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

This episode of the Prestige TV podcast is brought to you by Coffee Mate.

Coffee Mate has been searching the globe for flavors that pair perfectly with coffee.

So when they heard that the new season of HBO's The White Lotus was set in Thailand,

they were inspired to grow up two new flavors, Thai iced coffee and pina colada flavored creamers.

They're available for a short time only.

So for the love of coffee, go try them now. Look, it's not that confusing.
I'm Rob Harvilla, host of the podcast 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, except we did 120 songs. And now we're back with the 2000s.
I refuse to say aughts. 2000 to 2009.
The Strokes, Rihanna, J-Lo, Kanye, sure. And now the show is called 60 Songs That Explain the 90s colon the 2000s.
Wow. That's too long a title for me to say anything else right now.
Just trust me. That's 60 Songs That Explain the 90s colon the 2000s, preferably on Spotify.
This episode is brought to you by The Home Depot. It's starting to look like spring and spring starts with savings at the Home Depot.
There are savings for every project, whether you're starting with a clean slate with convenient cordless power, like a new pressure washer or leaf blower, or starting to love the yard again with colorful flowers and fresh mulch. Start your spring with early savings at The Home Depot.

Shop now at homedepot.com.

I love you.

I said.

Oh, no, I love you too, and I'm sorry.

Bye.

See ya. hello welcome back to the prestige tv podcast feed i'm joanna robinson i'm rob mahoney and we're here to talk to you about a doozy of an episode of Severance.
We have a lot to get to. I could do this for hours, literally, but we will try to do it in our usual allotted prestige time.
If you say so, Joe. I don't know that that's going to happen today, but we're going to try.
We're going to do our best. You might note that the runtime is longer than usual on this episode.
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. 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. And if you listen to this podcast, you get about half of that.
You get severed, essentially. So, you know, that is what is going on on this pod today.
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. So thank you for joining our space.
With a script written for me by one Mr. Rob Mahoney.
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.
It's true. It's true.
Okay. So listen, elsewhere on the Prestige feed, you and I are covering White Lotus midweek.
Bill and Mallory and I are covering White Lotus immediately after the episode drops on Sunday. So you can watch all of that on the Ringer TV YouTube channel as well.
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. 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.
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. And one last thing I want to say about the Damon interview, and I'll say it again later.
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 there's perhaps a stale take or two in that interview that does not hold up post episode seven.
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,

which, holy hell, Joe, a lot of strands being pulled together this week.

A lot of things happening this week on Severance.

Absolutely. Before we get to that, can we do like a quick zoom through some emails we got?

Where can folks find us, Rob? They can always find us at PrestigeTV at Spotify.com.

But in particular, you can find us at PineappleBobbing at gmail.com. 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 7 emails.
We record this the morning after the episode drops, and you guys were burning them in night oil, watching the the episode and emailing us thoughts about Russian literature, all kinds of stuff. So we will be getting to that.
But in terms of stuff that applies to last week, I hear all of you. You don't want me washing my chicken.
I will continue to wash my chicken. Don't worry about it.
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, a lot of people seem to think that third oven in Fields Kitchen is a microwave drawer.

Even we got a listener, Shane, who is a commercial interior designer, sent us some photographic evidence that that is probably what that is.

So does that make you more or less excited about the three-door situation in the Fields' Kitchen? 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.
But if it's, say, a miniature convection oven and not a microwave, then I'm back on board. 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.

Uncultured swine

that we are. We did not realize

the design significance

of these mid-century modern grinders.

Famed salt and pepper grinders

for

Dansk, Dansk, and I should say, i actually own something by dansk donsk um i don't do you know what a butter warmer is i i don't think i do 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 a in an island or otherwise okay 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. 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. Mine is like a red enamel with a little wooden handle and it is the cutest fucking thing in the whole world.
And even though I have a microwave now, I like refuse to part. I mean, I presume you warm butter to pour on popcorn.
I don't know what you would do with a butter warmer otherwise. 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.
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 Butter Warmer side. Brought to you by Dansk.
Chat. You can find it on the Food52 website.
That was not a free ad. Okay.
And then on a much more sort of, dare I say serious, more serious than a Butter Warmer level, we got this great email from Zachariah about Mr. Milchick, 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.
and what I wrote in my notes when I saw that I was I wrote after watching Miss Milchick go through

the performance review and the self-flagellation 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 is oppressing you, you sort of grab onto whatever little shreds of power you do have inside of the system.
Right. But something that Zachariah wrote in sort of specifically about the language component of Mr.
Milchick's review is he wrote, my read, someone like Mr. Milchick would have internalized the feeling that he would need to be better, twice as better, three times as better as the cure white children to ever bask in his virtuous light.
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. This is the exact dynamic, I think, that informs this character.
And I think the show is actually deeply about race and cast without hardly ever being explicit about it. This also applies to Dylan Gee and Natalie at various times.
And then he goes on to talk about the term uppity, 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 in reference to Devin. He was like, his sister is much more uppity than he is, talking about Mark.
But it's in the water in terms of what's going on with Milchick and Lumen at this time. And in this larger conversation we've been having about the severed as people who are considered not human and all of that.
So I really enjoyed that email from Zachariah. Well, especially, I mean, we already understand the broadest strokes of why Milchick reacts the way he does to being gifted the paintings of Kier, the racially adjusted paintings.
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 flourishing language that he incorporates. and then when you try to do that to be slapped on the hand for doing it it's understandable why he would

feel as if the rug has been pulled out from him in that moment. Cause 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 he still ends up in this place. All right.
This week's episode is Chakai Bardo. I am pronouncing it pretty close to how it's pronounced in the show, but if my Valley Girl, Chikai, sounds like a little off, you can let me know.
Directed by a cinematographer, Jessica Lee Gagné. This is her directorial debut, but she is this sort of main DP for the last season and a half of Severance.
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.
And then written by Dan Erickson, series creator and Mark Friedman. I want to start here, Rob.
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? I guess which part? Because 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. So how big picture do you want to go here? Okay, let's say,

do you believe everything we see on the testing floor

is actually what is happening on the testing floor?

Yes.

Me too.

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?

I think it is a combination of the two.

Okay.

