Severance: Innies, Exploitation & Modern Company Towns
- theghoulsnextdoor
- May 7
- 17 min read
Severance has given us one of the most nuanced examinations of identity, consciousness, and labor rights in recent television. The Ghouls dissect Severance Season 2's brilliant dual commentary: the fight for innie personhood alongside corporate America's modern "Sunken Place" for Black professionals. From Helly's rebellion to Milchick's blackface paintings, Apple TV's workplace thriller mirrors our reality of eroding worker rights, modern company towns, and the dehumanizing effects of capitalism. "Did you think just because you gave us half a life, we wouldn't fight for it?"
Sources in this Episode:
Other Reading:
Media from this week's episode:
Severance (2022-present)
Mark leads a team of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives. After attempting a revolution to inform the outside world of their conditions, the severed employees have to fight for their right to exist and get to the truth of their reality.
Severance: Innie Autonomy & The Corporate Sunken Place
by gabe castro
RED: Quotes, someone else's words.
Synopsis
Season 2 picks up where we left off in season one, where the audience, just like the innies, have no idea what occurred since we last saw them. Now that they’ve informed the world of their living conditions and the inhumanity of the severance procedure, what’s going to happen to them? We pick up with innie Mark returning to work, stressed and fresh from the realization that Ms. Casey is his outie’s dead wife and concerned for the lives of his coworkers, friends, only other known people. He is met by a new group of coworkers, a promoted Mr. Milchick and a “lax” version of the Lumon industries he once knew. He fights to get his co-workers back and they join his adventure for answers and for some of their own.
Irving struggles with the death of innie Burt, considering the worth of his own innie life. While also being concerned and suspicious of Helly who’s story of her OTC isn't adding up. Outie Irving is getting to know outie Burt and his husband, while slowly revealing Irving’s complex history and feelings.
Dylan, now aware of his outies life with a wife and child is captivated by this potential life. Mr. Milchick in an attempt to control innie Dylan creates visiting hours with outie Dylan’s wife, Gretchen. Thinking this luxury will placate Dylan much in the same way his little rewards did in season one, only it unlocks parts of himself he had been hiding away. He becomes far more vocal about the abuses and now having seen the light, begins to fight in his own way for autonomy.
Helly is strange and as eager as ever to support innie Mark and outie Mark find Gemma/Miss Casey but also to connect further with Innie Mark. It’s revealed, rather traumatically, that Helly is Helena and the real Helly is allowed to return after the death of innie Irving. Real Helly struggles to juggle her feelings for innie Mark while also valuing the life of outie Mark’s wife.
The biggest reveal this season shows the truth behind the Macrodata Refinement, which is a device that creates personalities and essentially, torture for people. For Mark, he’s been creating rooms and severed beings for his wife, Gemma and this will eventually lead to her death, unless innie Mark sacrifices himself and everyone he loves to save her. Oh and we also learn Ms. Cobel has played a much bigger role in the development of the severance procedure and refinement process.
**No one asks to be born and Innie’s certainly didn’t sign those contracts.
**Macrodata Refinement being so vague - the Innie’s don’t know what they’re doing which is very much worker isolation. (covered in our Possessor episode)
The Audacity of Innie Autonomy
Season 1 introduced us to Lumon Industries and their "severance" procedure – surgically dividing employees' work memories from their personal ones, creating essentially two different people sharing one body. What made season 2 so fascinating was how it built on that premise to explore a deeper question: are these "innies" – the work versions of these people – deserving of the same autonomy and respect as their "outie" counterparts?
One of the primary themes explored in season 2 is the personhood of the innies. Season 1 made us question the ethics of the severance procedure as a concept, but season 2 forces us to confront our own biases about whose life matters more. Which “team” are you on?
After season 1, viewers were definitely eager to see how the innie rebellion during the OTC would affect their existence and the severance program overall. Further, we wanted Mark to discover the truth about his wife and reunite with her in the real world. But I think a big part we may have all been missing was the reality of innie Mark’s life and how it’s threatened by these very answers. Viewer’s seeking those answers completely disregard innie Mark as a fully formed person with his own relationships, desires, and autonomy.
