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Commencing superhero ethics re entry procedure the podcast eennies of both Matthew and Riki have now joined the feed.

What their audis are doing, we don't know, but their eennies are here within the world of the podcast to discuss Severance season two as well as the show as a whole.

And now I will stop trying to be creepy.

Welcome Reaky to this conversation and say, Reeky, we did some coverage on this show about season one.

I think most of our listeners I'm hoping are watching Severance, but it is on Apple, which not everyone's gonna watch, and so we're gonna as much as we can talk about the issues it raises without going too deep into the show itself, and we'll try and kind of like make sure you're up to date with things.

Of course, we are going to be spoiling things like crazy.

So if you do want to watch the show, if you do have a way to get Apple TV, We're not going to ask you how you do it.

We're just gonna encourage you to do it.

Watch the show come back.

But for everybody else, Reeky, let's just start with kind of what was your overall thoughts on severnce even season.

One, season one or two.

Season one just kind of catch us up to people have heard mine, Rob's thoughts on it.

Just kind of catch up to where what your starting point was, and they will jump into season two.

I would say that I liked season one a lot, a great deal, and so was looking forward to season two, and for me, season two was a little bit of a letdown.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

I think that I kind of feel the same way.

I feel like Severance more than anything, is a show that it started as what if we can use this kind of interesting sci fi concept, namely the idea that you could be severed in your mind and have a persona that exists only at work, and that while you're at work, you wouldn't have to have any of the thoughts or feelings or memories of the person you left outside your AUDI.

But that also you're AUDI would not have to deal with any of the stuff that you were doing on the inside.

And so it's a commentary on the way we try to repress our feelings and our memories and our thoughts.

It's a kind of commentary on office culture and office you know, drudgery and now people similar to talk about wishing they could just disassociate for eight hours of the day, and it raised all sorts of great issues, And I think in season two.

In season one, they started trying to build with it and play with it and bring about a plot.

But season two they really tried to run with that plot a lot further.

And I feel like, as we're going to talk about, I love the questions that they're raising, I love the way they're continuing to discuss them, but I feel like they tried to take us a lot deeper into that plot and to make that plot a lot more convoluted and complex without really answering all the questions that they're setting up instead just making things seem weirder and weirder and more surreal in ways.

They kind of fit into a lot of the mystery bock culture stuff that I'm not really a big fan of.

So I've definitely enjoyed season two.

I'm glad I watched it.

I think there's a lot to talk about, but I think I agree with you.

I like season one more.

Yeah, I'm glad you used the phrase mystery box because that was definitely at the forefront of my mind when watching the show.

It does a good job of that.

And then one of the things I've read about season two is that it asks more questions than it answers yes, and that that is like a hallmark of mystery box type shows, and I don't like it.

I used to like it, but then I kept watching shows that didn't answer all the questions and kept asking more and more and expanding the lore and ways that are not satisfying.

And that was definitely something that I felt in season two, was like, you're giving us like all these things, but they're still not connecting to me in a satisfying way.

And I think you have to have some satisfying connections in a season of television that makes you go, oh, okay, that's what's going on, and that, in addition to the mystery, continuing mystery is what brings you back.

And I think you're right about that.

I think this is kind where we're going to start.

And I you know, this is more kind of TV critique maybe, but I think it's connected because it talks about like the kind of what we enjoy in the journey that TV shows take us on and the questions that they raise, et cetera.

This is a show that loves to play with a surreal where there's a lot of things that just everyone accepts as for granted that to us as outsiders, seem very weird and kind of completely out of left field, you know, and that they they have little dance parties among the group, and they melon parties are a way that people get celebrated, and there's just all kinds of random things like this.

And I think part of the problem is that, you know, a lot of the plot develops, we learn more about sort of the lore of this company Lumen that's behind this sufference, because you know, we've moved from not just sort of asking this question of like what about if this was just a benign procedure, but now learning that there's actually this dark conspiracy behind the company that's leading this procedure.

But at the end of season we still no idea really what that is.

It's a cult.

Do you get that feeling?

It's very much a cult.