Thank you. POV, or was that Gemma POV, or was that some sort of combination of the two? I think it is a combination of the two.
Okay. Do you think that sort of collective, unconscious combination of the two approach to flashback, does that sort of help us understand why Mark might be uniquely qualified to refine Gemma, if that is, in fact, exactly? We'll get into sort of the specifics of what we may think is happening with the refining process.
But do you feel like that underlines that sort of connection, collective memory, collective emotional experience that they share? Without a doubt. 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? 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 that.
It's early, Rob. I'm not going to make you talk about what is your concept of death.
The bardo is very interesting in the context of this episode. I think in a manner of speaking, when we do get it referenced by name, Chakai Bardo, it is Gemma looking at these lumen ideographic cards.
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.
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. 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.
She also mentions ego death. And do you want to talk about where we've seen that card before? Boy, do I.
Okay, great. Thank you.
So you may remember this card as the one that Dylan G pocketed at work in Season 1 when the MDR team was visiting O&D. And Milchick 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 a warrior two yoga pose, standing opposite another man, hand to his chest, effectively. And yeah, Gemma has interpreted this as some kind of ego death as a person fighting within themselves or combating themselves.
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, 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. 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.

And Gemma just got it in the mail, man. Just got it in the mail.
All right. 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. But we could interpret, we could apply that to Mark, who's on the verge of collapse you know throughout this episode is uh after hitting the floor pretty hard last week like there are there's a version of the story where he doesn't make it on the other side of this episode and um and then also gemma who is post death of a kind yep living out her afterlife um and this idea of the bardo as a space where you will meet all the people you ever knew in your life um or versions of yourself i guess is sort of more applicable to what is going on here 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. And this is just like another trip to another circle 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.
She also recommends we watch the OA, especially if we are fiending for more Jason Isaacs in our life. She says, is this Lumen's game to sell severance to the masses to cut out plane rides? Did you have a moment where you're like, plane rides? We talked about that on this podcast.
We kind of talked about some of these things in a way that is disconcerting. Like that we were joking about it and they're like, no, but seriously.
But guess what? What if you did it and then sold it to people? Wouldn't that be valuable? 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 has a chip in their head

and brothels are legal again

because who cares?

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.

Yeah, so once again,

a spooky new layer

to our what would you sever game

that we've been playing.

Boy, is there.

And I mean, this is my interpretation interpret there's a couple options here i think that that seems to be the main one or because we we saw in season one a woman who sort of severed herself out of her labor yes experience right um so that's an option but also in terms of having a workforce that you sever and knowing that you can do the most horrendous extreme things to them and they will not remember it at all or or you won't be liable for any of those things right 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.
That's an understatement.

Great. To abusing your employees to an inch of their life and then them not remembering it.

Tough.

That's an understatement. Grim.
Quite grim, Joe. Grim.
And I think, you know, we've seen it a couple 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,

you know, sort of explained to him. 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.
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. We already know, as you just said, that severance is strong enough to withstand the physical, emotional, psychic pain of childbirth.
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? 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.
Like Gemma is going into each of these rooms with a distinct consciousness. Persona.
A distinct persona where the version of her that is going to the dentist just left the dentist.

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.

And so Gemma's consciousness,

unlike Mark or Dylan or Irving or anybody else,

is fractured into who knows how many pieces.

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 that she did six rooms in one day.
Yes. But there are so many rooms down there.
Place names that we've never seen on an MDR monitor on these doors and stuff like that. Cold Harbor, though, still remains a secret, right? She has not been in the Cold Harbor room.
This is like a new room for her. And she saw the label on it, but she has not been inside it, right? That she knows of.
Has not been inside. What do you think is in there, Jo? I don't know.
Is it a room of puppies? What do you think is happening? Oh, for sure. Yeah.
Rainbows, sunshine, lollipops, something like that. Well, real talk on that front.
I think 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 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. We're getting the plane turbulence.
We're getting the two-hour dental exam. We're not getting anything that looks a lot like frolic.
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.
How optimistic for you. No, I'm not feeling good about it.
I'm just saying this is a thing that is possible. But if the end game of this sort of severance is shielding out negative feelings, there will be no need to sever out positive feelings.
So it's probably still absolute shit, whatever is happening in there. But the absence of frolic is noted.
Well, we'll always have it on tattooed on Drum's hands if we need it. Certainly will.
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. Rob is very assiduous about not talking about the episode.
He does not burn pod. We don't pre-chat about the episode.
Only talk

for money, Joe.

But what you did

text me is you said, we're going to need

to talk about Dollhouse. We have to.

And also our listener, Mike,

coincidentally wrote in to us about Dollhouse

just last week. So shout out, Mike.

Deachan 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

Thank you. Um, Deach and Lockman, 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. Do you want to tell the people at home who maybe did not catch this quickly canceled Gem what Dollhouse is about? I would love to.
Even Gem might be strong. I would say it's overall quite an uneven show.
Patchy. 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 and 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.
And so, yeah, Deeson Lachman spends that whole series going episode to episode in wildly different personas, doing wildly different things. Spoiler alert, many of the clients just want to have sex with these people with very specific kinks or very specific personalities or appearances.
And so there's something, certainly in my brain, about watching Deeson 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. The main doll on that show is Eliza Dushku of Buffy Vampire Slayer fame.
And you and I both agree that she's not the greatest part of that show. But Deeson Lman and Enver Joke, who played two of the other dolls, are like phenomenal.
Uncanny. At exactly this thing.
At exactly this. To transmute into exactly what they need to be for over-year characterization.
Different accents, different whatever it is. And so that was like a pure pleasure of watching Dollhouse.
I have been waiting for Deeson Lockman to have like another opportunity to really show what she can do 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 and then this is just a deejay lockman showcase this episode and she's phenomenal in it um 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 in exchange for a good deal of money or to make something bad in their life go away or whatever it is.

Except for our main character who, you know, there are questions about whether she's there consensually.

And, you know, I would say a similar case for Gemma here, where my interpretation of what we see in this episode is that 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.
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. We see her have a miscarriage.
We see that take a toll on their relationship. And 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. But that she is being kept now.
Like, it feels like to me that Dr. Maurer is unlikely to let her go.
He's lying to her about what's happening on the inside. Outside, she is asked to leave.
She's being told she can't leave. So however, 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.
Like, it's certainly within the wheelhouse of the nefarious shit that they do. But 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 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. 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? That she did go not to execute a charade, but to go play charades. She was honestly going to her friend's house.
And based on Maurer's appearance earlier, as you said, at the fertility clinic, there was a scouting recruitment effort happening. The mailers, there's something happening here that is, I'm sure, subconscious, right? 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. And so this is the sort of big A or B to me about this episode is, was 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.
I think it's the latter, mostly because, again, of 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 she knows she's leaving for something. Though I don't believe this episode gives no indication that she thought it meant forever or even for years, you know.
I would say a couple of data points on that front. We do hear 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. That's right.
So she did not sign up to be a guinea pig indefinitely. Right.
Also, I don't know if we want to get into Russian Literature Corner this early. Oh, I do.
But we simply must. 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.
It's name-checked several times in this episode, specifically with Gemma, who is

teaching Russian literature. 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.
You know, we've cited Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind several times, but I was so reminded of it in this

