‘Severance’ Season 2 Premiere: Are You Innie or Outie?

Speaker 1 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.

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Speaker 1 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, Cole in the 2000s, preferably on Spotify.

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Speaker 3 Hello, welcome back to the Prestige TV Podcast Speed. That's my very good friend, Rob Mahoney, and I'm his best friend, Joanna Robinson.
And we're here to talk to you about Submarines season two.

Speaker 2 Hey, Rob, how are you doing? I prefer Rob M these days, actually, if we're just going to go by really formalities.

Speaker 3 Okay, Rob M and Joanna are here reporting in on Severn Season 2. We are thrilled.
We are so excited.

Speaker 3 Rob and I have not been this excited about a show that we've covered in a little while with love and respect to the shows we've been recently covering.

Speaker 3 This is one that we are like very passionate about. We're really excited about.
So just so you know, Severn Season 2, this is a week-to-week Rob and Joe joint.

Speaker 3 Like that is what we are doing for the foreseeable. So we'll be doing this.
We're also going to, yes, catch up with the agency as we promised at the end of that season.

Speaker 3 So, we'll be back to do an end-of-season check-in for the agency. And also,

Speaker 3 you guys really like the pit question mark.

Speaker 2 Slash, you work in the medical industry.

Speaker 3 We got a lot of emails from doctors. Thank you for listening,

Speaker 3 doctors and nurses, and all sorts of medical professionals. So, thank you for listening.
Thank you for emailing

Speaker 3 with your insight. It was very educational.
So, we will be checking in on the pit,

Speaker 3 not every week, but

Speaker 3 sporadically.

Speaker 3 So keep the emails coming. We love to hear them.
We are going to hit you with some

Speaker 3 severance specific email options in a second.

Speaker 3 Rob and I have been doing some brainstorming, but in general, PrestigeTV at spotify.com is where you can find us to talk about the agency, the pit, severance,

Speaker 3 upcoming white lotus, your old squid game, thoughts, whatever it is, we'll be here for you. Did you just watch Presumed Innocent? Welcome.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Did you consider the ring?

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 So before we get into our severance specific emails, we thought we in our sort of like more ambitious state, we're like, should we do a whole entire episode recapping season one?

Speaker 3 And we didn't do that.

Speaker 3 But we bring, we are, we come here to you today with Rob and I put together and not shared with each other our very own personal, like sort of three things to remember from season one from each of us.

Speaker 3 Yes. And we're, I've just decided we're going to go back and forth, sort of saying what they are.
Rob was like, should they be big picture? Should they be tiny little things?

Speaker 3 And I said, whatever moves your heart, that is what we're here to talk about.

Speaker 3 Because I do think the show does a pretty good job, despite it being three years since season one.

Speaker 3 And I don't know if this is just informed by me having just binged season one of Severance over the last few days, but I think season two, episode one, which we're going to talk about in a bit,

Speaker 3 does a pretty good job of sort of refreshing certain things and recapping certain things.

Speaker 3 Rob, what's your sort of like number three thing to remember from season one of Severance that you want to share?

Speaker 2 This is going to be an interesting dance between the two of us, Joe. As I try to weave around what I anticipate you might pick,

Speaker 2 so we're not too redundant in our selections. I'm going to go kind of bigger picture.

Speaker 2 Something that is hinted around throughout season one, something is intimated in exchanges between characters or little bits of context, that there's still a lot of resistance to the severance procedure itself in the outside world.

Speaker 2 There's sort of a battle for whether this is a thing that should exist for everyone outside of our core characters. And as a result, there's kind of an ongoing PR battle happening.

Speaker 2 And you see that in the season one finale as Heli's Audi, Helena, Helena Egan, as it is, is basically attempting to get up on stage to put a face to this procedure and convince people that actually it's warm and fuzzy.

Speaker 2 It's okay. Everyone is so happy and so much happier this way.

Speaker 2 I think it potentially explains some of the softer, friendlier Lumen that we see here in season two as well, kind of post-potential news apocalypse, putting a new face on this whole thing and trying to spin it in a completely different direction because it's pretty clear that not a lot of people are on board with it.

Speaker 3 Stop motion animation, Lumen.

Speaker 3 Keanu voiceover lumen.

Speaker 2 100% Keanu Reeves voiceover.

Speaker 3 Great. I mean, if I could pick someone to voice over my

Speaker 3 complete corporate overhaul from my sinister reality, I would definitely pick Keanu.

Speaker 3 Okay, I will sort of yes on that with my number three, which is that a reminder that this isn't really dealt with in the season two, episode one, because they're dealing with a lot of other things.

Speaker 3 Bob Balaban is here. Like there's a lot of important things to dwell on, but

Speaker 2 reminder that Irving.

Speaker 3 In addition to

Speaker 3 sort of chasing after Bert in his foray out in the outside, we find out that he's got a trunk full of

Speaker 3 Lumen employee information.

Speaker 3 And there's also just like, you know, this is a very theory-friendly show. So, like, I don't know how to talk about things without talking about theories next door to them.

Speaker 3 So, just there's this prevailing theory that Irving, because he's been at Lumen for nine years, but only severed for three years, there's this prevailing theory that perhaps he once had Milchik's job or something like that, that Irving has been at Lumen, that Irving maybe was management higher up something, and something about being there set him on this course that he wanted to either whistleblow something and he was severed to shut him up or severed in order to pursue something.

Speaker 3 But just that Irving, in addition to being the most devout of the innies,

Speaker 3 his fascination with Bert

Speaker 3 and his painting of this spooky ookie hallway that we see Miss Casey go down at the end of season one. He's got a lot of information in a trunk in his house.

Speaker 2 He certainly does.

Speaker 2 Let me yes and your yes and because I also have an Irving related item, which is I would say we're starting to get some clarity as to the direction of this, but it's pretty clear that the boundary between Annie and Audi is at least a little bit porous.

Speaker 2 We see Irving in the outside world, as you said, painting the black hallway that leads to the testing floor over and over and over and over. Immaculate work, great motorhead deployment.

Speaker 2 I'm in favor of all of it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But just a reminder that if it's been a minute since you've seen Severin season one, we also see Irving's innie see the kind of black paint goop seeping into his workspace in a hallucinogenic sort of sequence.

Speaker 2 And so during season one, admittedly, I was wondering, which way is it going, right? Like, is this the understanding of the inner world seeping into the outside world?

Speaker 2 And And this is a vision that the outer Irving has had in his painting. But you're right.

Speaker 2 Like a lot of our signs now as we enter season two, and certainly a lot of the theories are out there, point much more toward Irving having a past within the company that would at least lead him into that hallway.

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 3 your number two really underlines a very important question of like, how different is your innie and your outie? How severed is your severance?

Speaker 3 How much can you compartmentalize your humanity, your memories, your grief, whatever it is?

Speaker 3 We'll get to Helena in this episode, but there's, you know, there's a moment where she defiantly says, you know, there's, we have nothing in common. The Indies and the Yowdies have nothing in common.

Speaker 3 We own, we owe them fucking nothing, right?

Speaker 2 She's saying lots of things in this episode.

Speaker 3 She does say a lot of stuff.

Speaker 3 Okay, that brings me to,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 we'll sort of get into our theories about what are they doing? What is the point of Lumen? What is the point of severance? We don't have a clear answer to that.

Speaker 3 But I do do want to underline, I think one of the more perturbing in a sea of perturbation.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of perturbment going on.

Speaker 3 Perturbation happening here.

Speaker 3 Jamie Egan, who is the current CEO of Lumen, who is Helena's father,

Speaker 3 in the finale, says to her that she will be at his side at his revolving.

Speaker 3 His what now?

Speaker 2 His revolving? Joe, you've never been to a revolving before? Do you even revolve, bro?

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 what is a revolving? Are we seeking some sort of artificial immortality? That's what it always seems to come down to with these like

Speaker 3 people with too much money and science in their hands.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 is the idea of

Speaker 3 a sort of digital resurrection, like how much can we recreate,

Speaker 3 you know, humanity? How much can we sever humanity?

Speaker 3 Is he going to revolve into something wholly artificial? Or is part of him going to revolve into Helena, his heir? Or what is all going to happen? But the word revolving is so disturbing to me.

Speaker 3 And it sets my mind spinning in terms of like, what is the point

Speaker 2 of

Speaker 3 severance and loom? And it of course is not what they're packaging, which is like, come be a happy, pliant worker for us. That's a perk for sure.

Speaker 3 But what is the larger, certainly more nefarious goal of the severance program?