But I think what I'm going with, And tell me if this is kind of how you feel as well, when everything seems kind of like the next development is random, and the next development is out of left field, the next development is as well, it's hard to find the patterns.

And I think what sometimes for me really satisfying in a show is when you can start to say, oh, okay, I didn't expect twist number two, and I didn't expect twist number three, but twist clue.

Yeah, you can kind of like see the pattern, and now you can kind of start to anticipate and and you're viewing of the show changes as you're no longer totally out of left field.

You're kind of thrown into the world, but you're starting to figure it out.

And I feel like you're right.

I just have so many more questions than I do, and I don't know if this is the case, but I think if I'm remembering correctly, things I've read from the people who wrote the show confirm this.

I find that a good general rule about how much I enjoy mystery box shows is when the writers start writing the mysteries, have they already figured out all the answers?

And there are shows that do that, and I think wind up being wonderfully put together because of it, because they do plan on coming up with the answers eventually for you, and they've already planned them out, and there's less of a feeling of like they're just throwing stuff at the wall and then, like you know, JJ abrams Is famously said about Lost that he didn't have any idea where everything was going, and I think it really shows in the show Battlestar Galactago, one of my favorite science fiction shows, a really good one, but I think really suffered because they kept adding more mysteries and they didn't actually have an idea of where it would end.

And this is definitely feeling like that first one to me, and I think part of what I'm frustrated by it is because it feels like it's kind of obscuring the actual really interesting questions that the show was raising.

About personality and about who we are and about the choices we make, and about office work and all these things, and so I'm just kind of like, yeah, I wish the show was doing more of the stuff that I wanted it to do, and and other people may love the way it went and that's totally legitimate, but it's for me is the ephesis.

That's what I want to focus more on.

Yeah, I agree, like the whole CULTI vibe.

One of the big things we got in season two was the goats, or they expanded on the goats, and we got to learn like the whole department of mammalian whatever, and then they were getting ready to sacrifice the goat, and again that's like, this is some kind of cult, Like it's very satanic, et cetera, and we don't really know what that means.

And at some point in theory hopefully they explain like this is what the goats are for.

But it, as you said, it like feels random.

It does not feel like a thread where we the audience can figure it out beforehand through the clups.

I mean, you can take some random stabs at it, but it's just like, I don't know, sure it could be anything.

It could be anything well, and so let's pull it.

To some of the questions that the show really is asking that I think are fun to talk about, even if we don't necessarily love the way they're trying to try to answer them.

One of I think the big questions about the show is this idea of literally the severance itself of can you kind of have these two aspects of your personality?

And I think, like a lot of good science fiction, a lot of what the show is doing is taking things that we think of metaphorically, you know, like I've got my work sona and my you know, work wife and stuff like that, and ah, isn't that funny?

But of course I go home to my real life and things like that, And it's kind of taking that to a logical stream of what if you really fully could sever those things?

Having now watched two seasons of it, if we take away the cult stuff, if we take away a lot of that, what do you think of this general idea and how it's playing out of can you is it ethical to have these two different parts of your person on it that are fully separated like this?

Yeah, that's I mean, that's my favorite part still of this show is that essentially each actor plays two characters, right, and we are finally seeing the two characters in the same body start to interact.

Not directly obviously, because that is impossible, but we do get some interesting scenes with the video camera recording and talking to themselves, right.

But especially the character of Dylan right played by Zach Cherry, having a second relationship with his wife was probably the most interesting thing to me that happened in the season.

One of the things the show sets up is that they want the any to really know almost nothing about the Audi, because they want it to be really just you're only there for work and you don't have these outside things.

But they were finding that there's a natural curiosity and so they want to slowly give people very generalized information.

And again it's all done in this wonderful parody of you know, sort of office self help culture.

That's really great.

But one of the things that happened in the first sevenment first season is that Dylan's Audi kind of broke containment.

And there's a moment where when Dillian's sorry, Dylan's Innie, and so when there's a moment when Dylan's Inni is the one in control, of the body.

