Greg and Zanna follow a long and winding corridor to its natural conclusion.
SCORES
Time spent in corridors: 5
Significance of corridors: 5
Agreement on meaning of corridors: 0
SHE SAW
Hollywood's compulsion to retell old stories and turn
real life events into drama keeps Greg awake at night. He's passionate about originality and takes a hard line against anything he believes has a whiff of referentiality. His excitement about Severance was therefore high. Mine, based purely on the fact that it's science fiction, which I acknowledge can be brilliant but rarely gets my juices flowing, was low.
The opening sequence contained an incredibly long scene of two characters walking down endless white corridors and I was immediately turned off. "How much of this show is going to be walking down corridors, do you think?" Greg asked. It was too much already. In our post-viewing debrief Greg posited the theory that the corridors symbolised our neural pathways. He might be right. I think it was more about creating a confusing maze you can't escape. Either way, it was a lot. But, by the end of the second episode, I couldn't get enough of those blinding corridors - so much so, I broke the cardinal rule of marital television viewing and finished the series alone, while Greg lay peacefully sleeping in bed.
The premise of Severance is that people can get a chip inserted into their brain, which severs their work persona from their home persona. You become two people sharing the same body with neither persona having any knowledge of the life of the other. There's an obvious commentary here, particularly relevant during pandemic life, about the blurring of lines between work and home. I currently have a coughing 5-year-old coming in and out of my office/kitchen to ask for food. Technology has allowed work to increasingly encroach on our home lives and it's easy to imagine a world in which we - and by that I mean me - would pull the trigger on a technology that would allow us to find complete, impenetrable work/life balance.