Speaker 2 Yeah, like ultimately, the severance program itself seems like just a shield to protect very sensitive information. And specifically, like what, as you say, what it is that they're doing, which is

Speaker 2 almost has to be terrible, almost has to be whether

Speaker 2 necromantic or not. We'll see.
I mean, there's certainly a lot of things happening in this show that are flirting with the edge of death and existence.

Speaker 2 And that's why, for me, I think one other thing to keep in mind is we don't really know if reintegration is even possible for these characters.

Speaker 2 And so there's a lot of things happening in the season two premiere where, for example, our kind of core four

Speaker 2 macro deaths are given the choice of like, you can stay here or you can go.

Speaker 2 But what's meant by you can go is your existence can blink out. Yeah.
Because there's no reason to think that you have a life up there that you would be allowed to continue to exist.

Speaker 2 And so I think the hopeful eventuality for these characters is that they would find some way to reintegrate any and Audi.

Speaker 2 But we've seen that go pretty messily and end in death so far in terms of PD trying to navigate that process. Admittedly, he did not follow the post-op instructions.

Speaker 2 He didn't follow the aftercare instructions, Rob. They were very specific and he blew it.

Speaker 3 It was breast ice compression elevation, and he didn't do it. So, I mean, I don't know what to tell you.
Um, if you're not going to do your PT, you're not going to reintegrate. But, um,

Speaker 2 I hope

Speaker 3 I don't wish ill, obviously, on our core for anyone else, but but I re-watching season one, Yulvaska is an actor that I love as Petey, watching how much fun they had with the scrambled

Speaker 3 reintegration, him sort of blipping in and out of reality and memory and the way that they used camera trickery or and sort of like in-camera movements to convey all of that is just a really fun part of season one that I had kind of had a loose memory of, but it was fun to revisit.

Speaker 3 So I wouldn't hate seeing that again, but hopefully in a way that doesn't require any of our favorite characters to bleed heavily from any orifice whatsoever.

Speaker 2 Unless they're into that, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to yuck anybody's yum.

Speaker 3 We're not yucking yums here on this podcast. Okay.
So is that your, is that your

Speaker 2 number three, or I guess my number one?

Speaker 3 My number three or my number one, if you prefer.

Speaker 3 Oftentimes in these sci-fi stories where the question of like, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean?

Speaker 3 All that sort of stuff like that, even Chris Ronolan does this. Oftentimes, it comes down to this notion of love.

Speaker 3 And so, I just want to remind everyone that Mark, like, there's the Burton Irving storyline from season one, which gets a little bit of a recap here in season two, episode one. So good.
Be it Dylan.

Speaker 3 I love that he used the word courtship in this episode to describe it. And in season one, he's like, Are you sweet on him? It's like the phrase he used.
Very sweet.

Speaker 3 So Burton Irving, that is, of course, beautiful. But I just want to point out that Mark, in his various guises, has like a plethora of love interests in season one.

Speaker 3 Good for you, Adam Scott. There's Helly, of course.

Speaker 2 Of course.

Speaker 3 There's Miss Casey/slash Gemma, his

Speaker 2 deceased question mark, resurrected question mark. Big old TBD on that one.

Speaker 3 Wife.

Speaker 3 And there's,

Speaker 3 as Milchik sort of put out in this episode this idea that

Speaker 3 Miss Kobel

Speaker 3 or Mrs. Selbig

Speaker 3 wants an erotic thruffle with Mark's Annie and Audi. I would

Speaker 3 a great idea. And are we going to see some version of that inside of this season? Let's tune in to find out.

Speaker 3 There are moments in season one, whether or not it's under the guise of her, like her undercover work as this sort of health nut kook neighbor uh that she plays in season one but that that mrs selvig you know says is hitting on mark like pretty heavily and in in multiple occasions so and then there's and then there's also a fully another woman that mark terrorizes with his grief um

Speaker 3 drinking uh problem in season one so uh this idea of connection of love and it doesn't have to be romantic love i think dylan dylan with his kids and his family.

Speaker 3 We know some casting information about his family in season two that we may or may not get into. But

Speaker 3 does that count as a spoiler? A casting?

Speaker 2 I think for this show, it might.

Speaker 3 Okay, we won't talk about it then.

Speaker 3 And this is as good a ten of any to

Speaker 3 promise you all, as I've already promised Rob, I'm not watching past one episode a week with this show. This is a theory show, and it is cheating to watch ahead.

Speaker 3 So we will be in the dark down here in the basement in the dark.

Speaker 2 In the office hellscape with all of you.

Speaker 3 With all of you, just scrabbling through the hallways trying to figure out our theories together. So that is, we are not watching ahead on this show.

Speaker 2 Not a bit.

Speaker 3 So those are our three random things. If I could smuggle one thing, it would just be that there is a room full of baby goats and we still don't know why.
And I just want to.

Speaker 3 Put that out there in the We don't know why.

Speaker 2 And the quote when they bust into the room of baby goats, the guy says, you can't take them yet. They're not ready.

Speaker 2 And I'm just waiting. I'm waiting for them to be ready.

Speaker 3 Oh my God. What if we get sort of like a little mini baby goat stampede through the hallway?

Speaker 3 I know.

Speaker 2 That'd be phenomenal. I do have, you know, as to pivot off the baby goats.
Yes. As we soft launch potential new emails.

Speaker 3 I'm so excited. I have a couple, but I can't wait to hear yours.
What are yours?

Speaker 2 The goats lay the eggs at gmail.com. Okay.
Which was one of the explanations for the egg party and perhaps why they were so good. Those did look like some incredible deviled eggs.

Speaker 3 The egg bar is coveted as fuck. It's just a quote I randomly have on a scrap of paper here on my desk.

Speaker 3 So, you know, it's important to remember. Yeah.

Speaker 2 How about the U-U-R at gmail.com? Okay.

Speaker 3 The U-U-R. Okay.

Speaker 2 I feel like with a lot of these, there's some questionable spellings. There's some dubious grammatical constructions.
I want to pick one that's clear in a way that the U-U-R is not.

Speaker 2 Perhaps Pineapple Bobbing at gmail.com. That's a really good one.

Speaker 3 I have a couple from this episode. I only have two from this season two, episode one.

Speaker 3 ShimbolicRube at gmail.com

Speaker 3 and Night Gardener at gmail.com.

Speaker 2 Oh, Night Gardener is good. Also, would watch Night Gardener.
The Night Gardener. The upcoming Netflix series starring, like, I don't know, Jason Statham or whatever.
Like, I'm up for that.

Speaker 3 The Night Manager spin-off, the Night Gardener.

Speaker 2 It simply must must be. Yeah, okay, great.

Speaker 3 Okay, anything else that I had written down from season one? Do you have other ones that you want to float?

Speaker 2 One that I don't think can fly based on the questionable spelling of Egan that I'm guessing people just don't have off the tip of their tongue. Animatronic Egan's at gmail.com.

Speaker 2 I also, in honor of my favorite exchange in this episode between Irving and Dylan, your favorite perk at gmail.com or I'm your favorite perk at gmail.com if you prefer.

Speaker 3 I was wondering if you want to do something with like

Speaker 3 finger traps,

Speaker 3 but I didn't workshop that well enough.

Speaker 2 It's pronounced fingy trap, but okay.

Speaker 3 The VIP area of pips at gmail.com.

Speaker 2 What a show this is.

Speaker 3 Obviously, waffle party at gmail.com. It's right there.
It is right there. All right, so we're going to go with.

Speaker 2 Pineapple bobbing at gmail.com. Yes, we've conferred away from the cameras

Speaker 3 in the supply supply closet waffle party not available so not available whichever one of you sick fucks is sitting on waffle party at gmail.com you won this round

Speaker 3 but pineapple bobbing at gmail.com is what we're gonna go for um i love a pineapple so sounds great to me i think it's aspirational too like i would love to see the pineapple bobbing in action this season at some point I actually think, I know it sounds like it would be really hard, but I actually think it would be quite easy because there's so much leafy stem to grab onto.

Speaker 2 So, what?

Speaker 3 Okay, so when's the last time you participated in or saw an apple bobbing competition?

Speaker 2 It's been a long time, but a pineapple is not easier. Okay,

Speaker 3 let me tell you, this last

Speaker 3 October, as you know, you know, Rob, that I did a like live show for a Buffy Vampire Slayer podcast. I like part of

Speaker 3 the show was an apple bobbing competition that I did not compete in, but I watched and I watched one participant demolish the other by simply going for stems, grabbing out stems and and tossing them over.

Speaker 3 So you can, there's so much pineapple stem to grab.