He recognizes that he has a son and that he has a wife, and it haunts him because now he knows these things, and so he wants to start having visits, and the woman who his AUDI is married to starts coming to visit him, and he starts to develop feelings for her, And just to give you to the contrast, the two other kind of relationships that we have are the Mark Scott, Mark S, who's kind of our main character I think hid by second.

The character is Scout, the actor is Scout.

Thank you sorry, it's Adam Scout, Adam Scott playing Mark Scout, also known as Mark S.

In general, the full name is the Audi, the initial is the Innie, and he is our kind of the main character who's figuring all this out, and his Inenie wants out, and there's a whole much more complication to his character.

But basically, his Audi has realized that he and his wife were kind of like taken into this program without their full consent in some ways, that his wife, who we thought was dead, might actually still be alive inside the system, and he wants to use his Inni to go find her.

But meanwhile, his Inenie is developing relationships for another Innie, and there's a conflict there about you know, what's gonna happen and if if Mark can fully get himself out, what will happen to the Innie.

And then the third is the character of Henny and Henny's Inennie is kind of one of the most rebellious, one of the moones who's most fighting this one of the moones who's most like, I don't want to be an Innie.

And we find out that her Audi actually is the daughter of the person running the company, and so her Audi is even more so like pushing her INNI to force her to be in there.

And we saw some of that in season one, it becomes even more so in season two.

All that is just kind of give context to the Dylan conversation, which I'm sorry interrupted, so kind of getting back to Dylan, what really struck you about how that played out, about having the Innie start to develop a relationship that he wanted with the woman who the Audi was married to, And the conclusion it comes to is that the Audi severs his severance.

He wants to stop working at this company, which means that the Innie, for all intents and purposes, ceases to exist and ask one of the questions that asked is that murder?

Is that the killing of a person or persona or is it just a part of you?

Or how do you frame that?

Yeah, I just want to go back real quick.

The character played by Britt lau Or her name is Helly, Helly sorry, thank you, the Inny character and the Audi is Helena.

Thank you.

Yes?

But yeah, so where to start?

Like the thing with Dylan is I found it.

I guess funny because he's essentially in a love triangle or square, I don't even know what kind of shape it is, right, because his Audi is married to his wife and then she comes to visit the Innie on the on the severed floor.

And then, as you said that, the Inny also develops feelings and falls in love and even reproposes to his own wife.

And she's in this position where it's it's the same body, like it's the body of her husband that she loves, but the persona, the personality is so different that she actually my belief is that she falls in love with the Innie as she's falling out of love with the Audi, right, And we get these interesting scenes of that conflict and part.

Of what's going on in that is that, as mentioned, one of the reasons why some of these people do severance isn't just because they don't want to have to deal with the drudgery of office work.

It's because in their day to day life, they're carrying all this pain with them or sadness or on wei or whatever it is, and they don't want to deal with that eight hours of the day.

And in Dylan's case, it's made him kind of a jerk to his wife.

And so part of the issue is not only that the Enny develops feelings for the woman that his Audi is married to, but also that she starts to develop feelings for him in part because she reminds him of the Dylan that she first fell in love with, who the guy she's actually married to, isn't really that guy anymore.

Yeah, And what this show does with Dylan is it asked the question about like work experience and skills and you and Rob talked about this in the previous episode.

But Dylan, the inny is good at his job right right, and he's proud of that.

He's got his little like achievement awards on his desk, and the out he doesn't have those skills So there's a brief moment at the beginning of season two when Dylan is fired for having instigated the incident at the end of season one, and he goes to these job interviews and he's like, on his resume it says he worked at Lumen, but he was severed, so he doesn't have any skills from that.

He doesn't have work experience that he can cite and be like, yeah, I'm good at this.

And that's part of the part of what I guess drives Dylan's depression or on WII as you called it, right, and makes makes that character less desirable to his wife because he is not gaining that satisfaction of doing a good job at work.

And that is like in our real lives, like that can be a part of your personality, and what makes you a person, right, is the happiness you gain from a job.

I mean, you talked about wouldn't it be nice to sever and just like disassociate from your job.

But it's a you know, approximately a third of our lives or a quarter right time wise, and that can can make you who you are.

