It’s Friday, which means there should be a fresh new episode of Severance waiting for you when you get home from your un-severed job. But alas, season two is over. That we’re eagerly awaiting more instead of breathing a sigh of relief is a testament to the show’s quality. Despite the weight of years’ worth of expectations, season two strode more than it stumbled. On the latest Aftermath Hours, we reflect on the highs and lows of a good TV show.
We begin the episode by briefly talking about our true passion, shirts, before elegantly segueing into a conversation about Ubisoft’s extremely eventful week: The embattled publisher announced that it’s spinning off its most successful series, including Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six, into a separate subsidiary thanks to a $1.25 billion investment from Chinese conglomerate Tencent. What does this mean for those remaining aboard the Ubisoft mothership? And will this lead to even more heads rolling following layoffs and studio closures in December?
Then we move on to the AI abomination of the week: an image filter based on the works of Studio Ghibli, whose most famous creative, Hayao Miyazaki, once called AI “an insult to life itself.” After that, we give our final appraisal of Severance season two, which was not perfect, but which managed to hit some impressive high notes and benefited from largely focusing on characters over mystery box shenanigans. Gita doesn’t love Ben Stiller’s directorial style, and Riley doesn’t think Severance is necessarily a Smart Show, but those things don’t prevent it from being good, if that makes sense. If it doesn’t, listen to the episode!
Finally, we come up with a simple solution to the problem of mass media illiteracy: change all of society. Seems like something we can knock out in a day or two, so let’s get cracking.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can follow in the footsteps of the many, many Severance recap podcasts and create After-Aftermath Hours, in which we’ll provide essential commentary about our own show mere moments after it airs.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Nathan: Why do we think the show became so zeitgeisty this season, but not during season one? Why did it become the show everyone was talking about every week this season?
Riley: I think we needed something, especially right now. At least there was one bright spot that I could rely on in the last ten weeks. And I think the long, long wait for it [played a role].
Gita: I think that’s true. People discovered it during the three-year break, and then they realized [how good it is]. I was watching the first season week to week, so I was having the same experience everyone else had three years ago, where I was screaming, crying, throwing up waiting for each new episode of Severance. But I do think part of it is also, a lot of the analysis of the first show assumes it was about anticapitalist politics. I do not know if I agree with that assessment now, having seen the second season. But I do think it’s a show about alienation – about the ways we are alienated from ourselves and why we do it and what it does to us. I think that is just a very common state of being in our world, especially right now.
Nathan: I’ve trained Instagram to only show me cat videos and anticapitalist memes, and one of the memes that pops up a lot is this idea of everyone feeling alienated from what they do but not connecting the dots and recognizing that capitalism is the problem, so they just blame individual issues. They say “I hate my job” or “I hate Mondays.” I think that something like Severance – because it is not explicitly anticapitalist – can appeal to those people too, even the ones who are like “I would never take the name of capitalism in vain, though I do hate everything about my life.” Those people can watch Severance and agree with it.
Gita: It is Marx’s theory of alienation for babies, in a lot of ways. The visual metaphor is so useful. I think that is really what people have latched onto: the idea that when you go to work, you are a different person, and you are not supposed to bring things from the outside world to work with you in service of the machine that you are working for. But also, that’s literally impossible. That is just not possible to do! Eventually you will reintegrate. There will be bleed-through. You’ll be dozing. It is a function of being in our modern world that makes us feel like we are separated into different pieces, and in order to be a healthy person, you have to bring those pieces together.
Nathan: I found what seems to be Lumon’s ultimate plan to be compelling in the grand scheme of all of that. It appears that what they’re trying to do is make it so that you can avoid any unpleasant moment or anything that would feel inefficient. Meanwhile, the people who are ruling over us right now are trying to make everything as “efficient” as possible, tech bros are all about automating everything, and then we’ve got Lumon creating an innie for when you use the fucking bathroom. Getting rid of every bit of friction in your life no matter what it is. It feels like the show really called what all these people are going for.
Gita: The Ghibli AI stuff is an example of that. “I can be a good artist without having to do any of the work of being an artist. I can draw like Miyazaki without putting in the hundreds of thousands of hours of training that he did in order to learn how to draw like that.”
Nathan: Now we’re also starting to see the tangible downsides of that. You hear about people who’ve become reliant on ChatGPT and who suck at all those soft skills or hard skills they’ve offloaded onto it. I’ve even seen people be like “Man, not gonna lie, even typing things into ChatGPT is really hard.” That’s the end result of all of this: If you remove every last bit of friction, you wind up with a person who’s this inert blob who cannot really do anything and who is no longer a contributing member of society – or an interesting person to interact with.
And then at that point, why be a human? Why exist? What is the point of your life if you’ve automated all of it? Because then, you really have made the case that you should be replaced by robots – not that we all should. But you have replaced yourself with robots, so what are you doing here?