Speaker 2 But it's all pointy. It's pointy.

Speaker 2 Also, the pineapple itself is so heavy, it's hard to pick it up by your teeth,

Speaker 2 by the leaf alone.

Speaker 3 Listen, you make some excellent points and considered the next strength that would be required.

Speaker 2 Oh my gosh, clicking gesture. I'm strange just thinking about it.

Speaker 3 Okay. Fair enough.
Okay. So it's pineapplebobbing at gmail.com or press tv at spotify.com.
We'll get it from both angles. Also, please pineapple bob,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 safely. We,

Speaker 3 you know, we don't strain yourself.

Speaker 2 Okay. For legal purposes, we do not recommend that anyone out there pineapple bobs.
But if you were to do it, we would love to hear about it at pineapplebobbing at gmail.com.

Speaker 3 Okay, I want to start before we get into like theories or bigger sort of picture ideas of this episode of severance, I want to start with just like a tiny behind the scenes

Speaker 3 context to say that this, you know, season one came out three years ago. I had just started at the ringer when this came out.

Speaker 3 So it has been so long,

Speaker 3 but there's a couple creatives sort of at play behind the scenes here.

Speaker 3 And I wanted to explain some slight, just quickly run through some slight behind the scenes tension and let that help explain why I was a little bit worried about this season, and why I'm really happy that I quite liked season two, episode one, and the reviews of people who have seen more are all quite good.

Speaker 3 So, that's a huge relief. Um, Dan Erickson is the name of the person who came up with the idea for severance in the first place.
This is his original concept. Exciting.

Speaker 3 Uh, since Dan had never made a TV before, um,

Speaker 3 Apple and their infinite wisdom, or you know, whoever paired him with Mark Friedman, who does have TV experience. Mark Friedman and Dan Erickson did not get along very well when making season one.

Speaker 3 And so Mark Friedman, I don't know, other His own steamer or not, is like, I'm out of here for season two. No, thank you.

Speaker 3 They tried to find someone to replace him to sort of once again, and this is not unusual that you have a creative who doesn't have a ton of TV experience paired with someone who does have a ton of TV experience.

Speaker 3 For example, a TV show like Lost, Damon Lindelof brought brought on Carlton C's for season two, essentially,

Speaker 3 you know, because he was like, help.

Speaker 2 I'm running a TV show and I don't know how to do that.

Speaker 3 I'm a writer. How do I, you know, what are the logistics here?

Speaker 2 Honestly, that sounds like a punchy title you could put on a Barnes and Noble bookshelf and help many aspiring screenwriters out there.

Speaker 3 Exactly. Cut that out, Kai.
This is our million-dollar idea.

Speaker 2 We're going to be, we're going to, we're going to make that.

Speaker 3 You can find us in the self-help section. But

Speaker 3 so that went south. They were trying to figure out someone who could replace Mark in his sort of TV, infinite TV wisdom in season two.

Speaker 3 And Ben Stiller, who was another, you know, an EP on the show, directed the show,

Speaker 3 asked Mark to come back because the, you know, according to reports, various reports, asked Mark to come back because he couldn't find anyone to sort of adequately replace him.

Speaker 3 Mark came back in some guys. He's a credited writer on episode seven, but I don't think there's no way, in my view, he had the same role that he had in season one.

Speaker 3 And Dan, of course, has much more TV running experience now than he did in season one.

Speaker 3 Who knows how much Ben Stiller stepped up, though by, you know, all implication, he, he stepped up to an even bigger role, perhaps, than he had in, in season one.

Speaker 2 And certainly the visual styling of the show comes a lot from his sensibilities.

Speaker 3 Absolutely. And then they have

Speaker 2 asked.

Speaker 3 at one point, according to reports, asked Bo Willeman of House of Cards and and or Fame to work on season three.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 these are all, these are all the sort of pineapples in the water here, bobbing along in the water here.

Speaker 2 A lot of baby goats in need of some kind of shepherd at season. Exactly.

Speaker 3 And so I was quite worried. And then there's writer's strike, and there's just like a ton of delays.

Speaker 3 And even though sort of Ben Stiller and some other people have come out and said, like, the reports of behind-the-scenes tension are greatly exaggerated, he did in a very recent New York Times podcast say, like, listen, okay, we didn't get along all the time.

Speaker 3 Like, Ben Seller's like, okay, I'm not going to lie to you. There's some, there was some tension, but it's not as rough as has been reported.

Speaker 3 So that's just sort of some of the repertage that has happened behind the scenes, all of which has led to a season two that I was worried was going to be a hot mess.

Speaker 3 And instead, it seems people are really enjoying it. And especially when you have a show that comes out of the gate, out of nowhere, no one was expecting Severance

Speaker 3 to be,

Speaker 3 even if it wasn't like the biggest ratings hit in the whole world for Apple, at least it's like really,

Speaker 3 you know, internet-friendly. People love to talk about Emmy-winning,

Speaker 3 you know, show for Apple. So when something comes out and has such a sort of explosive season one in that way, I'm always worried about the season two.
Definitely.

Speaker 3 So Rob, sort of just big picture, where was your anxiety level, if any place before season two? And how are you you feeling having seen season two, episode one?

Speaker 2 I mean, mine was pretty high.

Speaker 2 Just anytime you get this sort of delay, and in particular, the transition from what I would say is one of the most successful season finales we've haven't had in recent memory at the end of season one.

Speaker 2 It's just like a pulse pounding episode that is so deftly sewn together. And then three years of waiting, including

Speaker 2 not only everything you outlined, but multiple strikes and stoppages in production.

Speaker 2 This is a show that's very expensive to make, even though you may not think that based on the setting, but by the camera tricks and overall, like what they're disguising and what they're hiding and overall the structure and styling of the show, the price is clearly piling up for something like this.

Speaker 2 And I always worry with that of, oh, is it going to get too high? Is it going to get prohibitive? Is there going to be a cutting of corners that has to happen at a certain point?

Speaker 2 Because this is a show that among the things I love about it, I love how great it looks and how disorienting it feels and the camera work feels.

Speaker 2 And if you have to start sacrificing those things, I think Severance stops being severance. But overall, I am, I'm thrilled with where we're starting for season two.

Speaker 2 And I'm thrilled that to me, what is like the clarity of this world has not left it at all.

Speaker 2 I think it's such a weird thing with a mystery box show where so many of them, to me, Joe, feel like such a hodgepodge where... shows are trying to wrong foot you in so many different ways.

Speaker 2 They just throw a bunch of different things at the wall. And there's just all of a sudden a mystical animal walking through the street.
And you're like, all right, I guess that's what's going on now.

Speaker 2 And that's fine. And you you can you can structure your show that way and that's all well and good.
Specific mystic. Oh, no, no, that's just just strictly theoretical.

Speaker 2 Okay, that's the tip of the shitberg that can happen to a theory show for sure. Okay.

Speaker 2 But I think Severance from the get-go had such a specific sensibility in a way that makes the inexplicable parts of the show kind of make sense. And I was really hoping it wouldn't lose that.

Speaker 2 And I'm thrilled to say at least one episode in, I feel like we're right back in it.

Speaker 3 It's a really incredible feat in terms of this near future sci-fi

Speaker 3 vibe, which can be so hard to pull off, but

Speaker 3 it really does feel like a world that is just like a hop, skip, and a jump away from ours,

Speaker 3 which makes

Speaker 3 the sci-fi that much more engaging,

Speaker 3 our own corporate paranoia or whatever, you know, our tech phobia or whatever it is that we're feeling here in 2025.

Speaker 2 There's a very fine line between the show being acceptable to be on Apple, but this would not be made on Amazon Prime, I think, for a bunch of different reasons.

Speaker 2 Not to draw dividing lines between the various corporate overlords out there, but like Lumen as an everything company rings, like stands very tall over this whole entire story.

Speaker 3 You were thinking about Amazon?

Speaker 2 I think it, it,

Speaker 2 it's what comes to mind for me.

Speaker 3 Um,

Speaker 3 yeah, the people who make your deodorant and your snack foods.

Speaker 2 And run the internet.

Speaker 3 Yeah, your, your, your, your Lumen Basics. Do you have Lumen Basics batteries in your remote right now?

Speaker 3 That's funny that you mentioned that because I was going to say, and I remember talking to sort of like Van and Mallory when we covered this in season one,

Speaker 3 the Apple Aesthetic

Speaker 3 that's available here. And we get it.
So this episode opens with

Speaker 3 our guy, Mark S.

Speaker 3 running for a long time through the halls of the severed level of Lumen.

