like the homage of like, hey, I just want everybody to know I watch this show.

Speaker 1 I also watch Lost. Right.

Speaker 5 And it's like, and there are, you know, there have always been,

Speaker 5 you know, design elements and the aesthetic or like, or just the Milchik video, you know, where you're basically like, okay, like the the i'm del i i'll just say i'm always delighted by it yeah like because again lost did all the same it's there there's such a difference between a ripoff and a riff off yeah and these all feel like riff offs and like just to you know and and all the stuff that we were doing on lost it's like you know nosebleeds and the constant are like from firestarter you know and steep and stephen king borrowed that from you know i mean like and and so and now you didn't invent the nosebleed as like a ticking clock on something not remotely and i i and and i would just say like almost any idea that we had on lost i'm sure you would be able to find some version of it in something that one of us had read or experienced in movies television literature you know yeah in our life and like but you know you're throwing all of that stuff in the blender and the and and our job is like to make the smoothie delicious and severance is doing something entirely new yeah so it's like all it does does is it excites me to riff on severance on the next thing that I do.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like, because that's the thing is like the Beatles and the Beach Boys, they were annoyed by like

Speaker 5 Sergeant Pepper, Magic Mystery Tour, pet sounds, but then they were like, oh my God, you can do that?

Speaker 5 And so like that idea that I'm alive right now in a time and space where like we're riffing on each other stuff and the fact that Some of the stuff that I have done is in it is being riffed on in a show that I love.

Speaker 5 It's not just me loving myself, but it is the sort of idea of like, oh, this is in continuity now with like sort of a straight line of all the, all, all the stuff I love.

Speaker 5 And it's, because I'm not a musician, I'll never be able to go on stage and jam with the musicians who followed me. But it's like, you know, every, like, I'm now Paul Simon on that stage.

Speaker 5 Sabrina Carpenter is

Speaker 5 like, is way behind me, but I identify with him. Yeah.
And I'm, I'm cool enough to go, that's Sabrina Supreme Carpenter, right? But my son still has to go like, right.

Speaker 5 Like, I'm not, I don't, I'm not like. She's good, right?

Speaker 2 She's a great judge. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 Big fan.

Speaker 1 The locker numbers are 416 and 23.

Speaker 5 Okay. So that's, yeah, that's not a coincidence.

Speaker 2 That's not a coincidence.

Speaker 1 Sometimes we're reaching for the last references and sometimes they are just there.

Speaker 1 So this last question might come from either Rob or me, who's to say, we, as a collective, Rob and Joanna, would like your take on the Luca trade on the record.

Speaker 1 And specifically, in your professional opinion, as someone who has wrestled with the infinite mystery of the universe, how could this have possibly happened?

Speaker 5 So, here's what's really exciting.

Speaker 5 I'm going to walk out of the studio right now because we're talking on Tuesday. Correct.
And even though people will be listening to this later in the week,

Speaker 5 I am going to crypto.com and I am going to watch the Mavericks play the Los Angeles Lakers

Speaker 5 and basically their first face-off since the trade. And we, and so I don't know what's going to happen.

Speaker 1 It's a mystery box.

Speaker 5 I think like what no, the, the,

Speaker 5 what no one is expecting to happen is that the Mavericks completely and totally blow out the Lakers and that Luca has a horrible game because he's just like in his own head.

Speaker 5 And then that will basically start the, oh, we had it all wrong about about what this trade was. Or it goes the other way.
I just hope like it's a fabulous and fantastic game. Okay.

Speaker 5 I would say I'm still wrapping my brain around the fact that Luca is a Laker because I really disliked him a lot.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 5 Um, as a Laker fan and a Clipper fan. Like, and

Speaker 5 the Mavericks have knocked teams that I liked out of the playoffs with

Speaker 5 intensity. And also, like, Luca just complains so much.

Speaker 5 If there's one thing I hate in the NBA, it's just working the refs and second to flopping. And, like, Luca may be and is one of the best players in the league.

Speaker 1 You said that so grudgingly and is,

Speaker 5 but but he is the he is the worst when it comes to like whining. And I, for someone as talented,

Speaker 5 you shouldn't whine so much. And so I'm still.

Speaker 1 But you do have a conspiracy theory about this trade. However, the however the game goes tonight, don't you, weren't you saying outside?

Speaker 5 My conspiracy theory is there's something that we don't know about Luca.

Speaker 5 And I don't, I does he have a belly button.

Speaker 5 Oh, great question. Yeah.
I think that the Lakers don't know it either. Okay.
I think very few people know it. Okay.

Speaker 5 And we're about to, we're going to find out what it is. Okay.
And when we find out, we're going to go, oh,

Speaker 5 the Mavericks got the better end of this deal. Okay.
But maybe this is just all my Luca bias, sort of like not embracing it. Like, I just, when something is too good to be true, it usually is.

Speaker 1 You should check for a belly button.

Speaker 5 Just,

Speaker 5 you know what? I've got good seats. Okay.
And I will shout to Luca repeatedly, show me your belly until they throw me out.

Speaker 2 Well, I hope that happens. They have to tuck it.
They have to tuck.

Speaker 5 It's a violation.

Speaker 1 It's a violation

Speaker 5 to be untucked. To be untucked.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 5 So I could, I could

Speaker 2 flash it.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and it's during a timeout. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 5 yeah, he might get teed up.

Speaker 1 Okay. So

Speaker 1 if Luca flashes his belly button to the camera at the Laker game tonight, everyone will know why. It will be Damon Lindelof's work.
Thank you so much, Damon Lindelof, for coming on the podcast.

Speaker 1 I appreciate it.

Speaker 5 What a way to end. Thanks for having me.
Can't wait to meet you, Rob.

Speaker 1 And you'll be back for a four-hour podcast in House of R?

Speaker 2 Yes. Yeah.
Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 5 I feel like I just did it in the waiting room.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. With Mallory.
All right.

Speaker 5 It was, I was not let down by having them. It was one of those weird things where I was like, oh,

Speaker 5 I've listened to you for 300 hours, and this is the first time that I'm meeting you in the flesh. Yeah.

Speaker 5 She's great. She is the best.

Speaker 1 I do. All right.

Speaker 2 Thanks. Bye.

Speaker 1 Wow. What a good chat that was.
That's my best impression of Adam Scott at the end of all the interviews on the Severance podcast.

Speaker 1 Damon's the best. Thanks so much to Damon and Lindala for coming in and having a chat with us.
Again, you can see that full interview

Speaker 1 where we talk about some things that did not quite pan out in episode seven, but it's still fun to talk about anyway. Of course.
On the

Speaker 1 Ringer TV YouTube channel.

Speaker 2 Thank you. I was extremely jealous to miss this chat.
I got to say.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's a heartbreaking. We both wanted you here, and let's do it again when you're down here and we're all in the same place.

Speaker 2 The next time a show breaks our brains open with its mystery box elements, you know, we'll circle back.

Speaker 1 Okay, sounds perfect.

Speaker 1 Thank you to Justin Sales for his tireless work on this very vibrant and busy feed.

Speaker 1 Similarly to John Richter, who has been working his tail off on the video side of everything, and to our guy, Kai Grady, always, who is just the best and

Speaker 1 did incredible work turning that demon interview around and all sorts of stuff. So

Speaker 1 we will see you for White Lotus next week and for Severance again and again and again. And here we are on the carousel of content.
See you soon. Bye.