Hey so what even is severance about? I feel like you'd do a good job explaining because I'm intrigued but also confused
Okay so there are three things you need to know first:
'Severance' is a procedure in which they put a little doodad in your brain that basically causes you to lose all memory of the 'outside' world when you're working on the severed/basement floors of Lumon and also causes you to lose all memory of what you do at Lumon when you're not there. So you basically have two different sets of memories, your 'innie' memories of what you do at work and your 'outie' memories of what you do outside of work. This also means you can have two different personalities - your work!sona and your regular!sona
Lumon is a huge biotech corporation that does everything but also ??? It's very Fringe Massive Dynamic. So Lumon was founded by Kier Eagan in the 1860s that's pretty much the only concrete thing we know about it for sure. It's super culty and employees are basically expected to worship Kier and all that he stands for. There are several departments at Lumon including Macrodata Refinement, which is where our main characters work
Macrodata Refinment is a department in which the characters are.... refining data, but we have no idea what this data is. Neither do they. But according to the MDR handbook they gave us at SDCC last year, you sort the numbers presented to you on a computer into one of four categories - WO, FC, DR, and MA. WO "elicit melancholy or despair", FC "elicit joy, gaiety, or ecstasy", DR "elicit fear, anxiety, or apprehension", and WO "elicit rage or a desire to do harm".
SO. What Severance is about is a guy named Mark S. who's a macrodata refiner at Lumon. When his wife died, he was so depressed over it that he decided to get severed so he could be rid of the pain for at least a little bit. His fellow refiners are Helly R., Dylan G., and Irving B.
In vaguely spoiler-free terms, Mark gets pulled into a conspiracy that perhaps Lumon is actually pretty fucked up and learns that his wife who isn't his wife but might be his wife is actually alive. Maybe? Helly is new and absolutely hates working at Lumon and tries her damndest to get out there. She does not succeed. Irving keeps hallucinating black goop but that's totally normal, also he experiences a gay awakening with Christopher Walken. Dylan wins a waffle party but also finds out he has a son so he activates the overtime contingency and sends pretty much everything at Lumon into a tailspin except not really.
There are also other characters like Ms. Cobel who manages the severed floor in S1 and is off her shits (complementary). Mr. Milchick is the floor's supervisor and he definitely isn't paid enough for everything those dingdongs put him through. Mark has a sister named Devon and she's married to Ricken who sucks but wrote a "self-help" book that becomes a pretty important plot device.
Where we're at now is things are different but also the same. We still don't know what the hell Lumon is doing, what is Cold Harbor, who the hell was Irving talking to in the phone booth, how much does Burt know???, what the hell does it mean that Irving keeps seeing the same hallway that Ms. Casey went into but also has her flickering in and out with Helly in the new opening titles, WHAT is the deal with Ms. Huang, how bad is Helena's break going to be when she realizes she's finally had enough, etc etc aaaaaaaaaaa