Speaker 2 The conditioning on this guy for not doing any cardio on a regular basis is quite impressive.

Speaker 3 Did you happen to see Adam Scott's Colbert appearance?

Speaker 2 No, did he talk about this? He was talking about the running.

Speaker 3 Not the conditioning on Mark, who, as far as we've seen, only like lifts whiskey tumblers and that's about it, right?

Speaker 2 Maybe a growler at best.

Speaker 3 I was, because I, you know, he... Colbert put up a sort of a still image as one does on the late night of just the like the profile of him running.

Speaker 3 And I was like,

Speaker 3 that's a Tom Cruise run. And Adam Scott's like, I studied Tom Cruise's run.

Speaker 2 You got to study the best. You got to go straight to the graves.

Speaker 3 The best of the best.

Speaker 3 Do you have like a favorite Tom Cruise running sequence in film?

Speaker 2 You can't make me choose between my favorites like that.

Speaker 2 Well, I think the one, because he calls it out specifically, is Minority Report because everyone runs, Joe. Everyone does run.

Speaker 3 Minority Reports are really good. And I love Minority Report, but for me, it's the firm.

Speaker 3 And I think because in the firm, he's wearing not just the suit, but I believe also a Bill Oie 90s trench coat on top of it. It's just

Speaker 2 he running through like an amusement park or something? Or am I getting my Tom Cruise runs confused?

Speaker 3 There's like a fairy, it's like a fairy building.

Speaker 2 It's a fair fairy building

Speaker 3 situation.

Speaker 3 The

Speaker 3 Adam Scott and Colbert described as the blade hands. Like you got to blade your hands and you run and you got to keep the knees high.

Speaker 3 And that is the cruise run. And then Adam Scott said, and I believe this is true,

Speaker 3 that they took eight months to film this sequence. Obviously, not like straight, but, you know, with like breakthrough strikes and all the sort of stuff like that.

Speaker 3 And watching it, knowing that was really interesting because like you could watch it and just sort of get swept up in it. It's quite fun.
But watching it from, you know,

Speaker 3 with like you and I watch a ton of film,

Speaker 3 trying to track that camera. Oh my God.
And how they did that.

Speaker 3 And obviously like some of it has to be on green screen because there's one moment where the camera sort of swoops swoops around and almost under him,

Speaker 3 like around into where there would be a wall and down into where there would be a floor and around him and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 But I thought it was a really brilliant and fun, but he looks like he's running through an iPod essentially. Like it's, you know, the white, the stark white wall and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 What did you, what do you want to say about the opening running sequence

Speaker 3 or the Apple aesthetics?

Speaker 2 I enjoyed the sequence. I enjoyed all the camera work you described.
Like the stitching together of all of that is quite delicate and I think very impressive. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it speaks to what I think makes the show impressive in that way.

Speaker 3 You like just lose him around the corner and that's like a way that they can

Speaker 3 stitch a cut in and stuff like that. Just barely.

Speaker 2 And I like overall the idea that they can do something very fun with the start of this season where Mark is picking up right where we left off at the end of season one, right?

Speaker 2 It is the second that he is walking through the door because of like the inny-outy dynamic, like his consciousness snapped out.

Speaker 2 I don't know if you heard, but she is alive. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so he snaps into consciousness. He goes running looking for Miss Casey, looking for the woman who at least is a mirror image of his wife, if not his actual wife.

Speaker 2 And we're told later that it's been five months since the events of season one. I would push everybody watching this episode to take all exposition.

Speaker 2 in this premiere with a grain of salt because basically all of it comes from either Milchik or some like Lumen promotional material. So I have no idea how much time has passed or not passed.

Speaker 2 It could be the next day. It could be years into the future.
It could be exactly three years, like we have waited, or a little less than three years, like we have waited for season two.

Speaker 2 But then it gets to play off of those things both here and then eventually when we get the whole gang back together, and so many of those characters are snapping into consciousness for what appears to be the first time since the season one finale.

Speaker 2 So, we're both picking up right where we left off, and we have this hanging mystery of like, what has been happening in the background while all of these innies have been snapped out of consciousness?

Speaker 3 And a really funny sort of mirror image tactic here is that, you know, we start season one, episode one of Severance, we're with Mark crying in the car, and we watch him go through the whole procedure of going down into the severed level.

Speaker 3 Here, inside of this episode, we're trapped with any Mark

Speaker 3 inside of that reality, and we have no access to the other reality.

Speaker 3 So to your point, we can't fact check Milt's clearly doctored

Speaker 2 newspaper,

Speaker 3 heavily redacted newspaper.

Speaker 2 The heavily redacted newspaper was tremendous.

Speaker 3 With an image of them being celebrated in a parade, which when that image showed up in the trailer

Speaker 3 a couple months ago, the Redditors were quick to point out that this is a doctored image of, I can't remember who it is now. It's either like Eisenhower or Castro or something like that.

Speaker 3 Like, it's an existent historical image that they just like took their group photo from the desk desk and just airlifted it

Speaker 3 into the car and that's

Speaker 3 as much effort as uh whoever put that together uh used

Speaker 3 so yeah

Speaker 3 we are

Speaker 3 stuck not knowing and i'm not upset or impatient about that i really like that limitation that they put on the story here

Speaker 2 I will say the overall drive to one thing that I was wondering coming out of season one is what kind of role is the absence of Miss Casey or is her name Gemma?

Speaker 2 His wife's name is Gemma, is that correct?

Speaker 2 Going to play in this season. Like clearly, this is a character that everyone's trying to locate.
Is this a person who's going to be off screen for the entirety of the season?

Speaker 2 And already we're seeing kind of like flickering images of her pop up into various spaces and consciousnesses, which I have to say, one, I really appreciate because that central mystery is.

Speaker 2 phenomenal and driving. And I'm really eager to see where it goes.
But also, like, I really love Deechin Lachman in this show. Yes.
And her performance style is always so weird and so haunting.

Speaker 2 And I'm always trying to understand what her characters want or are after.

Speaker 2 And so the idea that we may get, whether it's flashback, whether it's on the non-severed floors, whether it's as we're kind of unspooling whatever this mystery is, she's still involved in some critical capacity.

Speaker 2 That makes me very happy.

Speaker 3 Are you a dollhouse man?

Speaker 2 That's a complicated question.

Speaker 2 I'm a dollhouse. I'm a person.

Speaker 3 Do you like her in Dollhouse?

Speaker 2 She is terrific. She's in Dollhouse.

Speaker 2 That's a show that I think has a lot of kind of fundamental weirdness in common with several.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And she absolutely crushes in on that show.
She was so good.

Speaker 3 And I've been sort of following her career with great interest ever since and wanting her to have projects worthy of her, which she doesn't always.

Speaker 3 She's often sort of this like mysteriously occasionally there kind of person.

Speaker 3 So hopefully she gets more to do this season, even more to do, but I thought she did a great job with what she did in season one.

Speaker 3 Her like wistfulness in season one when she talks about how, you know, first of all, that she's only been awake, was it like 16 hours total?

Speaker 3 And her wistfulness when she talks about spending time with them

Speaker 3 in the Macrodata,

Speaker 3 you know, office and how it was like, how much she enjoyed that.

Speaker 3 Sad.

Speaker 2 It's very sad.

Speaker 2 there's parts of it that are very sweet and i think overall what i what i love about their relationship whether they are aware of it or not and kobel's kind of like obsession it seems like yes with with whatever they are to each other is that it allows severance to be kind of perverse ultimately like this is a twisted gnarled up emotional situation yeah and a lot of other soft sci-fi that's out there doesn't ever really get that far if they like intimate oh it's kind of isn't it kind of messed up that people have severed heads and severed consciousnesses but they don't get into, oh, this is like actually really, really twisted.

Speaker 3 And I think what's brilliant about it is that they're using, and this is often the case with sort of high concept shows, is that they get back to

Speaker 3 almost like basic soap opera level storytelling. Yeah.

Speaker 3 That works. It's always worked.
It works. And so,

Speaker 3 you know, to go back to this idea of sort of

Speaker 3 the love theme, we are watching a like a love quadrangle or whatever.

Speaker 3 We are watching Mark S talk to a woman who is

Speaker 3 some facsimile of his wife. And so, certainly, there's a part of us that is that's like, oh my gosh, they have to be reunited.

Speaker 3 Presumably, if she is enough of a semblance of his wife, they have to be reunited. We have to be rooting for them.
But then we're also obviously rooting for like Helly,

Speaker 3 you know, and Mark and their connection. And so, they've given us an impossible love triangle, love quadrangle.
And again, that is basic soap opera storytelling.