flashback sequence, watching them go from the giddiness of the meet cute and first love and the idyllic early days of their relationship and their marriage into, you know, it's with the added harrowing infertility story that is part of their story. But, you know, you think about Eater and 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.
Yes. Listener Haley wrote in for Tolstoy Corner.
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.
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.
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.
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. But what I thought was interesting was the idea that death, the ending of oneself, only happens when authenticity is lost completely.
So when we think about Gemma, is Gemma alive? She's alive is the big line at the end of season one. And Ragabi gets one in this episode.
We're at our fourth different she is alive variation at this point. And 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.
But there are also indications that when she's getting her sort of vitals read by this nurse played by the great Sandra Bernhardt, great casting. And we'll talk about Robbie Benson as Dr.
Bauer in a second. But when she's getting her vitals read, one of the questions she asks is, did you do your reading today? And she's like, yeah, 50 pages.
But I was just like, 50 pages isn't nothing. But for an academic, I think of all the like, in terms of showing us their life in the span of just a few minutes of an episode of television, the really clever effect of the stacking up the books and the papers and stacking down, which is a huge part of that montage.
These are two academics who like fall in love talking about their respective fields. 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 the compliance is what I meant, not complicity. So like, so Gemma saying, yeah, I read 50 pages.
Like, yes, but like, is she... That's light work for someone like her.
Yeah, how much is she still Gemma at this point? You know, I don't know. 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.
Like not, not, does not look like understandable writing in any sense. And is that granted? 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? 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? She's losing control of some of the, even the verbal elements that as an academic would come so easily to her. One of our listeners, Todd, pointed out, and I miss 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.

It's very true.

Because the smear factor is just off the charts. And so she's writing and he's like, the nib is all like upside down and backwards.

And yeah, the writing, it like looks nearly like gibberish, 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. I thought that was like sort of a, it's always fucking Christmas, but I thought it was like a really diabolical, alongside the dentistry, writing endless thank you notes sounds like absolute torture to me.
But overall, I as far as the how alive is gemma question yeah taking the tolstoy elements and taking the chakai bardo specifically this really the idea of a bardo right this not just transition stage but one that involves the acceptance of death i 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. I'm sure there's plenty of things missing, and we may get those gaps filled in over the course of future episodes.
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. 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.
I am sort of out on Miss Casey's a clone theory. Like this is physically her body.
Also, this is a little extra textural, so if you don't like cast interviews, maybe skip ahead a little bit. Basically, everyone making this show has been incredibly emphatic to the point of insulting that this is not a clone situation.
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 i agree um though i really did like damon's uh clone theory if you want to hear it i cut it out of the episode just because of that like uh but you can see it on the on the youtube uh interview it's pretty solid uh except maybe not actually true um but anyway the um 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 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 etc etc and now'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. 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. Like, of course they have to be put back together, 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. 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 and right like like i again i would argue that jemma 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 and severance is so good at having it both ways it's so good at making us a lot of these questions. And we kind of jumped straight into the mysteries of this week's episode and the substantial answers of this week's episode.
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. I just think this is masterful, astonishing, staggering work.
I really agree'm like hall of fame stuff in its own category but it's definitely top five it's definitely top five 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 i think it just, it's perfect in the way that is, this is the kind of story that can only be told with soft sci-fi, right? 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 and then is returned to the floor without ever even seeing what's on the other side or knowing what happened like there's a part of her inside 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 flashed to the season one scene where she had been monitoring the MDR team and she was like, I really liked being here today.
Yeah. Deeson 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.
Maurer and Nurse Cecily. And that's all of her interactions.
So there's something inside of Miss Casey, even though she doesn't actually know it, that is so happy to be around other people. There's just something inside of her that is still alive and kicking and is Gemma, despite all of the tinkering that they're doing with her brain, you know? I completely agree with that.
Yeah, 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 relationship was falling apart, as she was dealing with her, like the infertility yeah and then she gets to this hellscape and these torture rooms 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 i guess that's a question mark uh where is she what has her existence been like what was mark and gemma's life like before met them, or at least met Mark over the course of the show? It's answering all those questions while raising the emotional stakes in such a huge way. And it's doing it in this really electric fashion that makes you reconsider basically everything we've seen in the show.
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 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 I 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 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 uh just filmmaking technique yes so let's talk about what jessica lee guenye does here um which standing fucking ovation genuinely like incredible incredible work especially for granted a long time director of photography cinematographer yeah but first time directing credit on this show yes um one thing that they mentioned on the official pot basically she 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, it's 16 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, Ann Biller's The Love Witch, a gorgeous film, Paul Schrader's First Reform, David Lowery's A Ghost Story.
So basically like directors who really just want to like flex and do something cool and weird, they'll go for the Bolex camera. So that's something that she decided to use for these, to give us these sort of like warm golden flashbacks from a production design standpoint.
I think the warmth and the sort of like lively clutter of Gemma and Mark's house, not to mention their offices in compared like pile of 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. Like it's a, it's a brilliant point of contrast, you know? This is where the two inner Robs are at battle because there is the inner Rob that loves monochromatic design.
Oh no. 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.
And I think you're really onto something with that. Again, especially for someone who like their home is so bookish.
It is so like riddled with plant life and sunlight and like the steepling is off the charts. There's just so much happening in those flashbacks from a filmmaking perspective and a set deck perspective.
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. You're a Blue Valentine kind of guy.
I don't know that anyone wants to identify as being a Blue Valentine kind of guy. But perhaps I am.
I think it's just executed at such a high level here. To the point of transcending

whatever you think about these sorts of montages.

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.

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.

But there's a something like so special about 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? There is no ant farm, but in West Wing, Timothy Busfield's character brings Allison Janney.
Yeah, goldfish. I would love to think that that's the case.
He brings her a goldfish in a bowl and she's like, I like goldfish crackers. Just a classic misunderstanding.
A great moment in TV dating. On the litigation of whether this is an official dead dog wife montage or not, can it be if Gemma's not dead?

Great question.

I want to zero in on the plant imagery.

Please.

We've noted that it is like the land of always winter in and around Kier from what we've watched for a season and a half of uh this show watching and we've got a persephone name drop earlier in the season uh between devon and mark and we talked about that at the time but watching gemma like poison ivy plant goddess uh you know surrounded by her her house plants or out in the garden with the various flowers that are blooming. Like, it is springtime.
So, this is the story of the myth of Persephone is 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. And when Persephone is above ground, it is summer and springtime.
And when she is below ground, it is winter and fall. 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. Everything was in bloom when she was around.

I gotta say, Joe, at this point,

my Persephone's and my Eurydice's are getting crossed.

There's so much hell imagery going on and so many different roles that Gemma's playing

within this show to various characters

and these kind of mythological archetypal constructs.

My head is spinning.

