On Dan Erickson’s hit sci-fi series “Severance,” the lead characters have all had specialized computer chips implanted in their brains that can manipulate their memories. When they’re in the office, they have no memories of their outside lives, unsure if they even have families or last names. On the outside, they have no memories of being in the office. This bifurcation of their memories means that the “innies” lack certain basic experiences. None of them know what it’s like to be asleep, for instance. Because they were created to crunch numbers on Lumon computers, none of the innies have ever read a book.
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On the outside, Mark (Adam Scott, from “Dead at 21”) is mourning the death of his wife, having fallen into drinking and despair. He shares a close bond with his sister, Devon (Jen Tullock), although he doesn’t get along as well with her emotional self-help guru husband, Ricken (Michael Chernus). Ricken has recently authored his masterpiece, a cheesy pop-psychology tome called “The You You Are,” and can’t wait to see it take off in popularity. Through a byzantine series of events, however, a copy of “The You You Are” makes its way into the Lumon offices, and the innie version of Mark secretly reads it in his spare time. To outie Mark, Ricken is a kind-hearted boob. To innie Mark, Ricken is something of a Messianic figure, offering the very first wisdom he had ever encountered.
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Ricken has several touchy-feely friends throughout the first season of “Severance,” and they’re all spacey and kind of weird. Of course, theories have emerged about them. Among Ricken’s friends, for instance, is a woman named Rebeck (Grace Rex), a character who has complained about how she has a feisty pet bird, leading to scars on the back of her head. As Dan Erickson had to clarify in a recent Buzzfeed interview, no, the bird-caused cranial scars don’t inherently mean that Rebeck is severed.
No, Rebeck is not severed
Of course, fans of “Severance” have theorized many things about Ricken’s weird, hippy-dippy friends. The world inside Lumon is arch and strange, blending meaningless corporate doublespeak with semi-liturgical cult language. On the outside, though, the world is more or less normal. So when someone behaves in an outlandish fashion to outie Mark, it stands out. Some theories on Reddit posit that Ricken’s weird friends have all been “chipped,” and that they, too, are part of some kind of grand social control experiment. Indeed, some Redditors have theorized that Rebeck’s multiple head scars are from where severance chips are always going in and coming out.
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Dan Erickson didn’t want to say whether or not Rebeck had or hadn’t been severed, but he did want to point out that the scars from a feisty bird are just that: scars from a feisty bird. Reickson, however, did want to keep some theories alive, so he addressed the theory tactfully, saying:
“There’s one [theory] that I do that I do feel okay throwing water on … although I’m not fully throwing water on it. People have said that when Rebeck talks about having sores on the back of her head from her bird, that that means that she’s actually severed, and the sore she’s talking about is actually the severance scar. And I just want to say that she might be severed! I’m not saying she isn’t, but whether she is or not, she does have a bird, and the bird is a jerk, and it is trying to kill her.”
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For Erickson, that must be the funnier theory. There is a bleakly comedic undercurrent to “Severance,” and Mark often reacts to oddball behavior with a relatable incredulity. Are Ricken’s friends weird because they’ve been severed, or are they weird because they’re weird? Erickson didn’t want to totally rule out the former, but it’s sounding a lot like it’s the latter.
Season two of “Severance” just came to an end.
