Severance Is A Brilliant Spin On A Familiar Existential Nightmare
The question of what actually constitutes humanity or sentience is one that has provided fodder for sci-fi and horror stories for decades. Even dating back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstien, the idea of whether or not an «artificial» person was really a person is something we just love to explore every chance we get--with robots, or zombies, or clones, in modern day or in dystopian futures. But, even at their very best, the vast majority of these stories do have clear moral dividing lines--sure, the replicant, or the cyborg, or the clone monster may be scary or hard for us to control, but they're still clearly sentient, right? Think about the robot uprising in Westworld or the tragedies of the Blade Runner franchise--sure, there's plenty of complication (and murder) to go around, but the morality of murding or exploiting a bunch of «artificial» people is still pretty obviously in the wrong.
Enter AppleTV+'s new show, Severance.
In Severance, there are no clones, robots, cyborgs, or other manufactured people to debate the nature of humanity. There are no flying cars or amusement parks for rich jerks to live out their worst fantasies. Instead, there's just a company--Lumon--and its employees who exist in a world that could be right here and now, in 2022, with only one key difference. At Lumon, employees are able to voluntarily undergo a surgical procedure called--wait for it--severance. Severance is the act of implanting a «spatially controlled» microchip into a person's brain that literally bifurcates their consciousness into two distinct and unique halves, one that is active while the person is on Lumon grounds, and one that is active everywhere else.
In the first episode of Severance, we meet Helly R (Britt Lower) who has
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