On that note, we did get a note from our listener, Mikhail, mentioning that. So Dr.
Maurer, again, I do promise we'll talk about Robbie Benson, the great Robbie Benson, who I was thrilled to see and I think is phenomenal in this episode. Maurer means wall in German, is what she pointed out.
And in the musical Hadestown, which is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and Persephone and Hades all intermingled together, Hades has this, Hades is depicted as this evil lord of industry. The underworld is this sort of like 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 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.

And if that isn't Lumen, I don't know what is, you know?

Wait, are you telling me capitalism is like

Thank you. And if that isn't Lumen, I don't know what is.
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. On the very cute front, what do you make...
Our listener Molly wrote in saying that she thought it was really odd. I mean, I loved the way it was done.
Yeah. But the fact that when 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 come from? Who are you? Right. Yes.
So that that's all in there but she was she made this really interesting connection between that me cute and mark s meeting heli 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 like that idea is like a connection between the two if you want to call the heli sprawled on a table losing her mind to meet cute uh yeah in a way not a lot of heli in this episode, obviously. Right.
Or Irving or Dylan.

Yeah.

One thing I want to flag on Pregnancy Watch. 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.
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

In almost exactly the same position and fashion we saw Helly last week in the hall when she's removed her shoes and is kind of going through a crisis. And look, Severance loves a mirror.
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. I didn't even consider that.
My mind went immediately to Vesper Lind in a Bond movie. No Daniel Craig around to suck her fingers, but, you know.
Question mark? But, wow. Upsetting? Thank you for raising that.
I'm sorry. That's okay.
But on that front, like, talking about Helly about ellie something that like actually a couple of our listeners pointed out that i thought was interesting was this idea that um you know if sort of building on something that damon was talking about in our conversation about this idea of like if you're attracted as innies you're going to be attracted as outies we get this with like uh our guys burving uh we get this with helena and mark and heli 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 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.

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 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. 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.
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. 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.
Oh, you have it. 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.

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

having trouble conceiving. Yes.

And Mark saying,

implying that he was not always the best husband

to Gemma. That was all seeded in season one.
This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apple Card is a no-fee credit card that gives you daily cash back every day.
That's 3% back at Apple and 2% back on every purchase made with Apple Card using Apple Pay. Apply for Apple Card, the wallet app on your iPhone today.
Subject to credit approval, variable APRs for Apple Card range from 18.24% to 28.49% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of January 1st, 2025.
Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.
Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law.
Not available in all states. Can we talk about Robbie Benson? We simply, again, we simply must.
One of the most immediately contemptible characters in terms of just speed from introduction to hatred that I can remember seeing on TV. Robbie Benson is best known to me as the voice of the beast from Beauty and the Beast.
Yeah. But I remember when 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 Benson's voice of the beast. I remember my mom being like, oh oh my god it's Robbie Benson because he was like a heart throb in the 70s so 70s heart throb voice of the beast and beating the beast to you know creep dentist doctor with a wig fetish is he a dentist creep doctor with side habit.
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.
He is using dental tools as a torture device. I don't know.
What did I say when we talked about it the first time? I mentioned Marathon Man and Dentists as Torturers. You're right.
You're right. It was right there the whole time.
There's a Torture Dentist, an Alias. This is a well-worn trope.
A friend of mine was texting me very excitedly last night while I was trying to put together notes for a fight of her podcast. So I do apologize to him.
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, a bookish woman captured in his lair. And who, who sort of believes that they have a romantic connection beyond his purview as her doctor.
It's certainly really creepy. And when he sort of parrots back the I love you catch as she's trying to leave the Christmas card room, just...
Was their house bugged then? Surely yes. It seems like it might be.
Or 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.
What is clear is he seems to be relishing playing house with her and the power that he wields over her. It's so disgusting.
In a really like honestly my whole body just recoils watching his scenes which is an incredible performance and i think is 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 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 has a daughter 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 you were like break break his fingers again legit straight up um on the like it was their house bugged front the i love you love you too, stolen from their last goodbye in that nightmare Christmas room scenario is one thing. 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 just prior to season one.
Great shout. Here's the other question on the bugging front.
This is where we're going to do Music Corner. We've got three entries to Music Corner this week.
A surprising amount of music commentary happening. Alexa 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 a doula. Yep.
Second is when Mark reassembles the pieces of the torn picture of Gemma. 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 to their current horrific state of being trapped in lumen, where the doctor abruptly cuts off the stereo.
What do you want to say about that? You mentioned that you wanted to talk about the doula date. Do you feel like a lumen plant like what do you what do you think i think the breadcrumbs are there in a different way than i noticed before at the time that character is presented so empathetically and is one of the few people who seems like an actual human living in cure you're you want to believe that mark is just so damaged he can't have a functional relationship with a normal person but revisitingiting it, and especially through this lens, right? 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. Yeah.
And she's connected to the birthing retreat and maybe even connected to how Miss Cobell gets hooked up with devon in the first place for the lactation consultancy the fraudulent lactation consultancy thank you uh an epidemic in this country huge problem yeah it certainly feels like it and i would say even more so in conjunction with another email we got joe uh 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. And so like well-observed all around.
Such a sharp observation, honestly. 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.

And 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.

Like they are trying to keep the memory of her alive

subconsciously in his head,

whether he wants to move on or not.

Well, and how much is that,

how much of that is Lumen at large

Thank you. They are trying to keep the memory of her alive subconsciously in his head, whether he wants to move on or not.
Well, and how much of that is lumen at large? And how much of that could be Harmony herself? Because Harmony, sort of off assignment, was pushing this with Mark, like stealing that scented candle and putting it in the in the room with Miss Casey,

you know, a girl can't have a hobby. I mean, you would think that baking disgusting chamomile cookies would be enough to occupy you.
But there you go. I advocate for other hobbies other than

that, even if it involves a little light B&E. Okay.
The third and final music. Okay, so a peek

behind the curtain. This episode, these episodes drop on Thursday nights.
We do screeners. We can watch them in advance.
But we like to record Friday morning so 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.
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.
And so it was just not the time of day 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.
It's a French song, Carousel. 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. So in the 1975 film adaptation of it, the song Carousel in Severance, it's in French.
In the film, it's in English.

And a woman is singing it.

And Yael wrote, it honestly kind of gives me strong Waffle Party vibes.

It's dark.

It's surreal.

The characters discover that there are really terrifying marionette versions of themselves.

There's a dead puppet master, Kier, and so much more. So I watched this video early this morning, and it gave me like full body tremors.
It is so upsetting. And I think it's so interesting to, you know, 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 Borel is alive and well in Paris.
The song just gets faster and faster.