No, I think that's definitely true, and I think I think we span job there to talk about like you know, homemaking and stuff like that.

It's not just like being paid to do something.

But one of the things I think is so fascinating, again, this is the kind of thing I wanted the show to explore more, is like I think one of the points of the show, especially in season one, but also in this one, is that a problem with the modern office environment is that a lot of people aren't getting that because what they're doing is just moving numbers around from one's box to another, or you know, shuffling papers and emails, and they're one cog in this much larger machine, and it's hard to see that they are actually getting anything, and that a lot of people go to work and don't come home with that kind of feeling.

And that what the show kind of posits is the idea that if you actually part of it is that there's this this disconnect between the part of ourselves.

As you said, that's all those other things that we bring with us into the office that want to be doing more than just moving numbers from one box to another.

But that if you cut all that off, you know that that Dylan with all that cut off, where all he knows is the number because it literally is just moving numbers from one box to another without any idea of the context of it.

And that's one of the mystery boxes that's kind of teased at but not really fully explored in the show.

Again to the frustration, But the point is very much that the workers don't know.

But because they don't have any context for that, and they are given these little awards like, hey, you did well, you get a melon party, you get a dance party, you get these little things, it is enough for Dylan's any And I think that's the irony as You're right, I think Dylan's Audi is completely denied the satisfaction of a good job at work that Dylan's INNI gets.

But I think what we're supposed to think is that if Dylan's Audi was doing this kind of part of why it happened in the beginning is that if Dylan's Audi was bringing all of himself into the office, he'd be incredibly dissatisfied but doing this kind of work, and that that's kind of the catch twenty two at the heart of all of it.

I disagree with that, okay, because I mean, any Dylan is very happy like with his work, right right, and and the work itself, Like you say, it's just moving the numbers, and we don't we are the characters don't know why they're doing it, but it is shown that they gain like a weird emotional satisfaction from doing it, and they don't know why, they just feel it.

They're like, these numbers feel good, these numbers feel bad, and moving them into the correct boxes like gives them an emotional satisfaction, and that's why they keep doing it, even at the point where they are trying to rebel against Luman.

Right.

I agree with you, I guess I guess my thought maybe this may be my bias because I'm someone who's never been comfortable in an office setting, so maybe I'm the wrong audience for this.

I feel like part of the point, though, is that the reason they're able to find that satisfaction is because they're bringing nothing else into them.

You know, they're not thinking about their brother in law who has a job that they really love and gets to do this meaningful work and they're comparing themselves to that.

They're not thinking about all the stuff they've seen on TV about people who have good jobs or bad jobs.

They're just not bringing all that baggage in with them, because you're right, I think Luman has created a situation where for these people's any is they can be very satisfied at work, and here again is our frustration because maybe we wish they'd explored this further.

My take was that they were saying, like, but if a fully realized person wouldn't be satisfied with this in the same way, they wouldn't get that same emotional satisfaction, And maybe dialing with the exception, but I think for the most part it wouldn't be the case.

I don't know if it's that they wouldn't gain satisfaction.

Again, this is the mystery box aspect, but I think what's going on is that they need to be severed in order to be able to do that work, is what seems to be implied.

Yeah, so I don't think it's like a I don't know.

I think it's that something they're going to show, that something in the brains needs this disconnection, disassociation in order to be able to identify the four where are they the four humors?

No, that's not the word, but it's like the four emotions of kier Egan as part of this cult.

MM hmmm, sense.

Yeah, So what did you think of the way it ended in terms of the Audi getting to decide that he's going to I think I think most of us think it's perfect legitimate, take a different job, go to a different area, do a you know, change what they're doing, but that the result of that is that this aspect of their persona that's given its own sentience and its own worth, is just ended turned off, which is an effect killing it.

Uh, you're talking about Dylan right right.

We're gonna get Marc ass faces that conundrum and fights back about it in a way that any Dylan doesn't.

We'll get to that, but I think Dylan's for that reason, We're meant to see Dylan to kind of frame the question that then mark As is going to wrestle with.

I think for Dylan's sake, Dylan, initially it's the any Dylan who asks for termination, right, and then Audi Dylan actually denies him that.