The season finale brilliantly highlighted this bias – many fans expressed shock or disappointment at innie Mark's choices. Why? Because they were prioritizing outie Mark's life over innie Mark's. They viewed Mark's relationship with Helly as somehow less legitimate because it existed only within Lumon. And that's exactly what the show wants us to question. Why do we assume the outie's existence is more "real" or valuable? Just because they have more freedom of movement or more memories? It reminds me of how we sometimes compartmentalize our work selves as somehow separate from our "real" selves, when in reality, our work personas are very much a part of who we are. This compartmentalization only serves those in power – allowing employers to extract more from workers while treating them as less than fully human.
Let's talk about the outies and their relationship with their innies in Season 2, because the show makes a fascinating point about how each of them views their work counterpart.
Dylan stands out as the only outie who truly respects his innie as a complete person with rights. Both versions of Dylan refer to innies as human beings whose lives are at stake. Outie Dylan’s letter to innie Dylan confirms this as he acknowledges his personhood. Also, innie Dylan is the only one to call innie Irving's firing a "death" – recognizing the existential stakes of what happens to innies. And look at outie Dylan's reaction to learning about Gretchen's kiss with his innie self. He doesn't dismiss it as inconsequential because it’s another version of himself – he sees it as cheating, treating his innie as a separate being from himself worthy of the same respect and consideration. Gretchen also understands the innies are independent beings. Her connection with innie Dylan allows her to reconnect with what she loved about outie Dylan before he became jaded by life. It's a heartfelt moment that acknowledges the humanity in both versions of Dylan.
Then we have Helena, who mistreats Helly from the get go. Not only does she override Helly's desperate attempts to quit, but she dismisses Helly's suicide attempt as essentially a tantrum. Helena having sex with innie Mark as a power move against Helly, assuming her innie would be gone forever. It’s sexual assault since innie Mark had no idea who she really was. It's the ultimate dehumanization to treat Helly's body as simply a vessel she can use however she wants with no consideration for the other consciousness that inhabits it. She works hard to dismiss Helly’s independence and personhood while portraying her on the severed floor. But as Irving is quick to note, she is nothing like Helly. “Helly was never cruel.” And while Innie Mark was consumed by butterflies and stars in his eyes, he would’ve been able to tell the difference too, had he been looking and not consumed by his own dilemmas.
Even Mark, who we generally view as sympathetic, shows a fundamental disrespect for his innie. The way he awkwardly calls Helly "Heleny" when talking to innie Mark reveals how he views inne Mark as childlike, naive, not fully formed.
And then he asks innie Mark to essentially sacrifice himself – to die so that outie Mark can be reunited with his wife. That's an enormous request that completely overlooks innie Mark's own life, relationships, and right to exist. Gemma isn’t innie Mark’s wife. He does not have that shared history of building a life, of struggling to conceive and of losing her in the accident. He has a day-to-day work life with a work wife who’s name outie Mark doesn’t even have the decency to learn.
Natalie and Mr. Milchick are in the Sunken Place
While the severed employees certainly live a sunken place life where they are cut off from the “real world” and their bodies are piloted by another, Black characters Natalie and Seth Milchick also appear to be in Jordan Peele’s Sunken Place.
For those somehow not in the know (why are you watching our show!? Go watch our Get Out episode silly) in Jordan Peele's Get Out, the Sunken Place represents a state where Black consciousness is imprisoned. They’re still aware but unable to control their body, which is now piloted by white consciousness. The severed procedure creates a similar bifurcation. However, in having to code switch and mold themselves into the Lumon landscape, Black characters Natalie and Seth are in their own Sunken Place. They're Black professionals navigating a predominantly white corporate structure that exploits and controls them.
Season 2 explores this dynamic expertly through Seth Milchick, the newly promoted manager of the Macrodata Refinement department after the team's revolt. His promotion is clearly not a celebration of his abilities but rather a crisis management move. The evidence? His computer still welcomes Harmony Cobel, the white woman who held the position before him.