And so, you know, Yael was putting out like part of it is like the in and out of the various rooms that Gemma is doing. Part of it is sort of like this this worldly exhilaration of, you know, early romance between a couple.
but there is a deeply sinister quality to this song, which makes it a really interesting choice. I would 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. Like there's a lyric specifically about...
I'll Be Seeing You. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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 and with 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 and also gemmama, whether she knows it or not, and I suspect not, reliving 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.

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 a big company like Lumen to wield that against somebody. Somehow the creepiest part of Dr.
Mauer's whole thing. Actually, I don't know.
I'm not sure I'm ready to call it. It's like, it's a long list.
It's the wigs and the costumes. Like it's so gross.
The plane crash one was actually like kind of the weirdest one for me. 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. 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. You know, control one of the variables here.
I listened to Dan asked, do you think there's a reason why we cut away before we see Gemma's last name? I don't think so. I think it is canonically understood that her name is Gemma Scout.
But yeah, they're at the clinic. So she would she would probably be scout at that point.
But we don't know what her last name was before they got married. No, I don't.
But I think if it was something of macro note, like if she was Gemma Egan, he would have already had a lot of reactions to her being an Egan because he knows Helena Egan. He sure does know Helena Egan.
What did you think of the sequence we got with Devin and Rickon and the foursome of them together? I thought that this was one of my favorite parts about the overall flashback construction is how different all four of them are and how different Devin... Mark is laughing at Rickon's jokes.
Like that's how far we have come from the people that they used to be. I, I adored that sequence.
The, like the genial nature of Mark saying, yeah, Rickon, what's wrong with you? Like, it's just like the bitterness isn't there that, that impatience isn't there. And this, you know, I had mentioned that I had listened to the official podcast and the actor who played Rickon was on and he was like, we don't know what Devin and Rickon's relationship was like before, you know, basically he said that knowing that this scene was coming where we would see what the foursome were like together.
We have heard Devin say we were all very close together, that this is grief for her too. The near silent communication of the news that Gemma is pregnant.
So that connection between Devin and Gemma, like it was just really. I think just striking that we, yeah, we never hear the word pregnant in this episode.
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.

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

time in your life and space

in your heart for a little bit more

mythology? Always,

Jo. What are we doing here if not

that? Always? Okay.

Damon mentioned

this concept.

It's also a Greek concept.

The River of Leith being this river of forgetting in the underworld. It's also a Greek concept.
The River of Leith being this like river of forgetting in the underworld. There's, I didn't know this.
So fun to learn. I knew about the River Styx.
I kind of knew about the River Acheron. I knew about the River of Leith.
There's like five infernal rivers. And I just want to say that the phrase infernal river is the life but the river of forgetting in plato's

republic it's like the souls of the departed were made to drink the the leaf before their

reincarnation that they are meant to forget their previous life before they move on to this other

life so is is cold harbor is the final step like a full wipe of who gemma ever was um we know the

Thank you. life.
So is Cold Harbor, is the final step like a full wipe of who Gemma ever was? 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 by our listeners, that has a whole plot about drinking from the river of forgetting and what it means to die and forget or die and be forgotten and all of that sort of stuff.
So this idea of Gemma, to go back to this idea of them slowly somewhat scrambling her brain is part of this sort of like river for getting underworld you know losing touch of who who she actually is or ever was which is devastating i think that's definitely there i also think there's the read where the severed floor itself is the river forgetting where she like she is going into the space where as soon as she gets there she forgets who she is and becomes Casey. Yeah.
And the only way she's going to find her way out

is presumably

with someone like Mark's help.

We're told in this episode,

Drummond kind of chides Mauer

about the idea that

when she does go into Cold Harbor,

you're going to have to say goodbye to Gemma.

Right?

So we know something dramatic

is going to happen in there.

I'm guessing, again,

it's not the puppy room.

But I do love-

And Mauer's like,

yeah, yeah, yeah. No problem.
I know. Yeah.
He's totally cool with it. I'm sure it's not going to be an there.
I'm guessing, again, it's not the puppy room. But I do love- And Mauro's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No problem. I know.

Yeah. He's totally cool with it.
I'm sure it's not going to be an issue.

Yeah.

But yeah, to get out of here, she is 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.
And so in doing

so, that feels very Eurydice-y to me. That feels very, this idea of like, you have to be led out

of this place. 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 top side world.
Rob, that's so good. I love it.
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.
We got emails or on the internet who were like, oh my God, Mark has to save her. And it's like, yeah, I mean, obviously she has to be saved.
But I was like, but I like it even better if she can save herself. I think that is even cooler.
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.

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. 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, bright, but very distinct in terms of we're not doing straight hallways.

We've got these weird triangular jutting shapes. And then the lighting, and this was the director's of this episode's idea to do the floor lighting.
She was like, the first thing I envisioned in this floor, knowing that Jemma was going to do this run through it, was lighting up the floor from underneath so that as she goes, she's lighting up. We've seen the overhead lighting, but this is like underneath lighting and it was visually quite stunning.
And here's a quote from the inside the episode that airs after the episode that I just I think is important.

This comes from Dan Erickson.

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.
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 the four people who aren't quite the doppelgangers, but still doubles of our MDR team.
They're building the credits as Mark Watcher, Irving Watcher. Their job is to watch our team as our team refines something.

I see them as refiner refiners.

They're here just overseeing it all,

just really trying to get these guys to be their best possible selves.

They're paying attention to things on a granular level,

and we love that for them.

One takeaway from that,

in addition to the doppelganger element,

which is just goofy and creepy and wonderful,

I feel like we learned that maybe the severed floor itself is not as surveilled as we might have thought, 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. And not, oh, the fact that Mark and Hallie are refining each other's data really put us back this week.
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. Beautifully put.
I believe them that there aren't video cameras on the floor anymore. It seems that way.
Because they thought they had a spy. But that's all gone to shit.
Back to book corner, back to academic corner.

We did get,

we actually had a couple emails from listeners about

the literary works of George Saunders.

Now, I know that you don't like

a piece of fiction.

Only Russian novellas, I'm sorry.

