This review contains spoilers. #television #religion

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The followers of Kier Eagan, founder of Lumon Industries in the hit TV show Severance, bear a striking resemblance to real-life religious believers — from the weirdness of their rites to the abuse they inflict on others and themselves.

Fixated on the founder's life, they shape language and traditions that reflect his words and deeds. They revere his texts and relics, produce symbolic art and propaganda, and refer to him as though he were still alive, exerting his influence. The descendants of Kier are said not to die, but to “revolve.” It is also implied that most, if not all of his Followers were indoctrinated as children.

A recurring concern for the Followers is “taming the four tempers” — Kier's version of the seven deadly sins. These tempers (Woe, Frolic, Dread, and Malice), it is explained, are more than merely present in people. They are the complete building blocks of every human soul. As with Christianity, this belief in one's inherent impurity creates the battleground for perpetual war between the spiritual mind and the sinful flesh — a war that, like Jesus, only Kier has had the strength to win, and in so doing was ascended above man.

Unbeknownst to them, the severed workers in Macrodata Refinement are soldiers in that war. Their assignment is to sort numbers representing the four tempers; in Mark's file, these come from his wife, Gemma. Lumon has been subjecting her many innies to painful experiments, then asking her outie what she remembers of them.

Her final test is in Cold Harbor, a room designed to be as triggering to Gemma as possible. Lumon hopes that her latest innie will nonetheless be totally unaffected, thanks to Mark's work. “Refinement” of the tempers, though its exact function is still unclear, seems at the heart of Lumon's ultimate goal of eliminating suffering itself.

In biblical terms, sin is often at the root of suffering. And as with the most fervent Christian or Muslim believers, the Followers are not concerned with merely conquering sin on a personal level. Their calling is to purify the world. As Jame Eagen tells Helly in the first season finale, “They'll all be Kier's children.”

Note on refinement

There is ambiguity about what “refinement” does. In the Kier mythology, every human soul can be measured by “the precise ratio” of the tempers inside him. MDR workers are tasked to sort four types of numbers (the tempers) into five categories, but it's not clear what those categories are or what sorting them actually achieves, other than it has something to do with the severance chip. Because the severance procedure creates an innie, it is plausible that they are identifying the composition of the human soul so that the severance chip can better delete it and thus create what is effectively a truly new human. However, it's also possible that the temporal split is a separate function of the chip and that sorting the tempers serves some other, as yet undetermined purpose.

The weirdness of religion

Religious themes and messianic figures are nothing new in fiction. A compelling element of Severance is that it shows how religiosity makes people behave in ways that can seem utterly bizarre to nonbelievers.

The constant references to Kier, the aggrandizing propaganda, and the obsession with structuring all things according to his example are no weirder than real-life theists praising their god at every turn, getting on their knees to pray, following rules from a book of myths, and generally shoving every aspect of life through a filter of religious interpretation. It can make them appear severed from reality.

Milchik is probably the clearest example of this. In the show, he serves as both an enforcer of doctrine as well as a victim of it. His striving to act according to Lumon rules overrides any possibility of genuine human connection, and leads to a tone-deaf attitude that is often inappropriate for the situation at hand — like when he aloofly hosts a “retirement” ceremony for a worker who has effectively died, or energetically dances to a marching band for the sake of someone who clearly has no cause to understand the fanfare.

In addition to showing little empathy, Milchik's persistent inability to read the room not only confuses the severed workers but repeatedly enables them to take advantage of him. He never seems to learn they have their own agenda and aren't playing by the same rules. This is typical of real-life believers, who often struggle to reason outside the framework of their faith. Atheists may be familiar, for example, with theists who genuinely can't understand that claims about the bible or threats of damnation have no effect on them.

Self-policing doctrine

Most of the time, Milchik devotes all his energy in service to Lumon (the Church) and its doctrine. The myth, the rules — and the institution that upholds them — have supremacy over all. Including himself.