This detail brilliantly captures a reality many Black professionals face – being promoted into positions without the proper support or recognition, often as diversity symbols or during moments of organizational crisis.
Milchick is constantly navigating microaggressions at Lumon, one big example is during his performance review. We learn he's been anonymously reported for "using too many big words" – a criticism that reveals how Black professionals are often surveilled and judged by different standards. His colleagues won't approach him directly but instead report him to avoid accountability.
One of the more disturbing and brilliant scenes (in a show ripe with brilliance), is when Natalie, as the Board's representative, presents Milchick with "inclusively re-canonicalized paintings" – essentially blackface versions of Lumon's founder Kier Eagan. Natalie’s schooled smile and dead eyes momentarily break when forced to claim she also received these paintings and found them "extremely moving." When Milchick gives her a look that essentially asks, "What are we doing here?," we witness a fleeting moment of authentic connection. It’s almost exactly the emotion and fear as the internal being of Natalie fights against her corporate facade that we see in Get Out, in the help.
The Board also speaks for Natalie as she communicates that the “board would like you to know that I also received this gift.” She isn’t in control of her body in this space any more than the innies are of their outies. However, we could also interpret Natalie’s phrasing to be a signal to Milchick that things aren’t as well as they seem or that she agrees with him. The “board says,” not necessarily Natalie saying anything.
When Milchick attempts to connect with Natalie, suggesting their "experiences at Lumon have been similar in some ways" and that the paintings evoked "somewhat complicated feelings," rather than reciprocating, Natalie retreats into her corporate identity. She understands that her positioning as a woman of color is central to her usefulness as the Board's face. Severance is exploring how corporations weaponize diversity and inclusion. The blackface paintings are a perfect metaphor for how companies often approach diversity, superficially altering their existing structures rather than creating authentic space for diverse perspectives. They’re performative.
Severance may not be labeled horror in the same way Peele's films are, but for its Black characters, the corporate environment of Lumon contains all the elements of a horror story with its loss of autonomy, constant performance, surveillance, and the erasure of authentic identity.
Overtime Contingency Revolution
What I find particularly compelling about Season 2 is how it moves from awareness of oppression to the beginning stages of resistance and revolution. Season 1 was about the innies taking the red pill, discovering the truth of their situation. Season 2 shows us the painful, messy process of trying to fight back against a system with vastly more power and resources. It reminds me of how season 2 of Squid Game followed the same red pill revelation into revolution between seasons. Both shows recognize that revolution isn't quick or easy – it involves sacrifice, setbacks, and suffering before any real liberation can occur.
I think it's important to note, though, that Severance isn't presenting a step-by-step blueprint for real-world labor resistance. Like horror and genre media often do, it's using this extreme scenario to highlight actual issues of worker exploitation and bodily autonomy.
The show builds on historical and modern-day woes, showing us how workers are dehumanized and exploited. In the use of science fiction, they can start the conversation about workplace control. It helps us see patterns that might be less visible in our everyday lives. At the same time, it depicts the power of collective action. The innies are only able to make progress when they work together, share information, and coordinate their resistance.
As we look ahead to season 3, I'm curious to see how the show continues to develop this theme of autonomy and personhood. Will we see more outie-innie cooperation with Gretchen, Devon, and even Miss Cobel? And how will the show address the ultimate question – in a world where severance exists, what rights should innies have? If they are indeed full people, should they have legal protection? A path to independence?
Whatever direction they take, Severance has already given us one of the most nuanced examinations of identity, consciousness, and labor rights in recent television. It forces us to consider not just the ethics of a fictional technology, but how we view our own compartmentalized selves.
Remember that whether you're at work or at home, you're still you. And you deserve to be treated with dignity either way.
Corporate Towns & Worker Rebellion: Severance's Frightening Real-World Parallels
by Kat Kushin
RED: Quotes, someone else's words.