Well, on that note,

so George Saunders wrote

a book called Lincoln and the Bardo,

which is about Lincoln

mourning at his son's crypt

and Lincoln sort of slipping into a Bardo space. So that's something that was on their mind.
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. But the one that a lot of people have been writing about is this story called Escape from Spiderhead, which was turned into a really bad Chris Hemsworth film, Spiderhead.
But this is Becky's description of Spiderhead. Quote, shadowy pharmacore with, quote, employees test subjects inside who did not really have the full knowledge, knowing consent of what they were signing up for.
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, even some elements of Innie versus Audi and the dangled reward of limited communication with the outside world. And spoiler alert, a subject embracing suicide rather than continuing with the experiments.
So 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. 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 reminds me of severance, I think George

Saunders is a great pick. And a book that I read that actually I read because Damon Lindelof

recommended reading it several years ago is a book called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, in which four Russians give masterclass on writing, reading, and life. And this is based on George Saunders' class he teaches at Syracuse University about Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, and Turgenev.
So it's about analyzing their work and how it gets to the root of how we tell stories. It's a really, really good book.
But basically everything I know about Tolstoy, I learned from that book. So I just think it's really funny that Saunders came back around this week in a couple different ways.
And all of that is... I just am really grateful for our emails from our listeners.
I think they're... They've been so good for Severance in particular.
It's really great stuff. And what do Ring Reverse recommends from you, Joe? Just smuggling a whole ass segment into this podcast.
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.
Okay. And I would love your thoughts on it.
Danielle writes, what do you think of the possibility of Irving being a prior test subject like Gemma currently is and somehow it involved BERT? Severance has been around for 12 years at least, and Gemma has only been there for two years. Thoughts? 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. It feels like Irving could be the kind of guy whose innie has been blank slated several times, even maybe with his knowledge.
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.

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

Could we even be so lucky?

Oh, yeah.

I mean.

All right.

We loved this episode.

Anything else you want to say about it before we go to the Damon conversation?

Only, I guess, big picture, small picture. Yeah.
Let's start small. On the most granular possible level.
During some of these very flashy, very athletic, as our friend Amanda Dobbins would say, bits of filmmaking in this episode, camera moving down the dark hallways, kind of like almost stop motion-y effect. I'm wondering if this is coming from that kind of hand-cranked camera situation.
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 what I've got. Freeze frame Mahoney.
All right. We see a split second of Mark's hands from season one as he's sculpting the tree that Gemma crashed into very

quickly. 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. We see Mark standing outside near some woods at night,

which she does in season one when he revisits the place where he thinks Gemma has died.

And also kind of the bend in the road, 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. Not unlike the other Lumen ideographic cards that we've seen.
It's not quite one-to-one, but maybe reminiscent. You get just kind of like a general icy road.
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.

You get a sort of soft table lamp, a red flower,

which like if that's not bell and beast coded,

I don't know what is.

And just some associated shots of Gemma along the way.

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.

I love that. Thank you so much for doing that work.
That is, yeah, it's very like crash. Not the terrible best picture winner, but let's invoke what happened here without showing you specifically like this is how Lumen planted a body or anything like know? What's your big picture? I think I just want to underscore again that this episode turned me into a complete mess, was really emotional in a way that I wasn't expecting.
And honestly, I was kind of wondering if Severance would be capable of. This is a process and a show I find very, like, intellectually stimulating, right? You and I banding about these theories.
I love the sci-fi concepts. I love the execution and the filmmaking.
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, my whole emotional relationship to this show has been turned upside down.
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. 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.
I don't need them to like Severance in order for me to like Severance. But I am curious if this moves the needle for them uh in any direction in terms of how they've been receiving this season because i think that has been part of their critique is like this feels like um clever yeah without being emotional in the way that they might want it to be um and i feel like i've felt, you know, like the Irving stuff in episode four, like I feel like I've had emotional moments.
This is a leveling up for sure. I completely agree.
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. And that I was just like wanting Severance to hit that other gear.
And Joe, we are here. Well, let's go now to our conversation with the Leftovers co-creator, Lost co-creator, Washington co-creator, Damon Lindelof.
The thing that I love about Severance, and I'll start many sentences with one of the things that I love about Severance is the idea of like the body sharing aspect of it is that Helier is saying Helena used my body to do this thing. But Helena's position is that...
It's her body. Is that 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.
Yeah. Which is I disagree fundamentally with whatever Lutheran pastor sold this line of bullshit to Fields and Bt that innies have souls there's only one soul baby like that's the way that it works 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 i'm so grateful to you otherwise raising my favorite harrison ford film thank you so much written by jj ab at age 23.
Correct. But basically, like, the idea that it would be viable if you murdered someone to erase your memory, and that would be justifiable, like, a 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.
And so I'm a one-soul, per-body kind of guy. Okay.
And 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, right? And it seems like— Everybody else is now hooked up except for those two. It seems like sparks were flying at the Chinese restaurant.
It seems to be on. Yes.
At. At Zoo Fu.
They have just. Yeah.
They have just. Or Fu.
Yes. Because the zoo is out.
Yeah. Okay.
So we should clarify that you have not seen episode seven. Correct.
As we're recording this. That's right.
You've seen episode six. Yes.
As I buy. That's the last one.
That's the last one. That has dropped at the time of the conversation.
At the time of the conversation. So you have not, I have not watched episode seven.
You have not watched episode seven. We're recording this clean.
Chikai Bardo is what that episode seven is called. Oh, the one that's coming up.
Yeah. Do you want to explain to people who don't know what a Bardo is because I learned it from you.
I will. I learned it from watching you.
Through the lens of a Western white fellow in his early 50s trying to explain the grand space of Tibetan and Buddhist philosophy. I think it's the fourth bardo is the Chakai bardo.
Oh, okay. So that just goes to show you how much I know about bardos.
But I read the Tibetan book of the dead when I was in college. Right.
And then the thing that stuck with me through the haze of pot smoke was this idea of the bardo and that and it aligns with um with other sort of like afterlife constructs um like kind of most notably um in egyptian mythology there's this thing called the river lethe l-e-t-h-e where when you drink from it um you forget your entire life 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. Like in the Robert Downey Jr.
film Chances Are. Exactly like that film.
And not like the film where Nicole Kidman hooks up with a nine-year-old in a tub. Right.
Exactly. Birth.
Different. Pretty interesting movie.
Jonathan Glaser. That's a cool movie.
It is weird and very uncomfortable. Is it as good as Chances Are with Robert Downey Jr.
and Cybill Shepherd? It's the exact same plot as Chances Are, which is why I'm referring to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's not a romantic comedy. Less age-appropriate, even less age-appropriate.
Yeah, for sure. The general idea of the bardo is that when you die, you enter into the space that is called the bardo, and in that space, you aren't aware that you're dead.
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 and in this space the bardo you're interacting with all the people that you've known in your life uh 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, you know,

the, the,

the, 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,

um,

you know,

uh,

there,

there,

there's a similar sort of like,

uh,

approach to this movie presence that Soderbergh just did.

It's a ghost story,

but it,

it,

it like,

it,

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. Right.
And the afterlife is timeless. The objective of the Bardo 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.
With James Morrison? Yeah, we're all Ronald in the Bardo. Now, some people like are still kind of like just wandering around the Bardo forever.
They never move on to the next stage. They never do the things that they need.
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 shit.