Oh no, yes, you are correct.

Okay, Yeah, so I apologize to our viewers.

Normally we try to watch these things right when we try to record these things fairly soon after we've seen them, or if not, at least just kind of keep them fresh.

In this case, it finished a little while ago.

We were trying to record with Rob but schedules just didn't line up, So we're now recording a little bit after that.

And in that time, both Last of Us and and Or have been coming out which have been incredibly heavy, and so I'm mixing up some of the details.

So that's my apology there.

So it's also just confusing because it's again the same actor and we're trying to talk about two different versions of him, and the word you know, Innie and Audi are not normal words that we really use contextually normally for characters.

So I'm going to try to rephrase this again.

So the Inny Dylan has been meeting his Audi wife fall they fall in love and he proposes, and she's like no, like I can't do this, it's too weird, and leaves and that breaks any Dylan's heart, I guess you would say, and he just wants to end it essentially like I would say, like he wants to commit suicide right by ending his existence.

Like that's that is the implication that this show wants us to have about the any Audi situation.

And when an indy terminates their employment at lumin like they are going to cease to exist.

Right, And I think they're You're right, nipology and you're thinking it's all coming back to me.

It's also it's raising kind of a related issue of that, you know, what rights do the ani have?

Because I think part of what comes up for him is that what he's realizing is that the AUDI creates this person in order to serve their own desires and needs, and they make very legitimate ones, you know, to not have to deal with in office eight hours a day, or do not have to carry with you the pain of the loss of a wife, as Mark Ast does, Mark Scout, et cetera.

But that part of what happens is this sense of like, if you're creating a whole other persona, you're creating a whole person whose literal purpose of existence is to suffer so that you don't have to suffer.

And I think that's part of what Dylan's pushes back on.

It's like, Hey, he doesn't want to carry all this weight for Dylan the Audi if he can't even have relationships, if he can't have his own self actualization with a woman he has come to care about.

Yeah, but Audi Dylan denies the request and writes him a letter and it was it was a beautiful letter and really like, I think that letter is why the Dylan story is my favorite, because Audi Dylan talks about how, yeah, like the reason like this is all happening in this way is that Audi Dylan has lost some of his spark for life, right, and he recognizes that his wife sees that spark in any Dylan, so he's like, that is still a part of me somehow, And I think he uses a phrase like I want to be the man that you are like for my wife, right, like to find that again in myself.

And I just found that really touching in an interesting way because it it asks this question of yeah, like who are we like what is identity?

And you know other characters have gone through reintegration and you wonder like, is this going to end with Dylan being able to reintegrate is two different personalities and be like the single happy person again.

And I think this is also where the metaphor of it becomes really powerful, because you know, I think Severance is taking this to an extreme that that none of us go to.

And I do want to say here, by the way that they worked with science advisors most uh specifically, I had a name of a second hold on that they worked with science.

They worked with a number of science advisors, most specifically UH A doctor V.

J.

Argowall, who is the medical consultant for the show and also the chief of the Skull Base and Mini minim Minimally Invasive Neurosurgeon uh EF and also the chief of uh Skull Based and Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery Division at Mountfior Medical Center.

And and the one thing very clear on is that they didn't want this to be seen as a reference to disassociative identity disorder what what used to be thought of as multiple personality disorder.

That this is scientifically distinct.

So I'm not using that as part of the metaphor because I think they're very clear that that's not what this is.

But you know a lot of us coaches, which a lot of us do, have a persona that we adopt with one group of friends, but not necessarily with another and or maybe with work or versas with family, and especially in you know, I have not had to personally experience this to be sure, but this is definitely true for people who are you know from backgrounds where where you know the dialects and languages and are just accents that they use are really judged in the workplaces that they go to or the culture or things like that for racial reasons or other kind of discrimination reasons, but also just people who just you know, have like they want to have kind of like you know, I have my my baseball friends, and I have my magic gathering friends, and I want to keep myself kind of separate in those ways.

And this is really kind of pushing that to the extreme of of asking like what to what extent is is you know, using how are you kind of using one part of you to serve other parts of you?

