Hi, my name’s Kayleigh, and I’m addicted to Severance. Worse still, I’m addicted to reading about Severance – obsessively mining Reddit for answers to the questions, questions, deliciously mysterious and important questions left after each episode concludes. 

I’m far from the only one, of course: the internet is awash with people like myself, all of them desperate to understand the series, which focuses on the severed employees of Lumon Industries. We know, of course, that Mark (Adam Scott) and his cohort have been hired to carry out cryptic ‘macrodata refinement’ work, which involves sorting numbers based on intuition. And we know, too, that the ‘innie’ versions of Mark, Helly (Britt Lower), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and our fallen soldier Irving (John Turturro) are vastly different to their so-called ‘outies’.

When they step out of the downstairs elevator at Lumon, they’re rebellious – albeit charmingly naive – upstarts on a mission to find out a) what really happens on the dreaded Testing Floor, b) where Ms Casey (Dichen Lachman) has been taken, and c) what the eff is the deal with all the baby goats. Outside in the real world, though, things are more complicated.

Watch the trailer for Severance season 2 below:

Mark, for example, is working with Alexa (Nikki M James) to reintegrate his ‘innie’ and ‘outie’ personas so that he can find out what really happened to his late wife, Gemma… who’s now bopping around Lumon as the aforementioned Ms Casey. Helly is actually Helena Eagan, aka Lumon’s seemingly nefarious leader-in-waiting who views ‘innies’ as (her words) animals. Dylan is a struggling dad of three who genuinely needs this job to keep his family afloat. And Irv? He’s actually a bit of a badass – one who seems hellbent on bringing Lumon down by any means possible.

Considering that Lumon is basically a cult with a darker, deeper agenda then it’s letting on, I don’t blame Irv one bit. And so, as we stumble ever closer towards the second season finale, here are some of the best and most compelling Severance fan theories. 

Which means that, yes, there are spoilers ahead, so be sure you’re up-to-date with the TV drama before reading.

Gemma is Cold Harbour

This theory – posited by little_duck on Reddit – suggests that Gemma’s ‘death’ in Severance involved her car going off a bridge into icy water near Lumon (hence the image of the submerged car in the title credits), preserving her body and brain function for Lumon’s experiments. Rather than dying from a crash, she may have been cryogenically preserved, leaving her as a blank slate for Lumon’s “revolving” experiments.

“I can see the Eagan family having enough wealth to preserve their bodies cryogenically, but of course Lumon wouldn’t experiment on them. They catch a lucky break when Gemma is preserved in a similar way,” explains the Redditor.

Lumon, known for its secrecy, could have staged the accident to fool Mark. The theory also connects this to the obsession of Patricia Arquette’s character, Harmony Cobel: perhaps the late Charlotte Cobel was similarly preserved but discarded after failed experimentation.

Hey, Lumon’s wealth and power puts it in the perfect position for such covert, unethical projects.

MDR are sorting through Kier’s Four Tempers…

The work that the Macrodata Refinement Department (MDR) is doing? That mysterious and important work? A lot of people think it all boils down to this quote from the late Kier Egan:

“In my life, I have identified four components, which I call tempers, from which are derived from every human soul. Woe. Frolic. Dread. Malice. Each man’s character is defined by the precise ratio that resides in him. I walked into the cave of my own mind, and there I tamed them. 

“Should you tame the tempers as I did mine, then the world shall become but your appendage.”

Now, if you look closely at the bottom of Mark’s screen during the end of season 2 episode 1, there are four different progress bars, with the initials WO, DR, FC, and MA. Coincidence? Unlikely.

… to resurrect the dead?

If we work with the idea that Lumon preserved Gemma’s body for experimentation, it could be that Mark is the one who’s been powering her body up via his own number crunching in MDR.

“Maybe Mark has been working on her the whole time he’s been down there and gotten her from comatose to where she is now. But he needs to finish to give her a fuller personality and make her more functional,” suggests de-alta-cali on Reddit.

… or to create the ‘perfect’ workforce?

Could it be that the MDR team are actually transforming their own personalities through their work? Or, rather, that Mark is?

“What is Lumon doing? Severance is the product. A cure for mankind, ‘Remedium hominibus’,” writes Tim Cheadle on Threads. 

“Mark *is* Cold Harbour. He’s the experiment. (Maybe the test is severing deep emotional bonds, e.g. his wife.) The other MDR folks are variables in the experiment. The work is a red herring.”

… or to commit corporate espionage?

The Lexington Letter, a short story set in the Severance universe, reveals a potential dark side of Lumon’s operations. Because, if the letter is to be believed, macrodata refiners may be unknowingly participating in corporate espionage. 

In the letter, one of the ‘innies’ mentions completing a large file titled ‘Lexington’ at 2.30pm. Later that day, she learns a Dorner Therapeutics truck – belonging to one of Lumon’s competitors – was bombed at 2.32pm, killing six and destroying key devices.

The timing feels deeply, ominously, horribly suspicious. And, sure, it could be a coincidence, but this is Lumon after all: they’re twisted AF.

Natalie is a prisoner

A lot of people think that there is more to Natalie (Sydney Cole Alexander) than meets the eye – not least because of her anguished microexpressions.

