My Severed Year

On Severance Season 2 and being in the closet.

What follows is a “review” of Apple TV’s Severance from a trans perspective. Consider it my Trans Day of Visibility post. This essay contains major spoilers for Season 1 of the show and minor spoilers for Season 2 (minor on the order of “these two characters have a conversation” but not the content of that conversation). If you don’t want to be spoiled, don’t read ahead!

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Severance is a show about a group of workers who undergo a surgical procedure (“severance”) that splits their memory in half such that their work lives (their “innies”) and their personal lives (their “outies”) are separate. The innie has no experience of the world outside their office building, while the outie has no memory of their work life.

When you come up with a premise like that, the first good idea you get is, “What if a person’s innie and outie have parallel story arcs, thereby exploring themes of identity, self-actualization, and human rights?” The first bad idea you get is, “What if the protagonist of the story and the antagonist of the story are the same person?? That would be such a CRAZY twist!” Severance Season 1 follows through on both those ideas in a way that I would argue is well done.