The question of what actually constitutes humanity or sentience is one that has provided fodder for sci-fi and horror stories for decades. Even dating back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstien, the idea of whether or not an “artificial” person was really a person is something we just love to explore every chance we get–with robots, or zombies, or clones, in modern day or in dystopian futures. But, even at their very best, the vast majority of these stories do have clear moral dividing lines–sure, the replicant, or the cyborg, or the clone monster may be scary or hard for us to control, but they’re still clearly sentient, right? Think about the robot uprising in Westworld or the tragedies of the Blade Runner franchise–sure, there’s plenty of complication (and murder) to go around, but the morality of murding or exploiting a bunch of “artificial” people is still pretty obviously in the wrong.
Enter AppleTV+’s new show, Severance.
In Severance, there are no clones, robots, cyborgs, or other manufactured people to debate the nature of humanity. There are no flying cars or amusement parks for rich jerks to live out their worst fantasies. Instead, there’s just a company–Lumon–and its employees who exist in a world that could be right here and now, in 2022, with only one key difference. At Lumon, employees are able to voluntarily undergo a surgical procedure called–wait for it–severance. Severance is the act of implanting a “spatially controlled” microchip into a person’s brain that literally bifurcates their consciousness into two distinct and unique halves, one that is active while the person is on Lumon grounds, and one that is active everywhere else.
In the first episode of Severance, we meet Helly R (Britt Lower) who has freshly woken up on Lumon grounds after undergoing her severance procedure. Except she, naturally, doesn’t remember ever agreeing to it. That’s part of the process, we realize–this version of Helly, the work version, is brand new. She retains some knowledge, she knows how to speak and that the state of Delaware exists, but her memories of her family, her life up to this point, any of her hopes and dreams and motivations, are all gone. This is exactly by design and, as her new boss Mark S (Adam Scott) explains, a perfect outcome for severance.
Helly–and all of her coworkers–are functionally brand new, factory reset humans who are, by the nature of the chips in their brains, never able to leave or experience anything outside of Lumon, ever. Because the second they set foot outside of the building, the chip in their head flips control back to the “outie” consciousness, the person who decided to undergo the procedure in the first place, who retains no knowledge or memory of anything their “innie” consciousness experiences or does. Functionally, two personalities are sharing one single body–but one of those personalities willingly committed the other personality to what amounts to a life of indentured servitude where they never get to see the sun, leave the building, make friends, have hobbies, or do anything but work.
Sure, the “innies” or the work personalities of severed employees aren’t being routinely murdered and reset like the robots of a Westworld themepark, and they’re not literally being used a slave labor (though that distinction is a little muddy, given the fact they can’t leave the building) like Blade Runner replicants, but they are, for all intents and purposes, filling the same narrative niche. With one major distinction–they, technically, chose this for themselves. Or, at least, some part of them chose this for themselves. While the severed personality may be distinct in every way, it’s still a part of a whole human being, right? A human being who, critically, willingly and consciously decided to undergo the procedure, aware of what it would do and the life they were creating for another version of themselves.
This makes Severance’s take on the tried and true “what makes a person a person?” question that much more unique and that much more complicated. Are the severed employees people? Of course they are, of that there can be absolutely no doubt. But if that’s the case, how is it ethical or moral to expect them to live in one room, doing one task, with no ability to leave or choose anything for themselves? But if that’s not ethical or moral, how do we factor in the choice and the freewill of the person who chose to have the procedure done?
Early on in the season, we learn that Mark, outie-Mark, distinct from Mark S, the employee, is vehemently defensive of his choice to undergo the severing procedure because he’s burdened with the grief of having lost his wife. It was making it impossible for him to work or to function, and, to him, severing is helping. In fact, he explicitly doesn’t want to even consider a world without severance–and he’s not afraid to make his take on the topic known. Severance, for him, is a good thing. But is it a good thing for Mark S? That, he’ll never know, and frankly, he doesn’t seem to really care.
But it is his choice, right? He made the decision and is now living with it, even though he’ll never actually know or understand the real repercussions on the other version of himself.
Put simply, there’s no real good or clear answer here. Obviously, Lumon, the company, is the “bad guy” of the story–and the show doesn’t shy away from that fact. There is a lot of obvious and clear commentary on the cult-like worship of corporate entities and the level of power brands and jobs have over our daily lives going on here, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Where Severance actually shines is in its ability to duck and weave between the expectations of a trope we’ve all seen a million times before–one that, no matter how murky or morally gray things get, usually boils down to “maybe we shouldn’t treat robots and clones like they’re disposable”–by removing the middleman entirely. It’s not about how we treat something we’ve created, this time, it’s about how we treat ourselves.
New episodes of Severance are available on AppleTV+ every Friday.