Speaker 3 And also, My Wife is Dead, No, She's Not, is also basic soap opera storytelling

Speaker 3 inside of something that has a lot on its mind

Speaker 3 and a lot of prestige sheen around its visuals.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 I think that really works really well.

Speaker 3 And again, it's impossible for me to separate theory from any plot discussion of this show. So I will say that like

Speaker 3 Kobel's personal

Speaker 3 grief, which seems, according to date sourcing of a hospital bracelet, perhaps related to her mother.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Question mark.
Maybe some kind of relative.

Speaker 3 A mother she lost or someone she lost. So if she's someone that is grieving,

Speaker 3 would she not like, because I was trying to figure out what's her investment in Mark and what's her investment in trying to test Mark and Gemma slash Miss Casey with the the scented candle and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 The candle is wild, right? There's like levels of like, oh, this is a weird situation that she's toying with. And then over the course of season one, it gets like pretty deep for her.

Speaker 3 Because she's a creep, but also a total psycho. Because she's trying to test something or trying to prove something.

Speaker 3 You know, she's asking Mark's sister, like, does he ever think he sees her somewhere? You know, I mean, she's testing and she's probing.

Speaker 3 And so I have to imagine, and outside the scope, seemingly of her job. And so I have to imagine that.

Speaker 2 You don't think working as an undercover lactation consultant is part of her job?

Speaker 3 I don't think the, was it chamomile cookies were

Speaker 3 on the menu there.

Speaker 2 But like, first of all, that doesn't even sound good.

Speaker 3 It sounds gross.

Speaker 3 When I was re-watching season one, she's like, I've been experimenting with chamomile. And then he eats the cookie and he looks like he enjoys it.

Speaker 2 Absolutely not. I know we live in a world that's like the Earl grayification of everything, but some teas go in food and some teas don't go in food.

Speaker 3 There needs to be a boundary. You can Earl gray something, you can green tea something, but I don't think you can chamomile something.

Speaker 2 Sever that right out. Keep that in Tea World.

Speaker 3 Pineapple Bobbing at gmail.com. If you have a chamomile recipe that you feel like we should try, we probably won't, but you should send it.

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Speaker 3 So what is her motivation outside of the scope of

Speaker 3 her own corporate ambition? And it seems to be this sort of like, if she's someone who's experiencing crippling personal grief,

Speaker 3 would she not be invested in figuring out, does this actually work? Can I sever out

Speaker 3 this grief and not feel this anymore?

Speaker 3 Can I forget this person?

Speaker 3 Can I internal sunshine essentially this person out of my heart or mind?

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 has that successfully happened for Mark and Gemma? To your point earlier about the black sludge encroaching on Irv, Irving, who has

Speaker 3 been severed the longest out of any of them. So, like, how permanent is this? Or did he have like an older model?

Speaker 3 And that's why the black paint is oozing in, or sort of how does, what are the boundaries of this procedure?

Speaker 2 You know, I think we're still learning what the applications are, too, right? There's mention in season one about one of the senators who is like supporting them in terms of some legislation.

Speaker 2 His wife gave birth while severed. Sure.
What would you want to sever your way through, Rob? Oh, this is a great question.

Speaker 2 Expense reports for sure.

Speaker 3 I was going to say tax season. So

Speaker 2 anything that fine-tooth comb and financial, get it right up out of here.

Speaker 2 Severed Rob can handle that.

Speaker 3 Receipts plus forms plus whatever.

Speaker 3 Severed Joanna can do that.

Speaker 2 Anything at the DPS slash DMV, Severed Rob can handle that stuff.

Speaker 3 But I wouldn't want to be a benign overlord to my severed self and say, severed me can also do some fun things. As long as she does the things I absolutely don't want to do, she can handle that.

Speaker 2 They can go go pineapple bobbing. She can pineapple bob her little heart out.

Speaker 3 And I will deal with the cuts and bruises on my mouth as a result. It'll be, it'll be fine.

Speaker 2 As we're sussing out what severance can be used for and what it can't be used for, I am fascinated by the introduction of Miss Huang,

Speaker 2 one of our new characters who I'm still trying to figure out

Speaker 2 as the deputy manager of this office working under Milchik. Is this a character who is severed or not? You know, most of the managerial characters have not been.

Speaker 2 If this is not a severed character, why is a literal child working in this office? Yeah. And if it is a literal child who is severed, what is it that they are severed from? Like,

Speaker 2 I'm just, my mind is racing with questions about who this person could be. Is it someone with a terminal illness who is like trying to sever their way away from some of the pain of that? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Like, is this a character who, you know, we see market flashes of Miss Casey as he looks at her? Is there any relation between these characters at all?

Speaker 2 Is there any kind of weird cloning shit that's been going on in this place? Like, I don't know what's happening. I just know that this character is mysterious enough.

Speaker 2 And I am, I have such a deep admiration for her organizational technique and her desk drawers that I am, I'm interested in whatever's going on in that corner of the show.

Speaker 3 The little hand game she has with the rings and the water,

Speaker 3 I unlocked a memory. And I had like a similar thing.

Speaker 2 We all did.

Speaker 3 It didn't have pure Egan as far as I can tell inside of it, but it definitely existed.

Speaker 2 I wonder what the version of that will be for Gen Z or Gen Alpha. This like, we had all of these dog shit handheld games that don't really work and are not even fun to play.

Speaker 3 They don't have to deal with it. They don't have to make little silver balls go through little mazes on like a whatever.
They don't, they don't, they don't do slide puzzles.

Speaker 2 But what's their version of the slide puzzle?

Speaker 3 Yeah, uh, two dots on iOS. I don't know.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 the clone idea is a good one. I like, I get really wary inside of

Speaker 3 a theory show to be like,

Speaker 3 this character and this character have like a very passing resemblance to each other.

Speaker 3 So, like, are they, but I did, but I couldn't help my dumb brain being like, can I do math to make this their daughter?

Speaker 2 No, I can't. I did the same thing.

Speaker 2 So, yeah.

Speaker 3 Clone, I could have.

Speaker 2 But could you do math to make it not necessarily their daughter who was born, but a daughter, like grown. I think there was mentioning of like IVF in the first season.

Speaker 2 Like, there's, there's just enough breadcrumbs to make me wonder. And I agree with you.
Like, we are perilously close to like Ray Palpatine territory in a way that I don't want to be. Yeah.

Speaker 2 This is my fundamental concern about this show.

Speaker 2 I love that central mystery so much about Mark and Gemma and like what and what is it that happened to her and why is it that she is popping up as Miss Casey in this world.

Speaker 2 There's so many different things pointing to Mark being a character of like critical structural importance that I'm worried he's too important.

Speaker 2 I'm worried he's not just like a guy caught up in this big thing that we're all trying to unravel, but someone who he specifically is key to whatever story they're trying to tell.

Speaker 2 I'm always a little wary of that.

Speaker 3 I think

Speaker 3 I agree with you. I don't want him to make him like sort of Lumen Jesus or anything like that, but I think circumstances he seems more circumstantially important

Speaker 3 than actually important. The sort of

Speaker 3 What do they call it? The freshman fluke, the thing that earned him his little,

Speaker 3 you know, head etching on his desk has to do with him refining a file quicker than anyone had ever refined a file before. So yeah, that points to sort of Lumen Jesus.

Speaker 3 But I think it's more like he is a man

Speaker 3 crippled by grief who has a wife who died or didn't in a way that they could sort of exploit to experiment on something, you know?

Speaker 3 So circumstantially important more than like he's got the medichlorians that they need to do this that or the other thing I was really happy. I think it only takes like 18 minutes for our core four.

Speaker 3 It's really only the core three, but like

Speaker 3 theoretically the core four to get back together.

Speaker 2 This is core three. Let's be real about what's happening here.

Speaker 3 I was a little mad because I was like, I was like, as soon as she came out, I was like, oh, that's definitely Helena. That's not the one.

Speaker 2 Body language is totally different.

Speaker 3 You know, absolutely. And then they like revealed it inside, like immediately inside the episode.
I was like, damn it, I wanted to be ahead of the show, but I wasn't.

Speaker 2 Here's the thing. Did they? Yes.

Speaker 2 I'm curious where they want us to be with that character right now.

Speaker 3 That there's an interpretation. So Helene, when she's, or Helena, when she's saying

Speaker 3 what

Speaker 3 the truth was of her experience up top, that she would lie because she doesn't want them to know. That she's an egan.
That she's an egan. That had not even occurred to me.