And what damage does that do?

And I just you're right there.

I'm having trouble talking about it because I think that's I don't want to get again.

I don't want to get into art critics about the show.

But I think this is the storyline that I wish we'd gotten so much more of.

Excuse that I wish we'd gotten so much more of instead of maybe some of the lumin lore, because I think this is and maybe it's just because they weren't really ready to explore this and more depth, but I wouldn't really interested to hear more about this of of how these you know, how these characters feel about it.

Yeah, the Dylan stuff again to me, like this was my favorite part of season two, and exploring the fact that he is the same person, like the Audi talking about like I used to be like you and I lost that and like I want to try to find that again.

And it's it feels truer to what I want Severance to be versus the Mark Scout stories.

So you know, that's like part of my personal projection.

Yes, it's certainly interesting from a drama perspective that Mark, the two aspects of Mark are in conflict with himself themselves.

I don't even know how to phrase it right, but it's less interesting to me as a moral and ethical discussion.

Like I just love the way that Dylan gets gets to act with himself and the Mark.

The Mark scene where he talks to himself via a camera and video camera recorder and like listens to himself and then records this reply and like switches back and forth.

Is interesting.

It was a fun scene.

It was very you know, Gollum and Smeegel, But I just didn't I didn't love it.

No, I think it's fair.

Let's go into more detail about what this is all about.

And you're gonna have to help me with character names, because you know, I'm terrible with this and sometimes I edit it out, but I'll be very honest here about mate with character names.

So, and I think the identity of these people is very important as we're going to talk about.

One of the things that we learn is that part of why Mark Scout wanted to go through severance is as I alluded to, that one reason people do is to like not have to carry this great pain with them.

And then in his case, his wife died.

As he understand, his wife died, and we get to see a lot of their background, that both of them were academics.

He's a white man, she's an Asian woman, and they were both kind of connected to the same university and had this really beautiful love story together and he kind of just learned one day that she was killed.

And what is her character's name?

I know the actresses one who have seen before.

She was in Altered Carbon.

She had a fantastic role and she said a couple other smaller parts, but do you do you have on hand the name of the actress.

So the actress is Diechen Lochman.

Okay, as you said she was in All Her Carvin.

She was also in Dollhouse, which I don't know if you remember that show, but we may want to talk about the similarities right shows her character.

So her character the Audi or the person who was the Audi is Gemma Scout because they were married, and her Innie is called miss Casey, right, and we don't really know why.

And her Innie is presented in season one as though she's part of the staff and that the staff don't have oudies in anies, they just are people, but they're there to kind of keep the keep the innies on track, and that she's kind of a she's kind of like a therapist combined with hr in your worst nightmares, and that she's her there, her role there is to kind of like keep you on track and to prevent you thinking things you shouldn't think.

What Over the course of season one, Mark realizes that, uh, this is miss Casey is his wife Gemma and because there's a whole bunch of shenatigans that lead to that, and so in season two, again through a bunch of Shenanigans that I feel we kind of kind of skipped.

He finds someone else who worked for the program who's tried to kind of reintegrate the Audi and the Inni, and he has that happened to some extent where he can now at least remember the Inni's memories and to some extent can kind of switch it will or at least with some help between his Audi ands Inni, and he now comes up with a plan that he wants to basically like use his Inni to figure out what happened to his wife and to get her back, which seems I think completely reasonable, And and things go along and the and the plot develops, and his some of his audi's friends and family are helping him until at some point the Innie realizes what it's expected of him and that if they go through with this, the Inni will eventually just be fully cut off.

And that's where we're really thinking about a persona a personality, but that a personality that in its own mind is fully sentient, a fully separate being, is going to stop existing and and perhaps therefore the word for that is die.

And further complicating matters is that he has developed the the Inni has developed very strong romantic and sexual attraction and feelings and that are are requited like they have a relationship with Helly.

Helly is Hella or Helly.

The is Helly Helly thank he and they they very like intentionally make that those distinct because they are very different.

And in right very different than like Dylan where it's literally the same, or Mark Scout Mark Ass who are fairly similar.