Severance, Bodily Autonomy & Worker Power
I’ll be real y’all that Severance, like most horror-themed media, hits especially close to home with everything going on presently. It’s depressing out here! Something that we see in season 2 even more is that it’s rough to be an innie. Being an innie and an outie both suck, but when a person’s whole existence is a windowless office, filled with manipulation and unjust labor practices…it’s worth rebelling over. As Helly shouts in season 2, “Did you think that just because you gave us half a life, that we wouldn’t fight for it?” Additionally as we see in non-severed people as well, working for Lumon sucks all around, pushing people to do awful things for the promise of power that is never really delivered upon. I had texted gabe about it cause I was like, “Dang why we gotta have everyone be so evil,” but then you stared into the characters eyes and saw their pain and own feelings of being trapped, and the characters became even more complex.
As we face the day to day struggles of being alive, drowning in capitalism and all it’s wrath, in all it’s lack of work life balance, in all it’s “we need money to survive and it costs so much of ourselves”, like Helly, we might ask the following question: “Do the people at the top really expect us to not fight back?” Those at the top so vastly underestimate us as workers, and operate as if they’ll never face consequences. I’ll give them this…it really does feel that way sometimes, especially with the world being what it is. But Severance shows us that the less you give someone to lose, the more willing a person will become to fight back.
Last time we covered Severance, I spoke a lot about worker power. So with that in mind… Let’s start with the bad news: We’ve unfortunately seen many shifts backwards in terms of worker power and autonomy in a job market that is volatile and realigning itself with archaic power hungry structures. Before, we had a lot more to be hopeful for, and we had started to make waves and progress. After season 1 we were coming off the great resignation, an event where people who had spent extensive time in pandemic isolation and massive career restructuring resigned from exploitative and soul-sucking jobs in mass volumes. We also saw increased pursuit of unions, and other programs that supported worker power. There were victories and losses on that front, which I unpacked companies like Starbucks and Amazon union busting (an illegal practice). We also saw many companies restructure their priorities to adjust to the new market, prioritizing hybrid and remote work, as well as more inclusive work spaces because that was what was demanded by workers. That’s not to say that that is no longer true now. Those demands are still very prevalent for many workers. The pandemic opened people’s eyes so much to the fact that work life can, and needs, to have a balance. The issue now is, that what has changed is who is in charge. This administration, and the influence of Project 2025/the heritage foundation and it’s mission has started or rather continued the firing and reinstalling heads of the company that align with their goals in mind, through JD Vance, and Trump.
The parallels between Severance and a decline in worker power extend even further when we look at the non-severed employees positioned as villains. In season 2, we see them start to crack under this pressure of entirely unreasonable expectations. In another article titled: We’re All Innies Now: Apple TV’s "Severance" Feels Too Real | Psychology Today They give a great outline of how Federal workers are feeling like they are living their own Severance right now under DOGE cuts and widespread uncertainty.
The writer says: “As a federal employee, I’ve watched some of the logic of Severance seep in to the workplace. After-hours Fork-in-the-Road emails seem more like veiled threats dressed up as opportunities. “What did you do last week?” check-ins are required to be sent to an anonymous inbox with no feedback coming back and rumors of monitoring echo Lumon’s constant oversight. Teams vanish overnight without explanation, while others wait in limbo, wondering if the next email will end a decades-long career. But this is not just the situation in the federal government. Across industries, workers are seeing psychological safety fade, self-care dismissed as indulgent, autonomy stripped by rushed return-to-office mandates, and empathy treated like a weakness. It feels like we’re all Innies now—expected to follow orders, not ask questions, suppress our humanity, not celebrate it. That’s the hallmark of transactional leadership, and it’s making a comeback. Leaders who once prioritized relationships are now walled off. Loyalty seems more important than expertise. Caring for employees is an afterthought at best. But we’ve known for decades transactional leadership doesn’t work. Endless corridors of research show that trust, inclusion, and purpose—not fear and control—drive real results. Even federal performance frameworks center feedback, learning, and well-being. But those principles are being pushed aside for speed and control, under the guise of efficiency.”