Speaker 2 Wow. See,

Speaker 2 my default assumption from the moment she comes out of the elevator and Mark hugs her. It's like the body language is different.
And Britt Lauer,

Speaker 2 a performer who I really, really like,

Speaker 2 is she's playing everything so cautiously. Like every exchange between Helly and the other characters,

Speaker 2 she waits for someone else to take the lead and she responds. She's never the first person to express literally anything.

Speaker 3 Also, the thing she says, she says,

Speaker 3 where did the security cameras go? Or he said there were no microphones in here.

Speaker 2 Also, the biggest red flag, I would say, the fact that a person who is supposed to to be Helly, when given the choice to leave, without hesitation, chooses to stay. Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's just not something I would believe that

Speaker 2 any version of that character would do, which leads us to only believe that this is undercover Helena trying to do God knows what with these other people, but she's here for some kind of reason.

Speaker 2 I love undercover Helena.

Speaker 3 Helena seems like she sucks, right? But maybe she's obviously clearly sucks, but perhaps she is on an arc of some kind because like there is some softening around her when she's like talking to Mark.

Speaker 3 She's like, very that it doesn't seem performative, but seems like sort of actually impactful on her.

Speaker 3 And, of course, since she's the person to so defiantly say, our any and our outies have nothing in common. We owe them nothing.
Yeah. She, of course, has to be a character who

Speaker 3 we're going to see her become more helly than Helena as time goes on. That's what storytelling logic tells me.

Speaker 2 So you think at the end of this episode of Undercover Boss, she's going to to have the big confrontation moment with the rest of the staff and be like, you know what? Actually, you are people.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 You aren't just family and baby goats for me to shepherd around.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Undercover Helena is a great idea, I think, for this story.

Speaker 2 Very good.

Speaker 2 Very interesting.

Speaker 2 It kind of puts us on a weird footing to start the season.

Speaker 2 And overall, I will say about all the Core Four, whatever you make of Helly or Helena, these are four people who have been through Early three people who have been something through something pretty intense in terms of their finale experience in season one and the overtime protocol or whatever it's called but they're still coming back and kind of keeping each other at arm's reach until irving and dylan have like the most the longest most lovely hug of all time

Speaker 2 it was wonderful you know but but it takes like he has to go have a good long cry yes and can't even talk about what happened with getting to burt's house yes until he has some space to process things and you even see Mark going through the mental exercise of, can we even talk about any of this openly here?

Speaker 2 Or is this, are they trying to mine our experience for more information? Well, don't worry, Rup.

Speaker 3 He said there's no microphones.

Speaker 2 There's no microphones. There's no cameras.
This is a safe space.

Speaker 3 I can't believe it didn't occur to me that like they were trying to sell us another reason that Helena might be lying.

Speaker 3 But in putting it in close proximity to Irving sort of being reticent to talk about his experience up top,

Speaker 3 that makes a lot of sense to me. But what I also love is that

Speaker 3 in her shitty lie, where she's like, I'm just a sad single person who wears sweatpants and watches TV or whatever, she's like,

Speaker 3 It's not that the gardener was there at night, which is a great thing for Irving to pick up on.

Speaker 3 A night gardener, you ran outside and you found a night gardener, but it's that Helena, the most privileged person in the world, can only think, What does one find outside one's front door?

Speaker 3 Why the hell?

Speaker 2 Oh, the groundsman. The groundsman.

Speaker 3 The groundskeeper was in his cottage.

Speaker 2 And I said, Hello.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so her body language is different um but her her voice is lower like you know she she's doing um

Speaker 3 and an interview that I saw with Adam Scott

Speaker 3 he was talking about how when he plays Mark S the any

Speaker 3 that he will wear a sort of posture device yeah to make sure that he like stands up taller um so yeah watching you know we only got a little bit of time with him but watching John Dutoro play Irving,

Speaker 3 you know, up top with his like paint-smeared Henley and all of that sort of stuff, like that was these, these are tremendous performers.

Speaker 3 And the little choices they're making to distinguish between their innies and their outies is just

Speaker 2 a delight, a treasure for us to enjoy. Dotoro is so fucking good on this show.

Speaker 2 He's so good. And that's a character who at the outset of season one, because he is so glued chapter and verse to like the company handbook is He's so easy to hate.

Speaker 2 But I find

Speaker 2 he's my favorite character on the show, not just performer on the show, but character on the show in Irving. And I love everything that transpired between him and Bert.

Speaker 2 I love the sort of wounded place that we're finding him at the start of season two and what he decides to do with that.

Speaker 2 I got to say, like, this is just a masterfully constructed and balanced core cast. Like those four in particular, we haven't talked enough about Zach Cherry, who plays Dylan.

Speaker 2 And Dylan is the one Audi we haven't had any time with yet because of the nature of the season one finale. Right.
So I hope we get that at some point, too.

Speaker 3 We got the introduction of the family visitation center with its ergonomic seating. So we shall see how.

Speaker 2 Does that mean you can visit your family there? Who's to say? Who's to say? It's right there in the name, but he didn't confirm it.

Speaker 3 And speaking of...

Speaker 3 Tremendous Tillman as Milchik is

Speaker 3 such a joy for me. I love him.

Speaker 3 I love that he's been promoted. There are two moments that

Speaker 3 I stopped and rewound and watched like several times inside of this episode.

Speaker 3 And one of them belongs to Adam Scott when he's staring down Miss Wong and he says three friends after saying four friends and the like 90 different expressions that cross his face as he tries to keep his eyes and face friendly while seething with rage.

Speaker 3 That I loved. And then,

Speaker 3 and then Milchik.

Speaker 3 Actually, I can't even pick one. There's no one moment.
It's just all the times in which he is. Actually, it's when they come into the newly refurbished break room, which used to be a torture room.

Speaker 3 And now we've got nice seating and projector. And he likes to ask serving to the tall drink of water that is Irving to sit in the back.

Speaker 3 And he's just talking about whenever he's like, isn't this great?

Speaker 3 This gift that Lumen is giving you? Isn't this wonderful? That affectation that he puts on, I find so delicious. I just think it's wonderful.

Speaker 2 So, I think the biggest mystery coming out of season one is why Trammel Tillman was not cast in literally every project over the last three years.

Speaker 3 Well, Britt Lower, too. Like, were all of them just in stasis, like

Speaker 3 waiting to make more severance, you know, because I don't think any of them have done much in the interim.

Speaker 3 Uh, Zach Terry seems like he's kind of always busy, but I feel like all of them are just, you know, we're sort of on hold, which is too too bad and then you know we're missing Patricia Arquette inside of this episode and

Speaker 3 and then we don't get any of of Mark's family all of whom I absolutely love I love his sister and then of course his brother-in-law is wonderful but his sister the work that they do in season one with Mark's sister to

Speaker 3 There's a lot of exposition they have to get through in season one in terms of like who these

Speaker 3 people are, what their relationships are to each other, what the state of lumen is, what severance is. There's a lot of high concept stuff that they have to deliver to us.

Speaker 3 All of that is done, I think, some of the best exposition I've ever seen, but the shortcut to establishing intimacy between Mark and his sister is not just like, hello, sister, how are you?

Speaker 2 Which is like, oh, it's just like one of the worst things that TV and Phil do.

Speaker 3 Hey, bro, how are you?

Speaker 3 You know, but it's like just inside jokes, little voices that they do with each other, little bits that like, you know, sibling bits that they do with each other that they never have to explain.

Speaker 3 It's just things that, you know, it's just family stuff. And

Speaker 3 I really love her. And I'm dying to know.
Like, I don't know how long we're going to be kept in the dark as to

Speaker 3 what was her reaction to she's lie or any or any of the other stuff that happened at the end of season one. I'm, I'm dying to find out.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, I feel pretty confident in guessing and maybe this, maybe this confidence, I'll be hoisted by my own petard with this confidence.

Speaker 3 Again, Rob, always no.

Speaker 2 Too many petards going around.

Speaker 2 I doubt very much that any meaningful change has gone on in the outside world. I doubt very much that it, I don't think it's been exactly five months.
I don't know how long it's been.

Speaker 3 I wouldn't mind it being five months. I would say zero reform.
I expect zero reform.

Speaker 2 Certainly not Castro-esque parades.

Speaker 3 Surface level.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 3 Surface, surface, surface stop motion animation, Keanu Reeves level

Speaker 3 pandering to will do better

Speaker 3 sort of corporate stuff but in terms of like

Speaker 3 I think the person best poised to pursue meaningful investigative work is Mark's sister and I can see a version that she sort of keeps a lid on some of the things she knows yes in order to do some actual further investigation.

