Severance

I'm fine with it as a plot point, but it came out of nowhere for the audience.

Fine, make Irving figure it out. But I don't know, maybe *show* us the clues instead of it just happening and 99% of us need it explained because the writers couldn't or wouldn't.

I've been keeping up on what /tv/ thinks and they had it pegged right away. That's another thing I'm not doing next season. I'd rather be going in blind every single time. If I had been keeping up on the chatter week to week with S1 of Westworld I would have had a much worse experience watching it.

Yeah, while it was pretty clear to us that Helly was actually Helena, unless Irving is literally being contacted in his dreams like was suggested, that's a wild leap for Irv to determine she was an Eagan.

we did back to back 4 & 5 this week since super busy last week with football parties and stuff, i loved it all. The thing I really enjoy about this show is i have no FUCKING CLUE what is going on. Pretty much 90% of other TV you can guess the rough outlines of whats gonna happen next since we're all watching the same big TV shows and movies and all the big stories are just variations of other stuff.

This shit is wild though, never in a million years would I have guessed a innie team building outdoors exercise in a winter hell lol

I didn't catch the Irving/Helena thing but I do think they planted enough clues for very smart viewers (I wish I was!), also a big thing I didn't see mentioned above is that Irving immmediately put together that Helly's outie is someone in charge because only that kind of person would have the sort of power to "override" innie/outie switching, a random employee wouldn't. There was clearly more to how Irving figured it out (the dream) while Mark/Dylan didn't and I doubt its just random and will likely be a big plot point having to do with all the research outie Irving has.

The beginning of the latest episode has a lot of teases too I am not smart enough to figure out. A guy is taking dental tools to "the scary floor", whats that about? He is humming the song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" which is about a ship sinking in the great lakes in the 70s, but Milkshake also says Irving is on a long cruise vacation. That can't be a coincidence but I have no clue what it means. Who is Irving talking to on the phone?

Intrinsic said:

On a similar topic, how did he realize the note with directions was behind the picture? Kind of missed that.

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Irv yelled hang in there at him before his exit. That was the text on the front of the poster

Are there any theories that the office is a virtual construct? I think the "off-site" team building exercise clearly wasn't in reality.

ShakyJake said:

Are there any theories that the office is a virtual construct? I think the "off-site" team building exercise clearly wasn't in reality.

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I didn't think that. It was weird like most things in the show but explained as Egan private land. If it was virtual reality than there wouldn't be risk to Helena from Irv's actions. And there are clear physical consequences felt by both sides when something physical happens.

Doesn't the management basically bypass the servered thing though? People like Milchick and Cobel? Didn't they also use a normal staircase at some point to leave the building?

But then, if it were virtual, that'd be the only explanation that makes sense to me on how his wife (who he said he identified her dead body) is "alive" in there.

I just want to know what the fuck the deal with Ms. Wong is. That shit is the weirdest part to me.

Gravel said:

Doesn't the management basically bypass the servered thing though? People like Milchick and Cobel? Didn't they also use a normal staircase at some point to leave the building?

But then, if it were virtual, that'd be the only explanation that makes sense to me on how his wife (who he said he identified her dead body) is "alive" in there.

I just want to know what the fuck the deal with Ms. Wong is. That shit is the weirdest part to me.

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A popular theory out there is that the purpose of all this activity is to create life ala Frankenstein. So people think the woman he saw as his wife was essentially a clone of his wife and I guess their activities are somehow recreating her essence as a person. The ultimate goal being to bring Kier Eagan back to life in both body and mind.

Gravel said:

Doesn't the management basically bypass the servered thing though? People like Milchick and Cobel? Didn't they also use a normal staircase at some point to leave the building?

But then, if it were virtual, that'd be the only explanation that makes sense to me on how his wife (who he said he identified her dead body) is "alive" in there.

I just want to know what the fuck the deal with Ms. Wong is. That shit is the weirdest part to me.

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Milkshake is not severed, he even says it at the beginning of season 2 during his "apology" to mark about how he behaved as an unsevered person to a severed person. So they can go in and out any way they want.

and yeah Ms. Wong is wild, one crazy thing would be if she is the child of Mark and Gemma, the age would fit, she's asian, and if a car crash happened she might have "died". Its also a little bit of a nod to how as you get older your bosses start to get younger and younger and this is an extreme version of that.

there's all sorts of weird stuff you pick up on rewatching episodes, like I didn't really quite follow the whole black goo stuff at first but now its a bit more obvious that outie Irving was constantly painting the same thing over and over to try and send a subconcious message to his innie, but there is a lot of mysterious shit going on with outie Irving (who is he calling?) we don't understand.

All the paintings, the way people talk, the whole Kier "religion", is there religion on the outside?, the fact that Lumon was founded the year the civil war ended, on and on but who knows if it ends up paying off in amazing ways or turns into Lost. I think the show has 1, maybe 2 more seasons before it feels like its going off the rails.

spronk said:

Milkshake is not severed, he even says it at the beginning of season 2 during his "apology" to mark about how he behaved as an unsevered person to a severed person. So they can go in and out any way they want.

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"Milkshake said"

He lies to them constantly.

I feel like we've been given a lot of scenes to believe that Milchick is not severed. If he was severed, who's bringing him up to speed immediately when they pulled off their hijacking last season? Or why would outtie Milchek get a performance review instead of the innie? If he was severed, then it would have to be a different kind of severed that doesn't have the same boundaries or parameters as the others, but I really don't think there's much support here for that.

Huh? Like I said, I thought it was obvious they're not. Which is why Cobel could keep tabs on Mark S. Or why she talked to Helena, you know, outside. Management not being severed is something they're not hiding and giving clues about. It's just outright said.

The reason I mentioned it is because if it's virtual, I'm not sure how you manage that part. And why I also brought up that it seemed like they showed us them physically leaving at some point, but I could be misremembering that part.