In the first scene of Apple TV’s hit show Severance, a disembodied voice asks an unconscious woman a question as old as philosophy itself: “who are you?” To the woman’s horror, as she slowly awakens, she finds she is unable to answer.
The reason is that she has just undergone a surgical procedure to insert a chip into her brain, in order to separate her memories between her work life and her personal life. So, while her body remains one, her consciousness has been split into two separate streams: the “outie” who exists in the outside world and who will never see the inside of the office; and the “innie” who only ever experiences the office, knows nothing about the outside world, and never gets to leave the workplace.
As with all great sci-fi, the premise of Severance – the second series of which concludes on March 21 – is both fairly simple and absolutely dizzying in its multifaceted ramifications. The fictional technology at the heart of the show raises terrifying, yet very relevant, issues of exploitation and the constant threat of dehumanisation under capitalism.
It also illustrates how feelings like grief always manage to find their way back to us, no matter how hard we try to shut them out. But for the philosophically minded viewer, Severance is remarkable because it invites us to reflect in depth on the age-old problems of self and personal identity.
One question immediately stands out to the viewer: are the innie and the outie the same person? After all, they share the same body, and the chip doing the severing is operating within a single brain. If our basis for personal identity was physical continuity alone then the answer would be “yes”. But as the show makes abundantly clear, this is not an acceptable answer.
Severance puts a new spin on classical philosophical thought experiments about personal identity. These usually involve convoluted scenarios in which consciousness is transferred into a different body, and brains kept in vats.
But in the world of Severance, one body alternately hosts two different people. The innie and outie’s conscious experiences are entirely separate.
The outie retains all of their past memories, with the exception of the chip-induced work amnesia. Innies, on the other hand, possess a certain amount of general knowledge about the world, but they can’t remember any personal facts, from their own name to the colour of their mother’s eyes, nor can they recall any of the unique moments that shape a person’s history.
The timelines within which outie and innie exist do not intersect, and their lives move at completely different paces. The outie gets to have what we would consider a more or less normal temporal experience – including luxuries like breaks in between each day – but for the innie, life begins the first time the chip is activated and from then on, their whole existence is an uninterrupted succession of work shifts.
There is no respite from the continuous drudgery, not to mention from the Sartrean nightmare of never being able to escape the judgmental gaze of one’s co-workers. It is precisely this split in personal history that makes it impossible to consider innie and outie as the same person.
But it is not enough to say that we are simply the sum of our memories and experiences. Throughout the series it is hinted that the severance barrier is not as impervious as we might think, and that there is something that persists beyond, or in spite of, severance.
This is perhaps not surprising since innie and outie share the exact same genetic makeup and body. While they are undoubtedly distinct people, they might be understood as variations on the same theme, or as different expressions of the same innate dispositions.
In Severance, the classical problem of nature v nurture morphs into a vertiginous question about who we would be without our trauma. The cast does an exceptional job of portraying the different ways in which the hardships of life can alter a body and a personality. The weight of grief physically crushes Mark Scout (Adam Scott’s outie character), and this is especially visible in early episodes when he transitions into his innie who immediately stands taller, and whose whole demeanour untenses, no longer burdened by loss.
In the second season, we see an outie called Helena (Britt Lower) watch video recordings of her innie. She slowly realises that she is watching someone who, despite unenviable circumstances, is living a life much fuller and freer than her own. As something of a blank slate, the innie might appear to reveal something authentic about the outie’s innate tendencies, about the kind of person they could have been if things had been different, if life hadn’t taken such a toll.
But this is where the idea of severance as a philosophical thought experiment finds its limits. Not because it isn’t possible to speculate any further, but because to do so might mean missing the whole point of the show.
The idea that the severance procedure might be a way to undo harm is precisely the trap that many of the characters fall into. While grief and all of life’s other challenges profoundly alter us – sometimes to the point that we feel like we are no longer ourselves – it is fruitless, and often dangerous, to pretend that these hardships aren’t an integral part of who we are.
The creators of Severance are less concerned with solving philosophical puzzles about the nature of the self than with showing that to sever oneself in any capacity is, ultimately, to alienate oneself from oneself. For all its social commentary, high-concept fictional technology, and deep metaphysical insights, Severance is at its heart, a show about connection.
Severance seasons 1&2 are available on AppleTV+
Emily Herring is a freelance writer and editor, whose book Herald of a Restless World is the first biography of Henri Bergson in English