Speaker 2 I think, I mean, I think she has to be very careful. But yeah, overall, I feel like bringing the group back.
And again, the sequencing of how all that happened is fascinating to me, right?

Speaker 2 You bring Mark back first, we should say, with this sort of dummy new team that he's brought into, which I enjoyed very much.

Speaker 2 Although I kind of wish they had gone full Sean of the Dead with it and done like bizarro

Speaker 2 macro data team, like just slightly parroting versions, although Ali Shawcat, I guess, is like kind of a bizarro

Speaker 2 version of Helly in some ways. But overall, it's like.

Speaker 2 The timing of all that and the way that the company acquiesces ultimately to Mark's request to bring back the team.

Speaker 3 And why would they do that?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't know. Like, I ultimately, clearly, there's some information that they want.
Yeah. And there's a reason why Helena has now gone undercover, it seems, to participate in that.

Speaker 2 But why they're bringing back the other two members of the team to accomplish that bit, I'm not really sure.

Speaker 2 But it seems clear to me that overall the proclamation that, oh, actually, you guys are heroes, mission accomplished, great job, systemic change achieved is a pacification technique.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 We do get some world-building information out of the other team, the Bizarro team that we get.

Speaker 3 Just love Ball Balaban always. So good.
So Mark W,

Speaker 3 you know, this might be all we get of them. It might be one and done in this episode and that would be too bad.
But this idea that like

Speaker 3 they had different carpet, different

Speaker 3 compuse colored keyboards.

Speaker 3 And then Dario, the Italian, that he was like, our egans were brooms with plates for faces. And do you have an elevator? We had a rope.

Speaker 3 So I'm just imagining them being like lowered down via rope.

Speaker 3 I believe all of that stuff in terms of like there is world. We are in Keirtown, a company town, Keir Town.

Speaker 2 Keertown, USA. Keirtown, USA.

Speaker 3 The state, because there's, you know, God bless the Reddit detectives, as you know, but like PE is pe is the abbreviation for the state that they're in which is not a real estate um

Speaker 3 but that there are lumen offices and severed programs throughout the u.s that is like true inside of the world building here within the the inner world during their uh what and sweet clippy hell presentation that they're given uh

Speaker 2 I think there was some factor in there about like, oh, it's in over 300 countries throughout the world. And I'm going to call bullshit on that bit.

Speaker 2 I don't know. Maybe.

Speaker 3 That seems usually fact-checked. I mean, this is.

Speaker 2 Maybe that's giving the world too much credit.

Speaker 3 This is a public-facing video, right? This isn't just for

Speaker 3 three.

Speaker 2 I think what Milchik says is all of the new severed employees will be shown this.

Speaker 3 100%. That is what he says.
But I also feel like it's for the nervous board members who want to feel like they

Speaker 3 can claim that they don't endorse an evil corporation or corporate slavery or whatever it is.

Speaker 2 But those people would know that the stop-motion puppet macro dat revolution did not inspire any actual change in the real world.

Speaker 2 So I think there'd be too many things in that video that real people above the world of the severed floor, I guess below the world of the severed floor, could call bullshit on for it to be for public consumption.

Speaker 3 Yeah, interesting. Interesting.
I wouldn't put it past the

Speaker 3 fear-mongering

Speaker 3 among like Rickens intellectual friends about not fear-mongering, like also intellectual.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 The dinnerless dinner party goers.

Speaker 2 It's so good. Fucking dinnerless dinner party.

Speaker 3 About Lumen's overreach and about the severed program. I wouldn't put it past this world to have,

Speaker 3 you know, a severed program in every in 300 countries. But

Speaker 3 to your point, and we should always remember it,

Speaker 2 don't believe everything you're told, especially not by Lumen.

Speaker 3 All right, do you want to talk about what we get at the very end of the episode when we get sort of a little bit of information about

Speaker 3 what this macro data refinement process is actually doing, accomplishing here?

Speaker 2 We do get something. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't know what we got, but we got something. Okay.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 I can't wait. We're recording this a little early.
I can't wait for the Reddit detectives to screen grab

Speaker 3 this image of Miss Casey that we get at the end of the episode.

Speaker 3 But I did pull, I did try to do my best Rob Mahoney impression and pull some

Speaker 3 words here.

Speaker 3 We get 20, this is the 25th build. There's the, there's the number 25, and then next to it, it says build.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 3 Which to me means like mock 25 of like that, is this, if we're building building an artificial Miss Casey,

Speaker 3 which

Speaker 3 kind of seems like the implication to me.

Speaker 2 It's at least hinted that way.

Speaker 3 Like, like the one we scrapped at the end of season one was perhaps build 24, and this is build 25.

Speaker 3 That Mark is refining data under the name Cold Harbor. And all of the sort of files that they're working on have names of real towns in the U.S.

Speaker 3 And I can give you my absolute cuckoo bananas theory on that. But

Speaker 2 I would love to hear it.

Speaker 3 But the screen, the Miss Casey screen at the end is like also Cold Harbor. And this is her face.

Speaker 2 And the way it's shown visually is sort of like, if you look through. the ambiguous numbers that are being bucketed in his work.

Speaker 2 It's like this is, it's intimated that this is sort sort of the layer of truth behind.

Speaker 3 He's at 68% and that screen's at 68%.

Speaker 2 68%, exactly.

Speaker 3 So like 68% built.

Speaker 3 This was like a theory in season one that he was able to,

Speaker 3 his freshman fluke, his like ability to refine the data faster than anyone else was

Speaker 3 because

Speaker 3 he was always working on building a version of his wife and he knows his wife better than other people.

Speaker 2 Like that was sort of a common theory does it feel like a confirmation of that to you or i don't i'm not quite sure that's where that's where i i am stumbling on the is this a is mark important by coincidence or important by design uh because yes it does seem like he is in some way contributing to a reassembly of his dead wife or maybe not dead wife in some fashion and particularly the fact that the numbers are grouped by a sense of feel.

Speaker 2 It's just like you look at the number and you intuitively feel something is correct and you put them into a bucket. Makes me feel like that is his

Speaker 2 consciousness identifying something that is familiar to him in something about her.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 2 But how does that relate to everyone else in the room and anyone else working in macro data reform? Like, do they have their own versions of that or are they all working on misery?

Speaker 3 I was wondering that because

Speaker 3 something I wrote in my notes when re-watching season one

Speaker 3 is when

Speaker 3 Helly, not Helena, is in the break room and she talks about hearing like an angry man sort of mumbling behind

Speaker 3 the audio in the break room and Dylan says he heard a kid crying and so I'm wondering if like

Speaker 3 if that person for her is a virtue of her dad and that person for Dylan is one of his kids. You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 And and and for Irving, perhaps his father who we see was, you know, serving in the Navy or something like that.

Speaker 3 So is there a person in their life that the severance program is making them work on building?

Speaker 3 You know, are they assigned a person somehow?

Speaker 2 Certainly speaks to the revolving possibility, Joe. I don't like it.

Speaker 2 I don't like it at all. And it gives Helena a dual purpose in doing severance in the first place, participating in this element of the work, right?

Speaker 2 There's the PR benefit of like, look, I am an executive, or at least the daughter of the CEO of this company doing this thing, and also I'm helping hypothetically create my dying father a new vessel to live in.

Speaker 3 Um,

Speaker 3 I was, I was reading through some Reddit theories uh this morning, and someone was like, This sounds very Westworld. I'm like, It does, it really does, it does sound very good thing or a bad thing.

Speaker 3 Um,

Speaker 3 season one, a good thing, uh, further on, we have some

Speaker 2 season two now, yeah, so we'll see.

Speaker 2 Cold Harbor

Speaker 3 and Allentown are at least two of the places in Culpeper, and there's like a few others.

Speaker 3 And I think in an interview, Ben Stillers says something pretty loose and vague, just like we picked U.S. cities, but I was wondering if there was like a significance to which U.S.
cities they picked.

Speaker 3 Cold Harbor and Allentown and Culpepper and a few other places, but

Speaker 3 I did not check all all of them. So this could be very quickly sort of, but are all

Speaker 3 had important Civil War moments occur or battles or incidences.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 Lumen was founded in 1865, which is the year the Civil War ended. So like

Speaker 3 that's all, that's the extent of my theory. Wow.
Something, something Civil War.

Speaker 2 I don't know. Something, something Civil War, something, something red and blue, something, something split.
There's a lot of things happening. Exactly.

Speaker 3 Like, I was like, civil war raging inside of all of us. I don't know.
So I don't know if that's intentional.

