Severance’s first season is a wonderfully tense workplace horror story

Image: Apple

In the age of binge-watching and television seasons that drop all at once, Severance feels unique: it's a show you definitely don't want to watch in one go. Severance is an incredibly tense sci-fi horror series where that tension only builds over the course of the show. The capitalist machine is willing to sink to the dark depths if it can see something more messed up in the new chapter. It's going to take some time to let it all soak in and catch your breath.

The first season of Severance is in this article.

Severance starts out slowly. The show centers on a new procedure that splits a worker's brain in two. People can skip work for eight hours a day and focus on their outside life. The work self is stuck in a life that is nothing but work. Their lives are contained in the office. Memories can be dictated by the technology. Your life and memories are yours until you hop in the elevator at Lumon and go to work. Your time and memories are yours to keep.

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The weird computers and claustrophobic hallways of Severance

Mark introduced us to the concept. Mark signed up to be severed in hopes of avoiding his feelings for at least some part of the day, as he is grieving the loss of his wife. He is the chipper department head of the Macrodata Refinement division at Lumon, where he and three other employees are. They are reassured the work is important and mysterious, but they don't know what their job is. It involves finding numbers on a grid.

It is easy to see the appeal of severing. It's work that sucks. Who wouldn't want to focus on the good parts of their lives? The solution is not viable. It is an actual nightmare for the innies. Their lives are limited to the dreary walls of Lumon's basement. Their next memory is when they get home. They feel the effects of sleep, but never experience it themselves. Collecting Lumon- branded finger traps becomes an incentive when things get so bad. At one point, a book of New Age gibberish makes its way into the department and is treated like the most important piece of literature ever written. When you have never read an employee handbook, anything would look good.

Image: Apple

As the show progresses, you will learn more about Lumon and what life is like in the basement. The company is a lot more evil than Amazon is. We are told that it is a pharmaceutical company with its hands in a lot of different industries, and that Mark's boss is played with a terrifying intensity. There are disturbing Romantic era-style paintings of inter-departmental wars in the Optics and Design division.

Severance thrives on mystery. Like Lost and Yellowjackets, it is a show that loves to toss inexplicable curveballs at viewers that are sometimes explained, sometimes not. The strange twists are the reason for the creeping sense of dread. The severed floor in the show is like something out of a parallel world. It's almost like a cubicle farm ripped out of the 60s, but with strange retrofuturistic computers, twisting hallways, and a break room that doubles as a psychological torture chamber. There is a room filled with baby goats. It is the kind of show where a celebratory waffle party inevitably turns into something weird and uncomfortable.

The dual nature of the severed characters makes for a sense of mystery. Each actor is playing two different people, and they have conflicting desires, but they only know half of the story. Outie Mark has no idea what goes on during the hours he is at the office, and innie Mark knows nothing about the outside world or the impact that widespread adoption of severance could have. The characters in the show have worse things than you might think. The creators of Severance have a love for artful cliffhangers of the NotPenny's boat variety. While answering some important questions and offering some explosive revelations, the finale of Severance leaves a lot to be uncovered in the second season. You can shout at your screen when the credits roll.

You have a show that paints a dark picture of how megacorporations treat their employees. In a future where tech giants can do anything in secret because employees have signed up to be lab rats, we will see stories of what tech giants try to get away with in the real world. No one will ever know about the goats or the break room if things go Lumon's way. The tension and terror are worth it. The first season of Severance is a lot more enjoyable than the Lumon-allocated Music Dance Experience.

The first season of Severance is on Apple TV Plus.