And then in the last episode big spoilers here, the Enny agrees to go along with a plan, even though he's very hesitant about this and uncomfortable with it.

But in the final moments he allows much to escape and gets like you know the Enny, you know fully gone.

The Gemma has escaped, but instead of then going back outside so he can be Mike Scout, he can be Mark Scout and go off with Gemma, he decides to stay inside and be Mark s with Helly.

And this is where both me and Mary, my spouse who was watching this with me, had a lot of problems, both for ethics reasons and and but even more so for just it didn't seem to make logical sense to us.

We didn't really understand what was happening.

It felt like a betrayal, but also understood where he was coming from.

But I think it's a got I want to let you talk about it first, because I think you pointed out some stuff that I kind of had a surface grasp of, but you really saw it a lot deeper.

I just fully got mad.

Yeah, and after we finished watching the final episode, I think I even use the words I hate it, yeah, and like I don't hate it, like it was still an enjoyable season, but it left me with a really bad taste in my mouth at the end.

So talk more about why.

Well, I mean, first off, like it just feels like the wrong decision you said, like from a logic right, from a logical perspective of character, or like the premise of the show.

Like this is not Mark and Helly going back into everything being fine.

This was like a prison break where multiple people from the Lumen staff were killed.

The idea that Mark and Helly are going to get to go back to normal is yeah, completely not the case.

So from a logical perspective, Mark s and Helly are the innies.

They can only exist on the severed floor because of the way this technology works, right, So at the end they run off together, but they're trapped on this floor.

They can't like live a life together outside.

Right, and more to the point, Helly her audi is Helena Egan, one of the bosses of Lumen.

So like when the executives at Luman realize what has happened, they're not gonna be happy and they're not gonna let her stay Helly.

They're gonna force her to become Helena again.

Like they're gonna remove her from the floor be like what the heck happened down there?

So there's like no happy, happily ever after here at the end of this.

So like they run off and they're like holding hands and it's like the music is like yeah, like triumphant or something like what the heck?

Yeah, this isn't gonna work out.

So that was like my A level response, which I think, like you mentioned, is like the logic of the situation, right.

My my B level response was as a as like a television movie fan slash critic, and it's like I rolled my eyes.

I was like, well, here we go again.

A white guy just left his Asian wife slash girlfriend for the manic pixie dream girl, white girl.

It very much reminded me of Scott Pilgrim versus the world in that sense.

Yeah, I can see that.

There's a lot of other problems with with that, and like the age of knives Chow, but like.

An underage Chinese girl who's part of the power structure, and it's a very weird way.

That is what I thought I would He mentioned Scott Pilgrim, But I think you're so right about the racial dynamics there, especially because and don't get me wrong, I love Adam Scott as an actor.

I think he's phenomenal, and I think the character of Mark s is great, and I don't want to live in a world where, like you know, we're saying, like no white man can ever be heroes.

But it is kind of striking that, like of the four people who are in there with him, you know, his three other coworkers who were a gay man who has been kind of pushed back onto the outside and tried to build a relationship with his Audi is trying to build a relationship with the person that has any fell in love with another man and kind of gets rejected and then kind of just disappears from the show.

He's left.

There's the black man who's part of the staff, who's kind of just their enemy who they're fighting against the whole time.

There's the white woman who he has run back into prison with, but there's never really a discussion of her getting freedom.

And then there's the Asian woman who has been freed, but also freed as much as she understands it, watch her husband rejector for the white woman, and it's one of the things where I don't think any of those racial dynamics are intentional, but just when and and also of course the man of color, Dylan having a pretty negative experience compared to that, and so it was just it was when you mentioned the thing about, you know, the dynamic there of him leaving the Asian woman for the white woman, which I confess I don't think I really kind of thought of consciously in the first moment, but I remember hearing you say that and looking at through the further lens of just everything else that happens in the season and the dynamics, it really does not leave a contation of the mouth, right.

So it's complicated because I'm not what do I want to say about this?

