Never let it be said that the Apple TV Plus showSeverancedoesn’t lean hard on being as weird as possible. From thevery first episodes ofSeverance, it was pretty clear this was a show that was not going to be at all normal. The people inside the world that Ben Stiller has helped lay out as the director are not at all normal. And one of the things the show does very, very well is that it tends to offer at least some explanation for why the main characters do seem as weird as they do.
That isn’t to say there aren’t some characters, like Ricken who appear to be weird for the sake of being weird or to add comic relief. But for the most part, the people that make up Severance act the way they do because of the life they are living. They are absolutely reacting to the world around them. And that’s a testament to how weird that world appears to be, even outside of Lumon Industries.
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Weirdness has long been the name of the game for Severance but it’s never been more clear than it was in “What’s For Dinner” that the weirdness was often used to mask something much more sinister. However, as the show has been able to do quite masterfully for most of its first season run, it’s quite impossible to put a finger on just what is at the root of that darkness. Is the company some sort of devil-worshipping firm that wants everyone’s souls? Or it is simply a company that is perfecting how to control people by slicing off parts of their personality? It seems unlikely all will be revealed in the final two episodes of the year,since there’s aSeveranceSeason 2, but some answers appear to be coming.
One of the things “What’s For Dinner” does to great effect is to show what one of the office worker’s -not named Mark or Ms. Cobel - life is like outside of Lumon. In fact, by the end of this episode, viewers have gotten at least a glimpse at all four of theemployees' Outtie lives. However, it’s Irving and what he does when he’s not at work that the show spends the most time with in this episode. It turns out that the way he spends his time is both surprising and entirely in line with the person that Irving is, in the real world. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is that the show seems to want to make it clear that there can be a bit of bleed over in an Innie and Outtie, as long as they’re subconscious. Or perhaps the show is trying to tell the audience that things have gone a bit wrong in the case of Irving. As usual, the way the story is presented allows for multiple interpretations of the same scenario.
Inside of Lumon, the story picks up an unknown period of time after the conclusion of theseventh episode ofSeverance. It appears that it’s at least been a week, but could be quite a bit longer. Helly is working harder at her desk than she’s even seemed to work before and that of course, should immediately be a clue that something is up. Of course, because of how the human mind works and how subservient the employees of Lumon usually are, there’s at least a moment of “what happened here?” Before the show makes it very clear something is absolutely “up.”
It turns out that the Innies have hatched a plan in order to launch “Operation Overtime” for themselves and wake themselves up in the outside world. At the center of that plan is for all four of them to look as though the near revolt that took place in thelast few episodeshas been quelled and they are good and loyal workers yet again. The plan seems to be going quite well considering that neither Milchick nor Cobel appear to be all that wary of the turnaround in personalities.
That the higher-ups don’t seem to suspect a thing would normally be a bit annoying but the show sets this up well in two different ways. The first is that theApple TV Plusshow shows the supervisors to be just bad enough at their job that they might underestimate just how much the Innies are no longer under their collective thumbs. The allusion to quite a bit of time passing early on is another explanation as it might have been weeks or even a month since the events of Episode 7 went down.
This does also offer the one big plot hole in how the Innies are going to pull off what appears to be the start of a coup. One scene makes it clear that Milchick and Cobel are able to monitor just about everything that goes on inside the halls of Lumon. It’s not entirely clearhow theSeverancecrewmanaged to talk through a rather elaborate plan without ringing any sort of alarm bells. Of course, it’s possible that the cameras aren’t as prevalent as it first appears and the workers have managed to just start this plot out of the Lumon sightlines but that seems somewhat unlikely.
There’s also plenty of a new kind of weird as the episode continues andin trueSeverancefashion, that weirdness also happens to be quite foreboding and dark. Some questions are answered, like why Dylan has always been such a big fan of Waffle Parties. That the Severance procedure is more than just a way to make sure that workers don’t form attachments to their coworkers outside the office is made abundantly clear. The episode also does a very good job of really, for the first time, showing some real questions about just what Cobel’s motivations are for many of the things she does. Explained away as just being a bad person for most of the season, there’s a hint that remorse exists there. Once again, that feels like nuance that most other shows out there these days would miss on quite badly.
New Episodes ofSeveranceare available on Apple TV Plus each Friday.
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