The second season of Apple TV’s phenomenal hit Severance has held many surprises, but the biggest may be its growing similarities to a dystopianesque novel by C.S. Lewis. Will this season end more or less like that book? With less than a week to go before the season two finale, I’ll risk a guess. But first, a refresher.
Warning: Spoilers galore.
Background
Season one of the mind-bending psychological thriller/mystery/dystopian/alternate-reality drama opened in 2022 with a simple but compelling premise: an international corporation had invented a brain implant that severed a person’s work memories and consciousness from his home memories and consciousness, allowing its “severed” employees to enjoy lives free of office drudgery but dooming their work selves to know nothing else until the “outies,” as the outside selves are known, retire and their work-only “innies” wink out of existence.
What would happen to a self split in half in such a way could itself have provided more than enough material for an interesting series. But viewers soon find that something more sinister than morally ambiguous brain surgery is going on at Lumon Industries. The severed employees work on an isolated, underground floor, kept under constant watch, doing jobs that make no sense while earning incentives (pencil erasers, finger traps) of no value.
Exactly what Lumon does isn’t clear. Nor are the cultish religious and health beliefs of its owners and workers. Seemingly a fictional mash-up of typically quirky American religious movements such as Mormonism or Scientology and of companies affiliated with stringent but also typically American religious and health practices like Kellogg’s or Amway, the show’s mysterious company is the creation of equally mysterious founder Kier Eagan, whose face adorns every office like a crucifix in a Catholic hospital and whose writings employees study as if reading the Bible.
Kier’s key spiritual teaching seems to be that every soul is a mixture of four temperaments—malice, frolic, woe, and dread—and that correctly mastering them through intense physical and mental techniques is the key to personal and work success. What his key pharmaceutical discoveries were is never mentioned, but everyone knows that current CEO Jame Eagan invented the Severance Procedure, which is used at company locations around the world despite vigorous public opposition.
Over the course of the first season, viewers followed four severed employees who made up the entire department of “macrodata refinement” at company headquarters in the far north town of Kier. The only thing the “refiners” know about their strange job scrutinizing and organizing sets of numbers on their antiquated computers is that it’s “mysterious and important,” and all they know about their work lives is that if they deviate from the cheery, office-appropriate behavior they are expected to display, they will receive severe psychological consequences. But if they excel, one of them will win the most coveted incentive of all: the quarterly Waffle Party.
Two of the refiners get particular focus. Mark S. (severed employees have no last names), is promoted to department manager after the mysterious departure of the previous manager, his best friend, Petey. Helly R., Petey’s replacement, reacts to discovering she’s a severed employee with outrage, first trying to quit, then attempting to kill herself, and finally trying to help the others let the world know that severed employees aren’t happy, they’re caged animals.
Outside, in the town of Kier, where it’s always winter but never Christmas, Mark Scout is a young widower who took the position so that some part of his life would be free of crushing grief. Helly’s outie, viewers learn at the finale of season one, is Helena Eagan, daughter of Jame Eagan and heir to the company. She is working on the severed floor for reasons unknown. It’s a big reveal, but the shock for both innie and outie Mark is that his wife, Gemma, is still alive, working (until very recently) on the severed floor as Ms. Casey, Lumon’s “wellness expert.”
Other intrigue and weirdness—such as Mark’s mysterious living situation on a street of company houses that are all empty except for one ominous neighbor; the grim Kier art collection and the macabre reality of the Waffle Party—were left unresolved at the cliffhanger ending. Thanks in part to the Hollywood writers’ strike, season two didn’t begin until this fall. As it progressed, so did unexpected parallels with C.S. Lewis’ 1945 novel That Hideous Strength.
Parallels
The book is the third, and most unusual, in Lewis’ highly unusual Space Trilogy. Unlike the first two, which are set on Mars and Venus respectively and which depict a dying world whose inhabitants never fell and a new world whose first inhabitants are in danger of falling, the third is set on Earth and concerns a titanic simultaneously spiritual and terrestrial struggle for the future of the planet and its inhabitants.
The parallels between the two stories began in season one, but many were not apparent until season two. In That Hideous Strength, the leaders of the N.I.C.E. are not actually in charge. Instead, they answer to a mysterious “Head” whom they never see and whose orders they dispense. In Severance, the top employees of Lumon are not in charge. Instead, they answer to a mysterious “Board” no one ever sees. Represented by an intercom, the Board talks—if it really talks—to one employee, who listens on an earpiece and conveys the Board’s orders.
The plot of That Hideous Strength centers on young professor Mark Studdock and his wife, Jane, a graduate student. Mark is hired to do a job that makes no sense by the National Institute for Controlled Experiments (N.I.C.E.), a mysterious corporation buying up and, ostensibly, “improving” a small British town by remaking and running it on purely scientific grounds. At the same time, and despite herself, the aggressively secular and “modern” Jane finds herself joining a band of religious people opposed to the N.I.C.E. and its real, much darker aims.
In season two of Severance, we learn the following: Mark Scout and his wife were young professors before Gemma’s supposed death; “Mark S.” was hired to do a job that makes no sense by Lumon, the main employer in the company town; and before her supposed death, Gemma had become interested in—and had possibly adopted—Kier’s daily spiritual and physical practices. Those practices now dominate her life in a secret wing beneath the severed floor—in between experiments “severing” her consciousness into more and more discrete parts, each of which is subjected to odd demoralizing treatment that amounts to psychological tortures.
Fertility is a key theme to both stories. In That Hideous Strength, Mark and Jane are an unhappy couple who refuse to have children. Neither is likeable or sympathetic, but both had, until recently, been fun, attractive, and in love. In Severance, Mark and Gemma were a happy couple who wanted very much to have children. Although both had withdrawn in grief and confusion after miscarriages and failed fertility treatments, Mark’s survivor’s guilt after the car crash had driven him to behavior that made him unlikeable and unsympathetic. But previously, both had been fun, attractive, and in love.
