Severance: Hide and Seek   Rewatch 
January 2, 2025 8:54 PM - Season 1, Episode 6 - Subscribe

Burt and Irving fraternize among the plants. Macrodata Refinement team up with Optics and Design to share notes on what’s going on. Mark and Alexa go on a much more successful date. Milchick wakes up Dylan at his home.

This episode puts a bunch of pieces in play for the last three episodes, where stuff really starts moving.

In the room with the plants:

Burt: Irving, you know, the Lumon manual doesn’t say anything about lip-to-lip contact.
Irving: It does discourage romantic fraternization, though.
Burt: This can’t be romantic then.
Irving: No.
Burt: Not romantic… at all?
Irving: I’m truly sorry… I’m just not ready.

In a speech to the combined forces of Macrodata Refinement and Optics and Design:

Mark: If the Eagan philosophy is illumination above all… Then why doesn’t that include us? Why are we down here still working in the dark?
Dylan: That was poetic as shit, man.
posted by simonw (12 comments total)
 
The scene where Dylan wakes up feels like a key turning point for the entire series. The question it raises about how Dylan will react is answered quite spectacularly in the next episode.
posted by simonw at 8:56 PM on January 2 [2 favorites]


I've always been fascinated by how the innies are in awe of Ricken's book; I guess they haven't been immunized to bullshit yet.

Happened to have paused screen while writing this and it's of Turturo looking incredibly innocent.

That plant room still bothers me; irl with that setup, the plants would die from inadequate spectrum lighting and fertigation. If they did get what they needed, that room would have rotted out from mildew without adequate ventilation.
posted by porpoise at 10:51 PM on January 2 [1 favorite]


Maybe when the plants start to die the goats come in and eat them all, then they are replaced with fresh plants.
posted by mikepop at 6:06 AM on January 3 [3 favorites]


The scene where Dylan wakes up feels like a key turning point for the entire series.

And it's all for that ideographic card? How could that be so sensitive? I've never understood that. I love how Dylan's characterization changes from here. He's such a hero through the end of this season.

I love Helly's line, "This is more people than I've ever seen." Full stop. No qualification, and it's true.
posted by gladly at 7:19 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]


And it's all for that ideographic card? How could that be so sensitive? I've never understood that.

Yes, it does seem like kind of a drastic response to wake Dylan up outside of work over that. He's been the one still seemingly toeing the company line the most closely up to that point, so maybe Milchick was extra worried to have caught him transgressing (and maybe you could imagine he only just caught the theft on camera footage in review after hours or something?), but couldn't Milchick have just waited to question him until Dylan's innie showed up at work the next day? You'd think he'd have more leverage over him there anyway.

Maybe Milchick was just panicking, with the whole MDR department now apparently rebelling against his authority and trying to form an alliance with O&D, and he wanted to try and handle things outside the view of his corporate overlords who might punish him for losing control. Or there was an interesting theory in one of the posts from the original Fanfare watch of the series which pointed out that the card being ideographic means it might have been specifically designed to get out of the severed floor and past the elevator and stairwell scanners. Maybe Milchick feared Dylan had already taken the card off work premises and wanted to try and retrieve it as soon as possible if so.
posted by sigmagalator at 3:11 PM on January 5 [2 favorites]


I've always thought, partly on the strength of the card being important enough to wake Dylan for, that it was part of a highly secret sinister plan Lumen considered important, in the nature of an army of non-speaking/non-language understanding people from their creepy lower levels to attack... somewhere. In which case perhaps the importance level rises to outside of work interrogation. But then the theory that the cards can go inside elevators also makes sense, but then why can they be created so openly by the design people without the risk of theft? Or maybe Lumen is so secretive that it's just considered important for Milcheck to enforce any security protocol to the maximum just in case.
posted by lookoutbelow at 5:26 AM on January 6 [1 favorite]


That plant room still bothers me; irl with that setup, the plants would die from inadequate spectrum lighting and fertigation. If they did get what they needed, that room would have rotted out from mildew without adequate ventilation.

All rubber plants, every last one of 'em. As befits a basement office.

And yeah, the pace of the last two episodes really cranked up the absolute what the fuckery that was the severed floor of Lumon Industries.
posted by Kyol at 7:12 PM on January 13 [1 favorite]


Per the set decorator podcast linked from another episode, they used real plants for that shot but it was meant to look like storage for zillions of extremely fake plants such as we have already seen dotted around the set. So they should have had the lights off for arrival to really sell that.
posted by janell at 1:04 PM on January 14 [4 favorites]


As befits a basement office.

I dunno, I used to be the secret "keep plants alive" person at the office. It's doable if you care enough and there are the right kinds of plants.
posted by porpoise at 2:00 AM on January 15


I think the scene at the bar at the punk show was the first appearance of currency in the show.
posted by Pronoiac at 9:16 PM on January 16 [1 favorite]


It’s funny, but as the series gets more specific, it also gets more universal. The metaphor of the severed workers toiling in the dark trying to figure out what their lives mean, being told by the system that only productivity and authority are meaningful is so applicable to our society. It keeps its puzzle-box nature, but it has deep meaning beyond that.

I feel like this would be great to watch alongside Andor.
posted by rikschell at 7:18 AM on January 22 [2 favorites]


Slight script-prop disconnect with the 'ideographic' card. Pretty sure at some point (maybe when it's found behind the toilet) we get a brief glimpse of the card's back, which says LUMON or something.
posted by Text TK at 1:43 PM on January 22


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