4 ‘Severance’ Season Finale Theories That Would (Kind Of) Explain Everything

I’ve been predicting this for weeks, but all evidence suggests that Helly is sending herself back to work each day because her outie believes in Lumon and the value of severance. In the last few seconds of Episode 8, right as her “overtime mode” is going into effect, we see her wearing fancy clothes and holding a glass of champagne. You know why? Because she is at the damn Lumon gala with all her damn Eagan relatives, that’s why. How will inne Helly react when she awakens to find she’s actually the Jeff Bezos of the entire operation? Only time, and the love of a computer-generated Kier saying “I love you,” will tell.

We know now that Harmony isn’t severed—if she had been, she wouldn’t have been able to walk out the side door to the stairwell. But we don’t know why she’s so obsessed with severance and the limits of Mark’s memory, yet so resistant to the board and their demands. (We learn, in fact, that all her Mark stalking was on her own time, rather than something the board asked her to do.) Then there’s the issue of the Charlotte Cobel hospital bracelet she has in her creepy Lumon shrine. What does it all mean??? My theory, which dovetails with that of some other Redditers: Harmony Cobel’s mother (D.O.B. 3/17/44 per the bracelet) was in an accident (maybe Lumon workplace related?) and ended up in a coma. Much like Gemma, her brain was severed and her innie—much like Ms. Casey—still lives at Lumon, possibly down in the basement with the rest of the full-time-innies. Harmony is obsessed with seeing if an innie can remember their outie life, because she is still hoping that one day she and her real mother will be reunited. That’s why she’s so happy when she learns outie Mark is thinking of quitting. If his innie can escape, maybe Charlotte’s can too.

We now know that Irving’s outie can access some of his innie’s psyche, such that he paints the dark corridors and black goo of Lumon. But his most haunting painting is of the elevator shaft that Ms. Casey goes in—you know, the one that takes her to the terrifying basement where all the waffle party sex slaves live. To our knowledge, innie Iriving has never been to the basement…unless he’s had his memory erased and reprogrammed since then! Which brings me to...

Many superfans are geeking out over the control panel that Dylan accesses at the end of the episode, which implies that you can do things to a severed person beyond switch them from innie to outie mode. While we have no idea what “beehive” or “elephant” mean, and can take educated guesses about “branch transfer” and “clean slate,” we have to assume that with the click of a button, severed employees can have their brains turned on and off every which way. My prediction? MDR’s coup won’t go exactly as planned, Milchick will walk in on Dylan in the control room, and Mark and friends will be reprogrammed per one of these selections, thus setting everyone up for a whole host of new problems and, of course, an excellent season 2.

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