Severance is without a doubt the best ongoing series on any streaming service or TV. If it keeps up the amazing streak of having every episode be interesting, compelling, and thought provoking, it could very well end as one of the best shows of all time. It's already climbing quite high on my personal list of favorites, and I expect it to end up within the top three for me.
An episode of Severance doesn't go by without both answering and asking questions.
What is the purpose of the goats? How big of a company is Lumon? What else do they do? What other departments are on the severed floor? Was Helly going to kill Mrs. Cobel? How long does reintegration take? What is Macro Data Refinement actually working on?
That's what we'll be exploring today. I've spent a lot of time discussing what MDR is working on with my wife, friends, and coworkers, and I think the key to understanding MDR's job is the four tempers.
What are the four tempers?
A philosophy developed by Kier Eagan, the founder of Lumon, the four tempers are Woe, Frolic, Dread, and Malice. The Eagans and Lumon believe that the four tempers essentially define every human being by how much of each tempers a person has in them. In the Perpetuity Wing, a region of the severed floor that houses inanimate wax reincarnations of previous Lumon CEOs, a statue of Kier Eagan describes the tempers says “each man's character is designed by the precise ratio” of the four tempers inside of him.
What exactly do those four tempers represent? To put it simply, they seem to represent their actual definitions. Woe is sadness, dread is fear or anxiety, frolic is happiness, malice is evil or, at least, unkindness. Kier believed that if one can master these four tempers, one can master themselves and, therefore, the world around them.
At Macro Data Refinement, Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan don’t actually know what they’re working on. All they know is that they are supposed to sort clusters of numbers into various boxes solely based on the feelings the numbers give them. Mark describes some of the clusters of numbers as feeling scary and others as a more positive feeling. When they find that cluster of numbers, they drag it into one of the boxes again solely based on where they feel it should go. Once they put it in that box, a bar chart appears. Take a look at that chart from season one, episode one.
Notice anything? The letters next to each bar are WO, FC, DR, and MA. These are almost certainly short for woe, frolic, dread, and malice, Kier Eagans four tempers.
So, why are the severed, and only the severed, employees working on sorting numbers that represent one of the four tempers which are the defining characteristics of a human being into boxes? Indeed, that is the question.
The first idea that comes to mind is that MDR are working on creating clones, but it’s simply too boring of an idea for a show like Severance, which is a wild statement to make, but Severance is a wild show.
The second idea is more complex. MDR is mapping human brains. Yet, it still doesn’t seem complex enough for Severance.
The third idea came as a sort of spawn from the first two. Maybe Lumon is working on artificial intelligence and machine learning to create an AI that is perfectly indistinguishable from a human being. This could potentially explain how Gemma survived even though Mark has her ashes; she didn’t. That’s not Gemma. That is an artificial intelligence inserted in a clone of Gemma. Mrs. Casey is an experiment. Gemma’s was indeed an accident. Lumon had nothing to do with it, but Lumon took it upon themselves to use her genetic makeup as a test for their re-creation of a human body, but gave it a blank mind. That’s how the dark hallway with the elevator plays into this. It leads to the Testing Floor. What are they testing? Stick with me.
This thought led me to the fourth idea. Stick with me, because it’ll take some explaining to fully understand. The entire purpose of the severed floor is to work on the re-creation of a human being. They are working on cloning, and creating artificial intelligence, yes, but MDR is mapping the human soul, the very identity and consciousness that makes up each person through the four tempers. In fact, it’s entirely possible that Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan are actually re-creating their own souls. That is why the numbers on the screen give each of them a specific feeling unique to only them. This would explain the very strange doppelgangers they saw of themselves when on their retreat in the mountains. They were prototypes. This also potentially explains why the board is so interested in keeping Mark employed. If the project he was working on is mapping his own soul, it could only be completed by him. It also explains why they brought back his old team without much of a fight.
The question to then be asked is why they are mapping their own souls. Think back to that idea of artificial intelligence and machine learning I mentioned earlier. MDR could be the ones training the AI. Severance perfectly recreates a corporate hellscape that mimics working in call centers and other monotonous jobs, so it would make sense that it introduces the biggest threat to that kind of worker: AI. The irony would be perfect. MDR is training the very thing that will replace them.
You may be thinking, “Why would Lumon want to do this? Why would they want to recreate human beings?” Well, there’s plenty of reasons. If you’ve ever watched Black Mirror, you may remember the episode in which a grieving widow orders an AI version of her husband that looks exactly like him. Lumon could want to capitalize on the grief of those who have lost someone. If they’re successful, they could even sell the idea of immortality. However, while this would be a profitable endeavor, I don’t think it is the ultimate goal of the severed floor.
Let’s take it back a bit further.
Lumon is a combination of a very corporate, controlling company and a religion. Essentially, Lumon is a very profitable cult. Their workers literally praise Kier, the founder of the company, as a god. His journey to tame the four tempers is told like it’s a biblical tale through books that actually resemble old religious style texts in their appearance. Mrs. Cobel had a strange altar meant for worshipping him. “Praise Kier,” is common Lumon vernacular. With the amount of religious fervor there is surrounding Kier, I think the ultimate goal of the entire severed floor is to resurrect Kier Eagan through a combination of cloning to match his genetic makeup and an AI trained by MDR to copy his consciousness with the exact ratio of woe, dread, frolic, and malice that made him who he is. Kier would then go through a Christ-like character arc where he is resurrected from the dead.
Of course, this could all be entirely, one hundred percent wrong. With Severance, it’s pretty hard to tell where the show is going, but, obviously, I’ve spent way too much time thinking about it. Yet, that is the beauty of the show.
What do you think about all this craziness? Is MDR working to resurrect Kier Eagan? Let me know what you think!