Okay so obviously one of the main questions that Severance is asking is "who is a person?" Like, what is a life, what constitutes living? The outies don't consider that when they choose severance, they're creating an entirely new person, someone with a consciousness that exists seperate from their own. Even if they know that's what's happening in some way, they don't really GET that.
Early in season 1, Helena Eagan seems like such a cold monster for telling Helly "You are not a person. I am a person."
And she clearly is cold, no doubt. But she's also being honest about the way most outies genuinely seem to regard their innies. She's just saying it in a way they won't.
Mark says he understands his innie is a person, but the way he talks to him betrays that. Him and Devon are nice and gentle, but at the end of the day neither of them consider what it will mean to take down Lumon or for Mark to quit. Will it be ending innie Marks life? Sure. But he's not *really* a person, he doesnt *really* have a life, not like they have lives. So it's not the same.
Theyre like, genuinely shocked he takes this so poorly.
When Dylan G proposes to Gretchen, he says "i can give you a life." Which struck me as such a specific way to put that, because... he cant, really? Not "a life" the way she would understand it, with all the things people use to "build a life together." Like, a family, a home, time spent together not in one weird waiting room.
What kind of life can you offer when you only exist on one floor of one building? When you can only see each other in one room, possibly for an hour at a time every few days or weeks?
For Gretchen, that wouldn't be a life. But to Dylan G, it's all he knows. So it is a life, a full one. He has nothing else to compare it to.
For Mark and Devon and Helena, it seems so cruel to look at the lives of the innies and see them as less. As not real. To see the innies as not real people.
But i don't think the show is saying that they're wrong. I don't think it's saying that theyre right, either. I think it's just posing questions, difficult ones. It's easy to say "of course the innies are people, with lives and consciousness of their own, and its cruel to discount that."
But even the innies do the same thing. They do it to Ms. Casey, and to every single one of Gemma's other consciousnesses.
25 seperate consciousnesses, who only exist for hours at a time, in one room. Are those lives, are those people?
As Gemma and Mark run for the elevator, Dr. Mauer yells for them to stop. He yells "you're killing them all." At first i didn't get who he meant. I thought maybe he meant all the innies on the severed floor, like Innie Mark said. If they took Lumon down, they all die.
But he meant Gemma. All the Gemma's that exist in those rooms, the ones Innie Mark created.
If innies are people, seperate people with individual consciousness, then both Innie and Outie Mark just committed mass murder.
And he did it to Ms Casey, too. Has been trying to do exactly that all season. To find his outies wife and get her out of there. It was never a question of asking Ms Casey what she wanted or letting her have a life of her own on the severed floor, the way innie Mark and Helly choose. It was always about getting Gemma out, saving her.
The innies complain that their outies don't treat them like people, that they don't give them choices, but when faced with the same question, neither Helly nor Mark hesitate to put Gemma over Ms Casey.
They don't see her as a person the way they see themselves as people. And they REALLY don't see her other 24 consciousnesses as people. But why not? How long do you have to be alive to be considered a person? How many places do you need to be allowed to exist in before you get a choice?
To the outies, it's hard for them to consider that the innies are people in the same way they are. Their lives are too small, too confined.
And its the same for the innies. Gemma was split into 25 people, 24 of which likely only exist in one room, for maybe a few hours at a time. It's an existence even smaller than their half-lives, and they don't give it consideration the same way their outies don't consider them.
Is a life that small really a life? Would each of Gemma's consciousness' fight for their strange existence if they had a choice? If they knew what walking out those doors meant, would they be afraid to do it?
Would Ms Casey have chosen to leave, if Innie Mark had told her what was happening? If he had stopped to consider what he was doing in that moment, do you think he would have done anything different?
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