re: Severance Season 2 Discussion (Spoilers)

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Well then why was innie Mark not at all affected by seeing his wife as Ms. Casey shortly after he arrived.

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I think there’s always some amount of bleed-through. Irving with the black hallway is an example. The implication seems to be that a “normal” innie may not remember the miscarriage while disassembling the crib, but that the deep-seated feeling of sadness might seep in.

In all of the rooms, they’ve been testing her for that bleed-through. I suppose this final test represents the memory that would affect her the most.

The idea of bleed-through kind of makes sense from a neurological perspective. Someone earlier in the thread was asking how the innies remember some things (like language) without remembering others. There are different types of memory that, as I understand it, are stored and processed differently in your brain. So the goal of something like a severance chip would be to isolate all of the parts that define someone’s personality/identity without lobotomizing them. That might be part of why they had her disassemble the crib as well - to see how it affected her motor skills?

In any case it seems to me that Cold Harbor represents a level of perfection in the severance technology. As for the implications of that perfection - the why of it all - I have no idea.

Of course some of this is speculation and I may be way off, but that’s my impression anyhow.

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Outie Mark’s appeal to Gemma — who has been placed in a scenario designed to figure out just how much separation there is her real, grief-stricken self and the fake personality Innie Mark just created for her — is deliberately smaller, and well-played by Scott and Dichen Lachman. But it’s undercut at least somewhat by the show’s vagueness about the full details of Cold Harbor. The season’s seventh episode gave us a rough outline of what it does, in going several steps beyond severance to reprogram people’s minds with custom-built personalities. We just don’t know exactly how it’s meant to be applied, what would happen to Gemma and Mark upon its completion, nor even why it’s so bad for Mark to release Gemma back out into the world. It’s not even clear whether any of the real Gemma bled into the latest personality, or if the scenario — dismantling a baby crib — was so inherently sad that any stranger offering a similar plea would have coaxed her out of the room and back into her true self. It seems like Mark is getting through to some version of his wife, especially given how upset Jame Eagan and Dr. Mauer(*) are by Mark’s mere presence. But the show is ambiguous enough about all of this that it doesn’t hit as hard as it’s meant to.

(*) When Mark is liberating Gemma, Dr. Mauer screams that he’ll “kill them all!” Presumably, he means that Gemma’s various programmed innies will cease to exist if she gets out of the building. Which raises the question of whether these personalities qualify as people in the same way that, say, Innie Mark or Helly do. Dr. Mauer certainly seems to think of them that way.

It’s one of a number of fuzzy ideas from this season that have rendered it less effective overall compared to the first. Though Innie Mark tells Helly that he knows why Lumon is doing all of this, it doesn’t seem as if Harmony has told him — or us — enough to truly understand. There were also various issues with pacing and character in the episodes that came after “Woe’s Hollow.” The show didn’t seem to know what to do with Mark’s response to being assaulted by Helena, so it downplayed it altogether and focused only on Helly’s anguish. (Which is an important detail, too; there just should have been room for both.) The Irving and Dylan subplots both wound up underfed because so much time was being devoted to other issues, including two episodes late in the season where neither character appeared at all. We still know nothing about what Outie Irving was up to, with whom he was working, how (or if) Innie Irving knew about any of it, and it feels like the show skipped multiple steps in dramatizing whatever the relationship is between Outie Irving and Outie Burt. Even the idea introduced in the finale that Jame Eagan has come to prefer his daughter’s innie to her outie feels like we needed another beat or two between him and Helena earlier in the year.

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So was the band supposed to be a waffle party?

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why the hell did they have the Bayou Classic halftime show? Who came up with that idea?

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