this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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[Moved to Piefed] Television
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Nowhere is it stated that C&M come into work every day, they might only come in for special occasions, or they could have other jobs in-between. Also, did you count 160 people, or are you guessing? It looked like way fewer to me, though still a rather large number.
I honestly don't get the "mystery box" criticism. The biggest mysteries have already been explained.
They're putting temps through brain surgery?
I was being dramatic to express my point
Tap for spoiler
So then what is the purpose of MDRs work? To create a better severed employee / birth mother? That was the answer to why severed employees exist? To create more severed employees? It's not a satisfying ending if the premise of the show is 'you thought severing was flawless, but guess what it fails sometime, but guess what, we use severed employees to make it fail less'.I thought the purpose of MDR was
Tap for spoiler
to perfect the severing so that anybody (who can afford it, I'd guess) can have their "innie" go through all the negative/bad experience stuff and you don't have to suffer through it.Imagine how much a company could make selling you the ability to dissociate and compartmentalize all the things you don't like or that you have a negative response to.
Don't like the dentist, send your innie. Don't like flying, have your innie to the flying bit, then for you it's like you stepped on and then right back off the plane. The possibilities are endless.
I mean yeah, I thought all the rooms Gemma was in, plus the pregnancy gave all of that away. The company would be one of the richest in the world.
But then there was never any mystery. The secret reveal is the core premise of the show.
It doesn't matter to me whether there was ever a mystery because that wasn't the interesting part. "What are they working on?" doesn't need to have an amazing answer; it could just be accounting for all I care. What matters is who the characters are, what they have done and will do and why. And more importantly, the way it highlights issues with corporations by drawing interesting parallels within the story. Maybe people in real life will be inclined to question their own conditions and be inspired to protest for better lives.
The show is telling a story. Revealing the purpose of MDR propels the story. I don't know what the plan is for the next season but I, personally, am interested to see the ethical debate about innies being "people". Maybe that will be a plot point in the future.
But there's no debate out of that universe. They are people. It's contrived as hell. I don't care if some of Severance's dystopian citizens think it's Fine, Actually, that's not thought provoking. Lumon is uncontroversially evil.
There's interesting parallels to neocolonialism to be made and the way it trivializes human rights abuses through invisibilisation, but up to now the show hasn't been interested in delving into that. Most they've done is a surface-level critique of corporate capitalism, mildly interesting exploration of cultish behavior, and lots of unexplained mystery of its own sake with unrewarding payoffs.
When a good mystery is revealed, you're supposed to go "of course! They basically told us that, I just didn't pay close enough attention!". But Severance's mystery reveals (almost) always come off as cheap thrills drawn out for too long with zero foreshadowing. Ah so Ms Casey is his wife... Okay? And redhead is the CEO's daughter... Sure? And Cold Harbor is just an iterative improvement on Severance? That's actually more boring than what was being foreshadowed.
I've said it before but without going too far into spoilers, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 does an infinitely job on themes of loss and pain and escapism and mystery than Severance ever did or could. I finished it before the show and the similar themes and love of a good mystery really made Severance's plot look like a crude children's drawing in comparison.
Lumon is an analog for any medical giant. Considering the top 30 medical companies in real life all gross over 10 billion a year, it's not inconceivable they'd have the money to pay musicians, who could also be used for marketing, entertainment, internal videos, hold music, etc...
Why is the goat department 6 people and MDR 4 then?
The reality is the marching band department makes absolutely zero sense. That scene was clearly just written in because the fans smiled and clapped when they saw Millchek dance at the end of season 1 and some crappy writer though 'how can we make an even better dancing scene than season 1, that's what the fans want!'
You're completely ignoring the subtext of Milchick, a Black man who evidently gets disadvantaged at work due to his skin color, using his power as the floor manager to choose a marching band as the method of celebration for their achievement. It directly ties into his season-long arc.
It's fine not to know that such a subtext exists, I also didn't know when I first saw the scene - but maybe try reading up instead of just assuming that there's no sense to what you're seeing?
Just because it makes sense with one character's arc, doesn't meant it makes sense in the broader context of the show.
There are lots of ways a writer could have written the conclusion to that character arc for Milchick that didn't require suddenly establishing not just a full department, but the biggest department we've seen at the company by far, consisting entirely of marching band players that are apparently very practiced.
I mean it is a piece of entertainment, not a documentary or scientific experience (both of which are also subject to performing towards people's preferences anyway).
You'd prefer that the Sci fi about having a switch that can turn you into multiple people based on a religious cult in a universe which is both simultaneously more advanced but uses older aesthetics than ours be more realistic to how normal offices work?
Yes, that is literally the core concept of the show.
The severing technology and Lumon itself are the two things about the world that drive it's difference from ours. Nothing they've established in their world building would explain why the C&M department would be that large, when literally every other department is extremely minimal, and C&M has played no role in any previous celebrations.
They have a giant underground museum that is used to reward employees with waffles and sex, and an indoor field to raise goats for ritual sacrifice, the marching band is probably cheaper and easier to organize than either, let alone both.
Everything about Lumon staffing has been minimal though. The staff in every department feel too small for the size of the space they're in.
Just like from a managerial and reporting standpoint, how many direct managers does the marching band department have? How many elevators do they take to get to their department every day?
And why are they all equally as primed to revolt as MDR? They could easily have just sat in front of the vending machine and blocked it, why did they let Milchick knock it over unless they wanted an excuse to physically harm him?
If they're doing other jobs on the severed floor in-between C&M performances, they're not temps.
Ah, given that you stated it was 4x the size of all the other departments we've seen combined, I assumed you were serious.
spoiler
We know that MDR is creating new personalities for the Severance chips of other people, and we know that there's a huge milestone with either putting many different personalities onto a single chip, or with a personality confronting the deepest trauma of a person. That's absolutely no mystery box. You may not like the answer to be so simple (as you've stated elsewhere), but that doesn't mean it's a mystery box.
spoiler
The show has shown us multiple times that severing isn't flawless, e.g. with Irvings black goop (and also iMark being affected by the sadness oMark feels due to Gemmas death). This isn't some new revelation, it has been a part of the story since very early on.