You 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.
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 in International Assassin. We talked about like the river leave and if you drink the water, you forget.
Like these are – I only have one idea, Jo. 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. And once you remember, then you take ownership and then you move on.
That is, spoiler alert, like what the 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 ao. If people haven't seen Lost, and I hear from people all the time that they're just starting Lost the first time.
Oh, yeah. You're like daily and it's amazing and it makes you really happy.
Me too. If people have not watched Lost, the film Jacob's Ladder is another sort of good example of that.
Yes. That's right.
Yeah. That's like Incident in Owl's Creek.
Yeah. Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, this, like this like it was all a dream it was all happening while the person was dying sort of idea in that short story but to clarify they were not dead the whole time on Lost if you do you want to say it into a camera this is a spoiler alert that it's okay to know if you've heard they were dead the whole time they weren't they weren't correct Do you want to talk about Bert? Well, yeah, let's talk about Bert.

You mean, is he evil?

Yeah.

Or are we just looking into Christopher Walken always plays someone kind of twisty? I mean, he's definitely a bad guy, right? Our guy Bert? Well, here's the question. it feels

if your fundamental approach to severance is

that their innies are the are the are the closest thing to the the you the they they are um that is to say that's the purest you it's un it's it's unaffected by the the nature versus nurture argument right 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 visited upon you. But then when you sever, all of that stuff goes away.
They erase your memory. 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 wiped clean, and so it's pure you.
You become the Dylan that your wife met at the beginning of your relationship. That's right, and that Dylan is hot.
Like, Merritt Weaver is like, give me some of that. Give me some of that Dylan.
And so, Bert is any Bert. That's my belief.
I agree. And so if he is evil, if Audi Bert is, 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's just, it's a hot take. Okay.
I stand by it. Piping hot.
Yeah. All right.
it doesn't mean there are people who appreciate wine who are not evil right if you know a lot about your grapes if you know your varietals it yeah if you know your wine shit and particularly if you have a cellar there's no one more evil on this planet than sommeliers so i think like bert has the hots for irving Yeah. And in a real sort of like sweet way.

And also he's up to no good.

Well, here's the thoughts.

It's like, I love everything you said about the you you are.

Your innie is your purest self, not sort of beaten down by life or corrupted by things that have happened.

I like this idea that if you're in love with or attracted to someone in one state, you will be in another state. And I love this idea that, and this is something that one of our listeners posited with last week's episode, this idea that Mark S., as we see him experience more in his life, the loss of Irving, the betrayal of Helena, stuff like that is getting closer to- He's like getting traumatized now.
He's getting closer to Mark, like 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.
Right. Which I think is really interesting.
Absolutely. What's your big codified theory of severance that you want to lay on me? My hope is that what is driving the creative team behind severance on every level, music to craft, to actors, to writers, is the question that always drives me, which is their investment in the show is, are these people going to be okay? All the stuff that I try to write about and am attracted to, it's the idea of using genre for coping mechanisms.
And severance is the ultimate coping mechanism. It's the title of the show.
So that everybody, as we learn, why did they get severed? Yeah. 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.
Yeah. In terms of like, why would you do this radical thing? It's not just so you can skip the boring part of your day.
We've all seen that Adam Sandler movie where he fast forwards through the boring parts and it never pans out. It doesn't work out.
So that's what they care about. So you and I talking about theories, it doesn't mean that what Lumen is actually up to doesn't matter or that they don't care about it.
I'm just saying like, I want, I want a level set that 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? And along the way, sure. Tell me what the fuck the goats are about, et cetera, et cetera.
What Lumen is really up to, but all the nefarious, like, so the, so, so my theory theory of like this is everything that i think is going on and and and i've come to understand yeah you know both by listening to you and rob and and and and 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. But that is to say, it dovetails with them.
But I do have one thing to say that I have not read or heard. Okay.
I do think that the play here is to bring Kier back to life. Right.
It's a resurrection play. Or I can't remember what the exact word that revolve but what is is that the word that heli dad heli r's dad used well i hope you should i hope you're there at my revolution 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 antennas it's like's like this is a straight-up kind of spirituality play.
This season has been getting much more into, like, scripture. Yeah.
And, like, it's like we've transcended, like, weird waffle parties, and we've gone right into, like, oh, Milchick is, like, not too far removed from Paul Bettany, 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.
Like, you know, writ large. And I'm so there for it.
Yeah. And I fucking love every bit of it.
Yeah. So, yes.
At the end of this all, is there cloning technology happening? 1,000%. Like, clones, growing new bodies.
My belief is that Gemma, Mark's wife, did in fact die. 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 then doctor all of the things.
But I do think that they grew a new body for her, and that's the person that we know as Mrs. Caseyy it's why she even has a different name like you could just call her gemma yeah 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 and ultimately like this the severance play is we will put a chip in your head that chip will basically absorb absorb the you you are.
And then that chip can be transferred into a new version of you when you begin to age. And we are all living in the perpetuity.
And you can just revolve. You can revolve forever.
Revolve, revolve, revolve. That's the game.
In season one, Bert makes – he's heard this rumor. in optics and Design they've all heard this rumor about MDR that they have pouches and it becomes this kind of very silly joke that has a punchline and they're all sort of chuckling about it and I thought it was hilarious at the time but now and we come into season 2 and we enter into the goat room we enter into the goat room.
With Gwendolyn Christie, yeah. And with Gwendolyn Christie, the amazing Gwendolyn Christie.
And she asks them to- Show her belly button. And what are the physical definitions? What are the descriptors that we use to describe what a belly button looks like? Innies or outies? Bro.
Clones don't have belly buttons. Okay.
Because they're not carried in utero. They don't have an umbilicus.
They don't have a cord to snip. So the only way.
So smooth. Yeah.
Like a candle. They're using this story of pouches as like cover to do belly checks.
And we belly checked. And I'm telling you, someone is fucking, Mark and Helly are clean.
Yeah. We saw, we got, we had full navel.
Yeah, we got belly checks, but we have not seen Irving's navel. 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. I was going to, yeah, I was going to say, this is Battlestar Galactica territory.
This is my, this is my thinking. It's pod people stuff.
Okay. You and I are pod people right now.
That's true. Okay, I love this.
Okay. The belly button theory.
There it is. Is that what you want to call it? It's, yeah.
We'll call it, yeah. The belly button theory.
Yeah. Okay.
The belly button theory. I'm trying to do some kind of play on, let's call it, we're navel gazing.
We're navel gazing. There it is.
Yeah. Punching it up as always.
Love it. Yeah.
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 endgame? And the unified theory of Lost is what is the island? And I always struggled with that as like, I don't even know how, do I have to explain that? And over time became to believe that we had to explain 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 talking about corks and, you know, like, I always felt like not entirely confident in answering that question.

