Episode 1: The Severance Procedure and Onboarding Resistance
Lumen Industries’ “Severance procedure” completely separates employees’ work personas (Innies) from their personal personas (Outies)—upon entering the elevator, Innies lose all personal memories; upon exiting, Outies know nothing about their work. Mark S. (Adam Scott) is promoted to supervisor of the Macrodata Refinement Division, taking over a team consisting of Dylan G. (Zach Cherry) and Irving B. (John J. Turturro). However, during the onboarding ceremony, he encounters fierce resistance from new hire Helly R. (Britt Lower): she refuses to sign the lifetime contract and slams her head against the elevator’s metal wall in an attempt to rouse her Outie.
Helly’s resistance uncovers Lumen’s first layer of truth: while Innies are indoctrinated with the “noble mission of serving human civilization,” their daily work actually involves categorizing numbers on screens into four color-coded buckets labeled “Sorrow, Mirth, Fear, Malice”—these numbers are actually encoded human emotional data, which Lumen uses to develop an “emotional manipulation algorithm.” Mark discovers that his colleague Petey (Yul Vazquez) has covered the back of his sorting sheet with drawings of black corridors and elevator symbols, hinting at Lumen’s undisclosed “Project Kier.”
The episode ends with Mark (in his Outie state) receiving an anonymous letter from Petey: “They’re watching your house.” Meanwhile, Lumen’s HR supervisor Milchick (Tramell Tillman) pressures Mark to “correct Helly’s anti-system tendencies.” The camera pans over a giant portrait of Lumen’s founder, Kier Eagan, with the slogan behind it—“Tame the Four Elements, Serve the Eternal Lord”—revealing the company’s ultimate ambition.
Episode 2: The Cognitive Rift Between Dual Personas
Petey’s warning proves true—Mark (Outie) spots Lumen’s therapist, Ms. Casey (Patricia Arquette), surveillance outside his house, while Mark (Innie) finds a bloodstained elevator key at Petey’s old workstation. The cognitive rift between his dual personas deepens: Mark (Outie) drowns his grief over his late wife in alcohol, while Mark (Innie) discovers a newspaper clipping about the “Optical Delusion” incident in a Bible left by Petey—in 1989, a group of Lumen employees collectively claimed to have seen a “non-existent floor” before all disappearing mysteriously.
Helly’s resistance escalates: she tattoos “LET ME OUT” on her arm, arranging her arms to reveal the text during the elevator’s security scan. Milchick orders her to be sent to the “Wellness Wing” on charges of “endangering company security,” but Irving and Dylan orchestrate a rescue midway. The three discover blind spots in Lumen’s corridor surveillance and speculate that the company deliberately retains these “awakening spaces” to test the stability of the Severance procedure.
The episode’s climax occurs when Mark (Outie) breaks into Petey’s house, finding his basement filled with Lumen employee handbooks and an undisclosed “Overtime Activation Protocol”—Lumen can use electric shocks to forcefully rouse an Innie’s subconscious. This explains why Petey suffered from seizures caused by persona fusion. Meanwhile, Mark (Innie) detects an abnormal code “49” in the sorted data, which coincidentally matches the latitude of the U.S.-Canada border, hinting at Lumen’s geopolitical ambitions for cross-border experiments.
Episode 3: The Awakening Moment in the Perpetuity Wing
To quell rising resistance, Lumen organizes the Macrodata Refinement team to visit the “Perpetuity Wing”—a museum that displays Kier Eagan’s relics with religious ritualism, where a giant spiral staircase and brain-slice sculptures form a metaphor for “the materialization of the human soul.” Helly seizes the opportunity to break away from the group, discovering ancient graffiti carved into the corridor wall that reads “HELLY R WAS HERE,” suggesting she is not the first Innie to attempt escape.
Mark and Dylan find archives of 1920s “Taylorism” experiment records in the museum’s archives—Lumen once decomposed workers’ muscle movements into standardized 2.3-second units, creating a historical parallel to the current number-sorting work. Irving encounters Burt (Christopher Walken), the head of Facilities, who writes “BREAK THE LOOP” in his palm, revealing that Lumen uses looped corporate promotional videos to achieve subconscious brainwashing.
The episode ends with Petey suffering a seizure in Mark’s basement; before his death, he draws a floor plan of Lumen’s building, marking “Floor 13 – Project Kier.” Meanwhile, Helly smashes the elevator’s security camera with her head, her blood forming an “∞” symbol on the metal surface—symbolizing the infinite cycle of resistance. The scene cuts to Lumen’s boardroom, where Ms. Casey reports: “Test Subject 49 has begun to develop cross-persona memories.”
Core Conflicts and Philosophical Metaphors
1. The Ethical Dilemma of Memory Segmentation
Lumen’s “emotional data categorization” is essentially the quantitative exploitation of the human soul. Helly’s refusal to sign the contract mirrors the predicament of gig economy workers in reality, who are forced to accept “algorithm monitoring agreements”—what appears to be a voluntary choice is actually the legalization of systemic oppression.
Petey’s persona fusion experiment echoes Husserl’s theory of “memory reconstruction”: when an Innie’s subconscious breaks through the limits of the Severance procedure, individual consciousness ceases to be a linear narrative and becomes a fragmented cognitive puzzle. This setup deconstructs the stability of the “self,” directly addressing the crisis of human identity virtualization in the digital age.
2. The Deep-Seated Control of Corporate Systems
Lumen’s black-and-white corridors and elevator transitions form a modern variant of Foucault’s “panopticon.” Employees, in spaces that seem free, are actually under perpetual surveillance via “visible violence”—the oppressive whiteness of the corridors and the cold metallic feel of the elevators visually embody the instrumentalization of humans in Mumford’s “megamachine” theory.
Kier Eagan’s “tame the four elements” ideology is in line with early 20th-century “Taylorism.” Breaking down human emotions into standardized units for processing essentially alienates workers into “emotional robots”—a setup that anticipates the algorithmic manipulation of user emotions by contemporary social media.
3. The Awakening Path of Marginalized Groups
The secret connection between Irving and Burt reveals the existence of an “inter-departmental resistance network” within Lumen. Marginalized groups such as Gypsies and LGBTQ+ individuals form underground alliances by sharing undisclosed protocols (like Burt’s “BREAK THE LOOP”), creating a historical parallel to the transnational mutual aid of Gypsy clans in MobLand.
Helly’s graffiti in the Perpetuity Wing and Petey’s floor plan constitute symbols of “materialized resistance.” These physical traces break Lumen’s absolute monopoly on memory, proving that humanity’s instinct to resist possesses resilience beyond technological control.
