tadc episode 9 and severance season 1 spoilers under the cut (warning: very long and rambly!)
i was trying to put my finger on why learning about the circus members' real lives in the episode 9 leak bothered me so much, but upon talking to some friends about severance i think it finally clicked for me. they don't react nearly enough.
for a disclaimer i am not done with severance season 2, so please don't spoil that for me! im watching it episode by episode with some friends and i want to preserve the mystery.
for tadc fans who haven't seen severance, an elevator pitch for the plot is that severed peoples' brain 'switches' from work mode (innies) to outerworld mode (outies) based on whether or not they are currently in their office. the innies know nothing about their outies and vice versa, and a considerable (but appropriate) amount of season 1 is dedicated to characters in the office musing about their outies.
dylan is seen wondering if he has a wife, kids, etc and joking about what his outie must be like, and irving has strange hallucinations and a budding relationship in the office that will be ruined when his boyfriend quits his job, thus effectively 'killing' his innie. it's to the point where office mental health check-ins can consist of merely hearing facts about their outie, which soothes their mind.
then, when dylan's innie is 'woken up' forcibly while he's outside of his office, just relaxing at home, and he sees that he has a son in the outerworld, he freaks the fuck out. understandably! when he's back in the office, he demands to know more about his family, and it's one of the moments that serves as a catalyst for the macrodata crew to really put effort into trying to escape. milchick tries to bribe dylan into abandoning this plan in episode 9 by telling him he can learn more about his family (or maybe even meet them, i forgor the specifics).
severance and tadc are obviously very fundamentally different stories with different characters and morals, but they sort of have a similar concept if you squint: characters are thrown into a different reality with no memory of certain aspects of their life, and made to interact with others in the same boat, with relationships unfolding in ways they wouldn't be able to otherwise. granted, severance doesn't have the same "this is all a game" ethos that tadc has especially with jax, but they're similar enough that one would think learning about the circus members' real lives would be agitating to them in at least a similar way as it is to mdr in severance s1e9.
take zooble and gangle, for example. both of them seemingly achieve their dreams in the outerworld! zooble opens their own bar and gangle gets a considerable online presence. ragatha escapes from her mother and becomes an awesome realtor! even jax pulls his life together! this is treated by the show as a comforting, happy thing, that even if the circus members are stuck here forever, at least their 'outies' lead good lives. shouldn't this be at least a little agitating? that this life will never be truly theirs? shouldn't they have a stronger reaction to seeing an alternate version of themselves living out the life they always wanted?
kinger has a very similar situation to dylan in terms of what he sees. dylan sees that he has a wife and kids, and immediately tries to do everything he can to claw his way back to them. kinger... sees that he has a wife and kids, and is just chill i guess? he doesn't want to know more? he doesn't beg caine to keep showing him things, doesn't seem to care that this life is completely intangible? he doesn't have ANY reaction to the fact that it's literally his fault that this is how things shook out?
another similarity is the dehumanization integral to the episode 9s of both shows. helena eagen views her innie as subhuman, just a tool piloting her body, and even tells her as such directly, which obviously causes helly a lot of internal struggle, especially as this comes directly as she attempts suicide to get out. the tadc gang literally learns that they factually Are Not humans, and yet this doesn't seem to cause nearly as many lasting effects as it does in severance. now, severance has two seasons of much longer episodes, so maybe there's just more time to explore the psychological effects of being treated like mindless drones. but idk, if tadc episode 9 stopped being The Jax Show for even 20 minutes we could have had more elaboration on what it feels like for everyone to be told they're basically just glorified NPCs.
it just bothers me that there is no repercussion for any of this, and that caine's attempt to soothe the gang by showing them their 'outies' literally works. it would have been better if the show played this for horror, emphasized caine's inability to sympathize with humans (or brain scans of humans) like we saw with him and zooble and their body dysphoria. or better yet if they did anything else. the soma theory being confirmed was just so. utterly, bafflingly fumbled.
the treatment of suicide is also. so weird? in severance, the fact that helly's suicide attempt isn't taken seriously is horrifying. she's sent right back to work after a recovery phase and her outie tells her in no uncertain terms that she doesn't matter. the treatment of her suicide attempt shows the huge power imbalance between innies and outies and is downright chilling the way she's treated more like a misbehaving child than a suicidal adult trapped in a harmful alternate reality.
in tadc, jax's abstraction (if we take it as a metaphor for suicide) is. handled the same way, without any of the horror? granted, his abstraction gets more responses from the gang than helly's attempt does from upper management, but it reads more as because this is The Jax Show than because the gang actually really has genuine feelings about this. then he's just kept around as the digital circus pet, which feels so gross to me. it's the same dehumanization and flippant treatment of suicide, except with severance it's horror, and with tadc it's... 'oh look it's fine because jax is our dog now and everyone else goes into a fishtank :D'
idk man, this was really long and rambly but i have a lot of thoughts on this, and it just... really bothers me, especially as i reflect back on severance in preparation to keep watching with friends. i understand that they are very different shows, but again, they have enough plot similarities that it makes me kind of squint judgmentally at how tadc tries to tackle similar concepts with a much more clumsy execution.
anyway im going to go rewatch severance season 1.