But I also understood why the audience is like, hey, buddy, we're 75 episodes into this shit. You better fucking tell us what the island is.
But then you get to the leftovers and you're like, let the mystery be. Yeah, but openly declaring.
And saying from the start, we're not going to explain this to you. And 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, if you're selling them a puzzle and you go like, hey, all the pieces might not be in here.
You go, what? No. 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? No, it wouldn't be exciting, you fucker.
I love both the ending of Lost and Leftovers, as you know. 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.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Which is like what The Leftovers gives us

is like a question that we can decide.

Choose your adventure of what the ending of this is

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 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.
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.
And so that's why I almost prefer to a certain degree that we never quite exactly know, you know? But that will piss off, you know, its own subset of people. Right.
And I think to some degree, like for those kinds of shows, you know, puzzle box shows or 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 Saul's and Sopranos because those shows didn't, they, they, they, they had to end and the endings were based around what's going to happen to these characters. Like how good is the final episode? But, 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 Mini do it, but like why are we alive? You know, like why do we exist in 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? It's much more interested in kind of, like, exploring.
But this is why I kind of go, like, the endgame of Severance just has to be, like, is Mark going to be okay? Is Helly going to be okay? 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. But if you showed me that episode, I'd start to feel quite torn about who I wanted him to be with.
When you get explicit, seemingly explicit references to Lost on this show, like when people are like, hey, those are the numbers. What does that do to you as a Severance fan? But they're not the numbers.
There are the numbers on their lockers. Ohers oh really the mdr team in the scene when they are all going into their lockers and going down the elevator one by one it each person had a lost number on their locker and what's in this season in the in the first couple episodes this is new this is a new data point this is new information for you um that's very exciting exciting.
And I look at that as like, you know, I know that Dan is a fan of Lost. Dan Erickson who runs his show.
Yes, right. And so I look at that as like, it's just a nod towards like the homage of like, hey, I just want everybody to know I watch the show.
I also lost right and it's like and there are you know there have always been you know design elements and the aesthetic or like or just the milchik video you know where you're basically like okay like that i'm i'll just say i'm always delighted by it like because again lost did all Lost did all the same. It's there, there's such a difference between a ripoff and a riff off.
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 in the constant are like from Firestarter, you know, and Steve, and Stephen King borrowed that from, you know, I mean, and so, and now you didn't invent the nosebleed as like a ticking clock on something.
Not remotely. And I would just say like, almost any idea that we had on Lost, I'm sure you'd be able to find some version of it in something that one of us had read or experienced in movies, television, literature, you know, in our life.

And like, but, you know, you're throwing all of that stuff in the blender and our job is

like to make the smoothie delicious.

And Severance is doing something entirely new.

So it's like, all it does is it excites me to riff on Severance on the next thing that

I do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's like, because that's the thing.

It's like the Beatles and the Beach Boys, they were annoyed by like Sergeant Pepper, Magic Mystery Tour, Pet Sounds. But then they were like, oh my God, you can do that? And so like that idea that I'm alive right now in a time and space where like we're riffing on each other's stuff.
And the fact that some of the stuff that I have done is being riffed on in a show that I love. 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 stuff I love. 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, I'm now Paul Simon on that stage.
Sabrina Carpenter is way behind me, but I identify with him. Yeah.
And I'm cool enough to go, that's Sabrina Carpenter, right? But my son still has to go, like, right. I'm not like— She's good, right? She's a great job.
Yeah, yeah. Big fan.
The locker numbers are 4, 16, and 23. Okay, so that's, yeah, that's not a coincidence.
That's not a coincidence. Sometimes we're reaching for the last references and sometimes they are just there.
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 Luka trade on the record. And specifically, in your professional opinion, as someone who has wrestled with the infinite mystery of the universe, how could this have possibly happened? So here's what's really exciting.
I'm going to walk out of the studio right now because we're talking on Tuesday. And even though people will be listening to this later in the week, I'm going to crypto.com and I am going to watch the Mavericks play the Los Angeles Lakers.
Correct. And basically their first face-off since the trade.
And so I don't know what's going to happen. It's a mystery box.
I think what no one is expecting to happen is that the Mavericks completely and totally blow out the Lakers and that Luka has a horrible game because he's just in his own head. And then that will basically start the, oh, we had it all wrong about what this trade was.
Or it goes the other way. I just hope it's a fabulous and fantastic game.
Okay. I would say I'm still wrapping my brain around the fact that Luka is a Laker because I really disliked him a lot.
Okay. As a Laker fan and a Clipper fan.
And the Mavericks have knocked teams that I liked out of the playoffs with intensity and also like Luka just complained so much. If there's one thing I hate in the NBA, it's just working the refs and second to flopping.
And, like, Luka may be and is one of the best players in the league. You said that so grudgingly.
And is. But he is the worst when it comes to whining.

And for someone as talented,

you shouldn't whine so much.

And so I'm still-

But you do have a conspiracy theory about this trade.

However the game goes tonight.

Don't you, weren't you staying outside?

My conspiracy theory is

there's something that we don't know about Luca.

And I don't, I, I.

Does he have a belly button to hear?

Oh, great question.

Yeah.

I think that the Lakers don't know it either.

Okay.

I think very few people know it.

Okay.

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, 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.
You should check for a belly button. Just, you know what? I've got good seats.
Okay. And I will shout to Luca repeatedly, show me your belly.
Okay. Until they throw me out.
Well, I hope that happens. They have to tuck.
All of us. They have to tuck.
It's a violation. It's a violation.
They don't tuck. To be untucked.
To be untucked. Okay.
So I could, I could inadvertently. But you could flash it.
Yeah. And it's during a timeout.
Yeah. But yeah, he might get teed up.
Okay. So 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.
We appreciate you. What a way to end.
Thanks for having me. Can't wait to meet you, Rob.
And you'll be back for our podcast in House of R? Yes. of r yes yeah oh absolutely i feel like i just did it in the way in the waiting room yeah yeah with mallory all right it was i was not let down by having them it was one of those weird things where i was like oh i've listened i've listened to you for 300 hours and this is the first time that i'm meeting you in the flesh yeah um she She's great.
She is the best. I do.
All right. Thanks.
Bye. 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.
Damon's the best. Thanks so much to Damon Lidlop for coming in and having a chat with us again.
You can see that full interview 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 Ringer TV YouTube channel. Thank you.
I was extremely jealous to miss this chat, I gotta say. I mean, it's heartbreaking stuff for me.
We both wanted you here, and let's do it again when you're down here and we're all in the same place, The next time a show breaks our brains open with its mystery box elements, we'll circle back. Okay.
Sounds perfect. Thank you to Justin Sales for his tireless work on this very vibrant and busy feed.
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 did incredible work turning that Damon interview around and all

sorts of stuff.

So we will see you for White Lotus next week and for Severance again and again and again.

And here we are in the carousel of content.

See you soon.