Speaker 3 Probably you could make a civil war argument for a lot of the cities on the eastern seaboard.

Speaker 2 But I like where your head's at. We're going to need more yarn to connect all that, but I like where we're going.

Speaker 3 I have an endless supply of, I actually have a ball of yarn right here. This is just.

Speaker 2 You have skeins and skeins?

Speaker 3 I do have skeins. I'm always skeining.

Speaker 2 Oh, we know that.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 what else? Anything else you want to make sure that we address?

Speaker 2 I think I am curious to see with Milchik, you know, the severed floor is under new management. He's running this thing now.
He very much wants the welcome screen on his computer to reflect that.

Speaker 3 He needs a new welcome screen.

Speaker 2 Why is it that he is so bothered or so haunted or so perturbed by Cobel?

Speaker 2 Like they didn't have the best relationship, but it seems like there's more obviously to that welcome screen situation than just like, oh, I want to be honored for my contributions here.

Speaker 3 So he's the one who ratted her out.

Speaker 3 So do you think that, like Irving's previous incarnation of his any, he is like a true believer?

Speaker 3 And he believes that she sort of like besmirched the good, quote-unquote, good works they're meant to be doing there?

Speaker 2 I mean, look, behind that megawatt smile, I would believe anything is going on, which is why that character is so great. I have a hard time believing believing that he's that big of a dunce.

Speaker 2 Like, it does, it does seem like Cobel is a Patsy. Not a Patsy.
And even as he's, even as he is saying that, like, I don't think he thinks that. He knows too much.
Oh, the erotic trouble business?

Speaker 2 The erotic trouble. And the idea that, like, oh, she was the one responsible for all of the abusive practices happening here, the break room.
Of course, she's being blamed.

Speaker 3 But, like, wouldn't he be eager to do that if it meant preserving the good name of a company that he believed in the larger work, I don't have a good answer for you, obviously. So,

Speaker 3 but I think it is

Speaker 3 an interesting additional layer that they put on his character inside of this episode.

Speaker 2 I'm going to guess no. And I say that simply because he and Cobel are shown to be such opposites in so many ways.

Speaker 2 And she, in addition to her fixation on Mark, also seems to be like, if not a true believer, at least obsessed with the Kir Egan mission and has her own little shrine to the company/slash cult.

Speaker 3 I think there are different versions of True Believer. You know what I mean? There's like the zealot, which she was to a certain degree, and then there's the like

Speaker 3 by the book rules and regulations matter kind of thing.

Speaker 2 He could be that for sure. I don't know.
He's certainly a striver.

Speaker 3 Pineapplebobbing at gmail.com, if you have some theory about that, or PrestigeTV at Spotify.com if you have a theory about that.

Speaker 3 Anything else you want to make sure that we mention?

Speaker 2 I just want to give a shout out to Dylan because I feel like narratively we didn't talk about him a lot in this episode, but just has, as often is the case with the show, banger line after banger line.

Speaker 2 Fuck, there's easels up there. Was

Speaker 2 that has to have been an improv.

Speaker 3 Like, I really hope that that was a Zachary improv. It was so good.

Speaker 2 Tremendous stuff.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I just oh, also, I want to shout out in the

Speaker 3 in the amongst the new snacks

Speaker 3 at Lumen, Christmas Mints, salsa, fruit leather, cut beans.

Speaker 3 What's a cut bean? Is that like green beans in a can? Is that what that is?

Speaker 2 I would love to find. I mean, it does sound like a healthy corporate-approved snack.

Speaker 2 In fact, I can't tell you for certain that there aren't cut beans in the Spotify office.

Speaker 3 I know there aren't, and you know there aren't.

Speaker 2 We know about all of them.

Speaker 2 I'm not so sure.

Speaker 2 I do love that about this show. Like, obviously, there's a lot of postmodern version of a corporate malaise thing happening all throughout Severance.

Speaker 2 And so it makes the setting so evocative and works so well.

Speaker 2 The overall like Mark S versus Mark W sort of thing brought this out of me where it's like, I, what I love about Severance is it feels like the writers' room got together and ranked from zero, from one to 100, the most annoying things about being in a white-collar desk job.

Speaker 2 And they didn't bother with numbers one through 70. They just looked at 71 through 100 and they're like, someone has the same first name as you.

Speaker 2 That is an annoyance of office life that we want to harp on for this little moment in a show that we probably will not touch on ever again. But it's what makes it so great.

Speaker 3 Around the Mark W

Speaker 3 post-it debacle,

Speaker 3 I do want to say, wrathfully, your innie, Mark W is an incredible way to sign off a post-it. And I think we should start doing that.

Speaker 3 And then also Aaliyah Shotcast's delivery of Do You Even Have a Brother-in-Law Asshole?

Speaker 3 Also, her asking about wind.

Speaker 2 Is it just like someone breathing on you?

Speaker 3 Very good stuff. Very good stuff.

Speaker 3 All right. So that's Severn Season two, episode one.

Speaker 3 We had a blast. We're going to continue to do this week to week, and we're so excited.

Speaker 3 We will be digging into all the theories, all your questions, comments, or concerns.

Speaker 3 I got a little deep, but like a little too deep, and I need to shallow it up into the idea of like how memory works and like

Speaker 2 the kinds of memory.

Speaker 2 Like procedural memory? Is that what you're talking about? What are you, what are you ripping on here?

Speaker 3 I don't, I don't know.

Speaker 3 The way the brain works, long-term memory, explicit memory, implicit memory, all this sort of stuff like that.

Speaker 3 I just sort of like, what kind of, what could you actually do to a brain to achieve what you do with severance? And like,

Speaker 3 what would that bring out? What is it saying about nature versus nurture? Who is Heli? Who could have Helena been if she hadn't been raised by assholes? Could she have been Heli, who we quite like?

Speaker 3 So, you know,

Speaker 3 all of these are great questions asked. Did you want, do you have anything you want to say about the

Speaker 3 severance pop-up that they did in New York this week?

Speaker 2 A phenomenal throwback to a time I didn't know existed anymore.

Speaker 2 I love this sort of marketing. Yeah.
And I think it helped for me, Joe, just crystallize the idea of severance as, and this, I mean, I think this is.

Speaker 2 the effect of a thing that's so heavily anticipated that people are really looking forward to.

Speaker 2 And so it's less to me the existence of the pop-up of them mulling about their office space and doing the little, it's not a vacuum. What is that little roller cleaner thing called?

Speaker 3 Oh, I don't know.

Speaker 2 Like the little carpet cleaner across the green felt.

Speaker 2 It's like what they're doing and the fact that they're doing it is not that important, but the outsized response and how psyched people were to see this thing that they loved and they're looking forward to, that has been cool.

Speaker 3 Here are my two notes.

Speaker 3 So, in case people didn't see, they put a glass box inside of Grand Central Station in New York and did a little like the

Speaker 3 four cube cubicle setup of the, of the office space. They had three of the Core Four in there and then

Speaker 3 Milchik and

Speaker 3 Kobell were also in there.

Speaker 3 So, they got Patty there. Patty, Patricia Arquette's there.
Oscar,

Speaker 3 I'm like,

Speaker 3 Johnny, Johnny Totoro, what were you doing that you were too good for the

Speaker 3 severance pop-up? I was like, they couldn't get Totoro.

Speaker 3 It's a no for me.

Speaker 2 He's doing some Batman shit. I don't need to worry about it.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 3 I'm excited. I love this show.
I'm so excited. It's back.
I'm so excited to talk about it with you.

Speaker 3 As I mentioned, we'll be back for the agency wrap-up next week, along with season two, episode two of Severance and more of the pit.

Speaker 3 So if you are a macro data refinement expert,

Speaker 2 a

Speaker 3 CIA spy or a medical professional and you would like like to email us.

Speaker 2 Yeah, or if you have worked a desk job that you suspected in your heart of hearts might have actually been

Speaker 2 a covered-up attempt to resuscitate a dead relative of yours. I would love to hear about it at pineapplebobbing at gmail.com.

Speaker 3 Or if you have some other thoughts and feelings about what one should sever their way through, if it's not expense reports, I would love to hear that.

Speaker 2 I think the birthing process might be a popular one.

Speaker 3 It's a real dizzy. It's a real good one.

Speaker 3 Pineapplebobbing at gmail.com, press tv at spotify.com. Thank you to Justin Sales for his work across this feed in general.
He's the best.

Speaker 3 Thank you to Kai Grady, who is also the best for producing this episode. And we will see you all next week.

Speaker 2 Bye.

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