Severance season 1 and the self you leave at work
Quick note! There are spoilers for plenty of important plot points for Season 1 of Severance and some spoilers for the TV show The Good Place. Please read with caution if you're interested in watching either of these shows.
Basic premise
The premise of the story is pretty straightforward: In this world, there is a technology that allows people who undergo a specific procedure to “sever” themselves, or perhaps more specifically, their work self, from their personal self. This procedure is called severance, and the main character, Scott, opted for it after the tragic loss of his wife. He couldn't cope with the grief and used the opportunity to keep the pain away for 8 hours a day.
Essentially, someone severed would be unable to recall absolutely anything at all from their time out of work when they step into their workplace and vice versa. They would only have the knowledge of their workplace while carrying out normal human stuff like walking, talking, grammar, and humor. Their "innie" personalities are expressed differently from their "outie" selves (the version of themselves out of work) but still carry their essence.
Why I liked it
What's interesting about the show is when the severed workers of the company that does the severance procedure itself, Lumon, start to gain hints of the wrongness of the whole system their workplace is operating in. We see varying levels of acceptance in the main characters and the slow building of their camaraderie in uncovering Lumon's secrets and their want to just know what is going on.
The show does a great job of giving just enough to the viewers to 'get' the story but also increasing the questions you ask as you watch. This show reminds me a lot of The Good Place in the sense that, although they both speak on a very hypothetical level. I mean, I would hope that Ted Danson won't be tricking me into thinking I'm in the best place ever or that I would have 0 memories of my colleagues. Or if my boss is taking advantage of my alternate self. But they do share a similar focus on telling something very much rooted in our real worlds.
Note: The Good Place is one of the best sitcoms I've ever watched! It never overstays its welcome and is one of those shows with practically no filler.
In the Good Place's case:
- The meaning of life
- Whether shitty actions you've done are redeemable and if people can inherently change
In Severance's case:
- Would it be ethical to compartmentalize people dependent on their environments, and how would that work?
In Severance, we see that there are people in the show who are supportive of this idea. It sounds great on paper. Being able to leave work at work. Not knowing or having to give a thought about your monthly quotas or KPIs when you're at home. No late-night messages from your boss asking you, "Could you please help XYZ…". The show challenges that with hypotheticals: what if the people in charge are making your innie do bad and morally unacceptable things? What if your innie wants out, but because the higher-ups wouldn't share it with you due to confidentiality reasons, you have 0 idea that your innie tried to escape the office a million times with a note saying they quit? What if your innie makes friends, and you never know what happens to them the second they leave the office? Even if they died?
Favorite plot point of the show
A lot of these questions are posed in the show, and my absolute favorite plot point is for the character Helly. Helly is featured at the start of the show, and she is presented as someone who cannot comprehend why anyone would even choose to sever themselves voluntarily. She hates the people in charge, she tries to escape multiple times, and she even tries to commit suicide at one point. As the season closes, our main characters are placed in a temporary position where they can be 'awakened' in their outie self (although the outie themselves were unable to sense it happening, so they were mutually exclusive), and Helly realizes that she was a prominent figure in Lumon. The company that started it all.
It's a perfect example of the classic debate of whether personality is inherently in yourself or if it could be dependent on your circumstances. And in this case, it was the latter. You see the disgust in Helly and her doing her best to expose Lumon for their cruelties, despite her outie being a full and willing participant in the procedure. Heck, she is literally trying to promote the procedure and is in love with the idea of a fully severed world.