this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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Severance
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I don't think severing works as well as Lumon would like. We see tons of crossover between innie and outie awareness, even down to simple stuff like Helly R being able to name Delaware, Europe and the equator. The testing floor and Macrodata Refinement seem to be about making severance more precise by refining exactly how much of the complete mind the innie has access to. They are impressed that Cold Harbor Gemma gives no indication of having an emotional response to what they have identified as the most significant trauma of her outie life because the current state of severance isn't achieving that.
We don't really know what an innie's response to being confronted with major outie trauma would be, because the Severed Floor is so clinically sanitized of anything that could possibly resemble the outie's "real" life. Even when the innies are allowed to do something outwardly normal like a dance party or a funeral, it's fundamentally weird and wrong because they are avoiding giving them experiences that reflect life on the outside. I don't think this just comes down to Lumon being incredibly weird, although that helps.
If what MDR has achieved is some sort of perfect severance with no crossover, then Gemma is no longer needed. They can apply this knowledge to all severance from now on and Gemma herself is only a liability: somebody who was kidnapped and tortured for literally years, who the entire outside world believes to be dead. If she gets out and tells people, that's going to damage Lumon. If she dies (again), they don't even have to bother telling anybody.
This all makes sense, but it’s still a little unsatisfying. They built it up all season and in the end it’s just not very interesting.
Maybe if there was something more emotionally significant than disassembling a crib. It’s been 2 years since she had a miscarriage, right? Would her outie still be this upset? Maybe the kid is still alive, or was born and died or something, but that is not information they have given us.
Probably a bit blasphemous to bring up BBC Sherlock in the Severance community, but:
People are different all over but two years doesn't seem unreasonable for somebody to still be upset about a loss of a pregnancy. Dr. Mauer has certainly identified it as a sore point for her, since he lied to Gemma about Mark having moved on and had a kid with somebody else, right before he got a chair to the head.
Additionally, we don't really know with any certainty how long it has been from Gemma's perspective given they've had her working as Ms. Casey and also testing for hours at a time in multiple rooms, possibly every day. Even when she gets to be her outie self, she's been in a prolonged traumatic situation of being kidnapped and experimented on, so she probably has limited opportunities to process her previous traumas.
Yeah, I see all these points, but the show did not convey to us that the loss of her pregnancy was still affecting her this deeply. I would think being kidnapped and tortured (physically, not mentally) would have made her let go of that pain.
I think maybe if they showed outie Gemma being put in a similar situation and we can judge the difference in reactions, that would have made it more meaningful. As is it just seems like a bunch of way too smart people doing dumb meaningless tests.