“I genuinely wonder if she has some sort of modified Lumon chip, such that she’s almost like truly connected to the Board in her brain, but in a parasitic way, and they could just take her out if she ever stepped out of line,” says LimpEmu1021 on Reddit. 

Yup, while she seems harmless within the Lumon workplace, it’s been hinted that Natalie could be part of a larger, sinister system – just like Georgina in Get Out. Georgina came across as friendly but was secretly complicit in a dark, oppressive agenda, unable to express her true feelings because of the control over her.

Could it be that Natalie is playing a similar role, trapped in a system that keeps her from breaking free? Maybe all of the dead Board members’ consciousnesses have been set up to speak via her, quite literally?

Milchick is a mole

Thanks to his superior dance moves and wonderful command of the English language, Milchick (Tramell Tillman) is something of a fan favourite – and that’s in spite of the fact he works for Lumon. It makes sense, then, that some are already attempting to find him a redemption arc.

“Milchick is very suspicious. He rarely says anything genuine or unrehearsed to other people, and never to the innies. There’s definitely a front he presents to the innies that is seemingly meant to be managerial [and] non-threatening, but it reads as so sinister,” reads one Reddit post.

Throw in his tale about the Grakappan (a fictional Swedish king who would disguise himself to spend time among the common folk in order to learn about their true needs) and a fair few fans are insisting that Milchick is a mole. That this was his way of telling everyone he was a mole. That his discomfort, too, over the adapted Kier paintings hammers this point home.

And yet… well, I think he’s a vindictive bully and an obvious metaphor for middle management: the ones who lack the power to make decisions, who are desperate to befriend their underlings (while never afraid to throw them under the bus), and who are expected to meet the demands of their superiors by any means possible. Yuck.

Lumon is planning Irving’s untimely demise

OK, bear with me on this one. When he’s talking to the ‘innies’, Milchick tells them that Irving is on an “elongated cruise voyage,” so all the other innies think he’s somewhere on a boat.

So far, so innocent… until the opening scene of season 2 episode 5, in which we see a mysterious Lumon employee picking up some dentistry tools from O&D and delivering them to the Testing Floor. His face is never shown, but we do hear him whistling a little ditty: The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald by Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot. Which is, you guessed it, inspired by a real life freighter that sank in 1975, resulting in the deaths of 29 men.

I hope this is a stretch, because I bloody love Irving…

The dentistry tools are everything

The whistling man with the dentistry tools has sparked a genuinely compelling Reddit thread, all about the role that dentistry (and ether) plays within the show.

“In [season 2 episode 5], it’s mentioned that Kier worked in an ether mill. It’s been speculated on here that Kier likely worked with diethyl ether – why is this important? Well, let’s look at that name again: DIEThyl ethER,” the thread begins.

We know ether was traditionally used to help numb pain in women during childbirth and as an anesthetic agent during dental procedures in the 1800s. Side effects include amnesia and unconsciousness.

“Well, what does Helly first say when she encounters the Smile Wall: ‘Are we a dental company?’ And the very first thing we learn about Helly, in episode one, is: ‘Helly is [3o] years old, is allergic to almonds, and has weak enamel.’”

Mark has been using severance as a way to numb his grief and the pain of losing his wife – and to render himself unconscious from the real world. Miss Huang plays an etherphone. And Lumon is on a mission to change the world. Could it be that they’re severing people during routine dentist appointments, without their knowledge?

Miss Huang is (wait for it) a zombie

There’s more than one theory out there which claims Miss Huang (Sarah Bock) is either Gemma’s clone, or Mark and Gemma’s daughter. Somehow. Personally, though, I prefer the theory that she is one of several undead workers toiling at Lumon…

Think about it: firstly, she’s a crossing guard – a role often used as a metaphor for those who help usher souls from one world to another. Secondly, there’s the fact that Miss Huang is a literal (creepy) child. Thirdly, how about the fact that her LinkedIn profile refers to her as a “Wintertide Fellow”?

One post on Reddit highlights the 2023 film Wintertide, which is set in an isolated northern city as it battles a plague of depression that transforms its victims into zombie-like automatons. 

The Redditor notes that the film has “Invasion Of The Body Snatchers vibes, which also intersects with the Santa Mira (town from the film) file on Helly’s docket… all this to say: a body becoming a ‘zombie’ and being replaced by grafted yet ‘refined’ idealised characteristics all tracks.”

Based on the above, it seems likely Miss Huang’s body does not hold her original consciousness, right? Then again, she could be one of the severed children that Lumon is so desperate to get its mitts on…

And the goats?

Fun fact: goat’s milk is closer to human milk than cow’s milk is. In many countries, goat’s milk is actually used exclusively for infant feeding (although medical experts still advise against it).

“I think that they are cloning humans, and the goats are raised to produce milk for the babies. Notice all the references to lactation and birth. And in the goat room, there are milk pipes coming down from the ceiling, suggesting they have a huge milk processing facility somewhere,” reads an intriguing Reddit post.

Throw in the fact that Mrs Cobel/Selvig posed as a lactation expert to get closer to Mark’s sister, and the not-so-small matter of the governor’s wife using the severance procedure to get through pregnancy, and yeah, this one makes for a pretty solid theory.

And just like that, I’m counting down the minutes until the next episode of Severance drops. How about you?

Severance airs weekly on Fridays via Apple TV+. The first season is available to stream in full

Images: Apple TV+