Everyday we hear of worsening conditions, and threats to worker power under the Trump led Republican administration. The DOGE cuts were intentionally done to make sectors of government so short staffed that they are inoperable so that closing them will appear justified. In good news, there has been push back from the courts here, as the cuts did not follow the laws that had been established surrounding discrimination in the workplace, as well as legal process when it came to firing procedures. While some federal workers sit in limbo, having won being wrongfully let go, but still unable to return to their jobs, DOGE is not “saving” the government anywhere near what was promised. Either way, at large many federal workers are traumatized by the experience, sudden loss of livelihood, and robbing of their autonomy. All that to say is that Severance is topical, and relevant to our history and present day life.
In an article titled, 'Severance' and Threats to Bodily Autonomy—Past, Present and Future - Ms. Magazine, they discuss the ways Severance, and Lumon relate to real history. Specifically when thinking of the episode featuring Ms. Cobel and her life in Salt’s Neck. They say: The show’s depiction of the fictional corporation Lumon Industries builds upon a history of real-world corporate malpractice and worker exploitation. An example of this is during the “Industrial Age factory owners forcing laborers (often women and children) to work in dangerous conditions for low wages.”
Thinking of Cobel and the man from town whose name escapes me right now, talking about working for Lumon as children. Giving every facet of themselves to a company that did not value them. Additionally, thinking of Cobel, in her youth developing the entire program for severance and getting zero credit. Cobel and the other people of Salt’s Neck grew up in a company town, exploited by Lumon from the time they were born until they die, and considering how Gemma was exploited, maybe even after they die. Owing everything they have to a company that doesn’t view them as people. The article continues to draw parallels to union busting as well, which we see in Lumon’s breaking up any kind of rebellion by “retiring” innies.
Examples in recent history are, “Corporations such as Starbucks, Amazon and SpaceX firing pro-union workers, refusing to bargain or stalling negotiations and intimidating workers.” If you have the time also, I recommend checking out this article titled: Apple TV’s ‘Severance’: The Role of Jester’s Privilege in the Leftist Media Dilemma because they unpack the limits a show like Severance has when owned and housed under a company like Apple, who operates its own Kier/Eagan like business. In some ways the show is limited by its platform in what it can actually say about worker exploitation, and it also controls the narrative of that critique by having a show like Severance on its app. I think it still does a lot to critique these systems, so I mention just to point out the media literacy conflict of interest at play.
Update on Company Towns
In our last Severance episode, I mentioned the creation of some new company towns so I wanted to provide an update since we recorded that episode over a year ago. Just to give a brief overview for those who haven’t listened to that episode and do not know what a company town is. A company town is a community that is built and owned by a single company, where the company provides housing, jobs, and various services to its employees. These towns often arise in remote areas where the company operates, and they can exert significant control over the lives of their residents, including their work, social interactions, and even aspects of their personal lives. Check out our episodes on Sorry to Bother You and Haunted Towns for more on company towns.
Last time, I specifically spoke on Meta’s Willow Village, that has begun construction on housing units. We won’t know the impact of it until people start to live there, but considering everything else, it’s feeling very Parable of the Sower. Amazon’s continues to own even more of Seattle, expanding its real estate for AI and e-commerce. They’ve also made it so there is an in-person working mandate, similar to efforts in Philadelphia to increase traffic for their businesses. The main difference being that since Amazon owns most of Seattle, the mandate largely benefits them specifically. There are additional company towns being constructed in Texas, by Elon Musk, specifically around SpaceX and Tesla manufacturing. As a fun anecdote, there have been company town specific protests of sorts, with crosswalk terminals being hacked to play deepfaked audio of the CEO’s saying satirical messages. This is both in towns where Musk owns much of the businesses, as well as in Amazon and Meta hubs An article from KUOW within the NPR network gives some quotes of the audio: “Instead of the little robotic voice that tells you to wait until it's safe to cross, at least five intersections in Seattle last week played something like this: "Hi, I'm Jeff Bezos. This crosswalk is sponsored by Amazon Prime with an important message. Please don't tax the rich, otherwise all the other billionaires will move to Florida, too." Does this actually solve the problem? Not really, but it is nice to hear these things when you feel like the world is on fire and no one is acknowledging it. It kind of validates the insanity you’re feeling day-to-day.
Comments