However, there are exceptions. Despite his efforts, he is only human. The suppression of normal emotion is unsustainable, and it is when that unnatural restraint fails that Milchik is at his most authentic. On those occasions, he is prone to expressing anger or annoyance, acting out against the severed workers who resist the doctrine, or against the superiors who relentlessly impose it upon him — such as when he tells Drummond to eat shit for making him apologize for his verbosity.

Drummond's own fixation on Milchik's choice of words might seem like targeted hostility, but is really a logical — if severe — carrying-out of a doctrine that abhors all excess. And in true religious fashion, doctrine is not only a thing to be impressed upon the naive — it must also be continually imposed among those who already believe.

Because any system that struggles against nature is inherently fragile. Nature will always resist. The system must be enforced at all times, lest it fall apart at any moment.

In their ongoing effort to “tame the four tempers” and adhere to Lumon code, the Followers thus police themselves and each other. They attempt to express themselves only in the prescribed manner and in prescribed doses, striving to be like the severed floor — the physical embodiment of Lumon's ideal mind: cold, organized, compartmentalized.

Like the indoctrinated of our own world, Milchik is smothered by his own system of belief. He may occasionally find the strength for a gasp of air, for the briefest moment of assertion — though as is usually the case for those in his position, overthrowing the system itself is simply unimaginable.

Severed from virtue

While their minds are blank and thus fertile for religious influence, the innies are actually too raw to be properly indoctrinated. Their newness in the world endows them with the innocence and liveliness typically associated with children — who in our real-world religions are also absolved of sin, as they are too young to understand right from wrong.

Almost paradoxically, this causes the innies to be the only characters in Severance who truly embody Lumon's nine core principles (mirroring the Christian seven heavenly virtues), such as cheer, humility, nimbleness, and wit. These virtues exist in the innies more than in the Followers of Kier, more than even in their own outies, who are themselves shown to be living drab, depressing lives.

Concurrently, it is the Followers who most lack the core principles. Though they have not undergone the severance procedure, they are nonetheless severed from their own selves. They are dogmatic and traumatized; shells of human beings whose innocence and healthy emotion have long been lost.

Harmony's aunt tells her that as a child, she had the “fire of Kier” within her; yet in adulthood, she lacks all liveliness, speaking almost exclusively in low, monotonous tones. “Frolic,” the only cheerful of the four tempers, is tattooed on Drummond's hand, a man without an ounce of gaiety. When Milchik or Natalie smile, there is no warmth in it. Jame Eagen, expressing the impact of Helly's betrayal, says he “threw a tin of candies” to convey how badly he lost control. (As she says in response: “God, you're fucking weird.”)

In Lumon's demand for absolute control, the spirit of life itself — the “fire of Kier” that it so values — is precisely the thing its Followers must kill; just like the “verve” that Drummond seeks in the lamb only makes it eligible for slaughter.

Innocence reborn

Jame also tells Helly that her outie once possessed that “fire,” which “left her as she grew.” Yet he witnessed the fire in Helly, the version of Helena that happens to be free of religious doctrine and abuse. This alone seems to have been enough to draw him to the severed floor so that he may see her, mouth agape, the way a tired, jaded man can find dreamlike beauty in a child's innocence.

Is it a coincidence that Helly — the least reverent of the severed workers, who routinely laughs and scoffs in the face of Kier propaganda — is the spunkiest of all the characters in Severance? And that her shambling father — the highest living representative of the religious cult — has the least fire of them all?

This again highlights the unwinnable struggle at the heart of those religions that propose a good life requires opposition to one's own sinful nature. In the biblical narrative, man doomed himself when he ate of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. He must strive to do good, but a life truly without sin — and thus without suffering — is reserved only for the likes of god.

Man can only experience genuine innocence and be free of suffering when without the knowledge of good and evil — a luxury afforded only by young children, shortly after life begins. To be pure, to be without the suffering that comes from sin, one must therefore be reborn.

Or severed.