Severance trades in mysteries. What is Lumon really up to? Who's on the mysterious board that controls the company? What's with the goats?
The second season of the show probed these questions but didn't definitively answer any of them. But according to showrunner Dan Erickson, the answers are out there for fans willing to look. "I think so," he told Buzzfeed when asked if fans could figure out the show's mysteries. "It's not like we laid-in proof of it, but we've tried to sort of lay in the build-up to it. And so thematically, you know, there are details that I think you'll look back on when it's all done and say, 'Oh, that's why they did that.'"
Mind you, Erickson has yet to see any fan theories — and there are many of them — that get everything right. "Not in its entirety, no." It is interesting to know that Erickson is reading the theories. “I love reading the fan theories, but you do get in your head a little bit with it and you know at the end of the day we know we have this sort of roadmap that we've been following since we started and we're basically sticking to that,” he told PEOPLE. “I'll read a theory and I'll be like, 'Oh I wish we were making that show because that sounds cool.' But generally, I have to sort of turn the other way.”
So there you go: if you've voiced a fan theory about What It All Means, it's possible the people behind Severance have read it...but they're not taking the note.
The mysteries of Severance go deep. For instance, the show seems to be set in our world, but some things are off. Some technology seems up-to-the-minute and some seems plucked from prior decades. So is the show set in our world? Erickson made it sound like there's at least something we haven't picked up on: "I don't want to say too much!"
"I will say that I do think it looks cool, whether there's another layer behind that… There's always a sense off being a little bit out of time and space," Erickson said. "And that starts on the Severed floor, because down there, the technology is intentionally kind of older – in part because you can't really have anything down there that would give a cell phone signal or an internet signal. But also because there is a sense of wanting to unmoor workers and have them not necessarily know what year it is outside, or where they live outside. And so we wanted to extend some of that ambiguity to the outside from the viewer's perspective. I know people do ask the question, like, well, where is the town of Kier, and also, what year is it? Because you have smartphones, but then you have these old cars. So whether it's stylistic, or whether there's a practical reason behind it, it's all very intentional."
Whither Mark and Helly?
Maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves trying to solve these big-picture mysteries. Let's focus on the present: at the end of season 2, Mark S (Adam Scott) decided that he wanted to be with his office soulmate Helly (Britt Lower). This will be very complicated, since Mark and Helly are both Innies, brand new people occupying the bodies of Outies Mark Scout and Helena Eagan, neither of whom wants to give up their lives, but neither of whom really has a choice.
"I think that we leave our innies in a very interesting and precarious place," Erickson told Dazed. "They’ve made this decision to draw a line in the sand and choose their own existence, at least for the moment. They don’t know necessarily how long they’re going to be able to stay alive and stay in any form down there, but they’ve chosen to fight for that for as long as they can. I think it’s going to put them in a very interesting, dangerous and cool place."
Mark's situation is further complicated because his Outie's wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) is now free from Lumon's control and would really like it if her husband joined her on the run. But Mark S has chosen Helly. This show has the weirdest love triangles in the business. “I think that people really do love Gemma and they love Mark and Gemma, and the idea of Mark and Helly sort of making this choice that is so heartbreaking, I think some people have trouble with that. And I understand it — they should,” Erickson told Variety. “I don’t see it as a moment of somebody stealing somebody else’s lover. I see it as a moment of somebody claiming their own autonomy and the importance of their own existence.”
Looking forward to season 3
We'll see how all of that goes down in season 3. Obviously Erickson didn't give anything big away, but did say that they're “working on it.”
"We're very excited about it. I'm very excited about it. I've been losing some sleep over it, but in an excited way."
The closest Erickson got to teasing what might be coming is when he told about further exploring the character of Natalie (Sydney Cole Alexander), a Lumon employee who speaks for the mysterious board: "I think there's a question of what exactly she’s hearing in her ear when she talks to the board, and I think that that's really fascinating. And then what her motivations are. Does she sympathize with Milchick more than she lets on, and feel that she can't communicate that to him? Or is she truly the mouth of the board the way that she seems to be? I think that's an interesting question."
Just one of many. Speaking to EL PAÍS, Erickson assured fans that they are driving towards something, even if he can't say what it is: “You can only ask those questions for so long before people say, ‘okay, what’s the next thing?’ And we wouldn’t have answered them if there weren’t more interesting questions on the other side. For example, we still don’t fully understand what it is that Lumen is trying to do, what their end game is.”
When might Severance season 3 come out?
The one big drawback of Severance is that there was an agonizing three-year wait between the first and second seasons, long even by today's standards. Now that Apple knows it has a hit on its hands, we won't have to wait as long for season 3...right?
“I hope not,” Erickson said. “Each season was delayed by something, first Covid-19, then it was the [writers’ and actors’] strikes. Apparently there’s an asteroid heading for Earth, but now it looks like it's not likely to hit Earth. So, unless a crack opens up in the Earth and swallows our production team, we’re hoping it’ll be less than three years.”
I'll take it.
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