So there's this concept of like it's called yellow fever, and what it, especially when it pertains to Asian women, is that Asian women are exotic, right, And this goes back to like the whole Madam Butterfly thing, and like the way Geisha have been portrayed in media and used in Western media, and there are very few cases of like in rom coms, there's very few cases of like a white man and an Asian woman pairing in rong coms.

And of course, like you could make you could say that there have been very few Asians right like as as the romantic lead and especially like in the eighties and nineties they were just like the comedic side characters right right, and and that was definitely bad.

And in modern rom coms, especially since like crazy Rich Asians, we've seen a lot more Asian Asian pairs.

And then like even now Asian man white woman like Henry Golding is like the the dude right now in like in terms of rom com leads.

But even there's a great rom com called Love Hard, which I just love and it's based on love Actually and Die Hard, like the two quote unquote Christmas movies and like smashing those names together, and the lead in that movie, the male lead is Jimmy O Yang, who is a Asian comedian who like I'm gonna say, like he looks like me, like you, I would never be mistaken for him.

But he's a dorky Asian guy with glasses and he's the lead in a rom cam and like that to me is like, yes, this is great, this is a revolutionary.

But he's paired with a white woman.

And that's what I mean, is like the Asian woman in media is often like the exotic person, but is not is not the romantic interest of like a traditional rom cam.

I think you're really right, because as I was thinking about, I was thinking of but wait, there's lots of times when the Asian woman is the romantic counterpart to the white man.

But it's in action movies.

Oh yeah, wish Michelle Yale.

Yeah, almost as good as Hung Fu as he is or whatever the martial art is, but still gets to fall for him.

And I don't remember if this is something I've completely come up with my own or I'm sure other people written about this and I just I've probably seen it but also was thinking about it beforehand.

I don't know, but like I would love to see people have done analysis that I feel like In many ways, the manic Pixie dream girl is a whitening of the exotic, sexy, mysterious Asian woman, you know, in the kind of the same A lot of ideas, especially when you look at like how much of the manic Pixie dream girl aesthetic is kind of like the anime girl aesthetic.

And I think you're very right, it's not in rom comms because it's not there.

She's not taken seriously as there she would have to be taken seriously as a romantic lead, as opposed to in the action movie where it's kind of just like a you know, you beat up the bad guy, you get the girl.

Excuse me, yeah, I mean absolutely the and Michelleyo actually like she was in a Bond movie I think it was Tomorrow and ever A, where she was also the final Bond girl and they have their romantic fling at the end, and that was really revolutionary, I feel like in terms of the positioning of Bond girls, as she was also like a tough spy, like a competent counterpart to him, which they have had, you know, like going back to the spy who love Me from Russia with love I think, but I think it was she was like very different and very modern.

Right.

Well, in a lot of those movies, as you said, there's the final Bond girl, because we've talked in other episodes recently about how Bond often has a first woman who he seduces, who's connected to the villain, who then gets killed because she was with Bond.

And there's a number of those movies that I remember.

I think this is some with Sean Connery, but a lot with Roger Moore where he's infiltrating some you know, you know, Chinese potentate or some you know, again very racist portrayed, and often like he's the first girl he's with is Asian, but then he winds up with a white woman by the end.

Yeah, and plenty of other action movies like when an Asian woman's cast, it is often because of their martial arts skills, right, So they are like a sidekick in the action movie, but not not the love interest.

So that that to me like with this show, like it's not a it's not an action show, but the fact that like they focused on Gemma as this objective.

I mean, she's the damsel in distress literally, right, and they rescue her, and that should be the happy ending, like you have rescued the damsel and now you're gonna beat with her but not and she's Asian and like it's it was very difficult for me watching that to not make that association.

Like obviously, like the show will go on and they will address it and they will be more drama that happens between all this, but I'm just like very worried that somehow she's in the at the end of it all, she's not going to be his wife anymore and he's going to end up with Helly is slash Helena.

Oh.

I think it's absolutely the way it's going, unless there's some way.

I mean, like you know, the polyamorist in me is always like, come on, lets everybody find a way to be together.

But I don't really know that works with the severed personalities.

But I think for me, like all the stuff you're talking about is very true, and it's doubly frustrating because to me, there's a very interesting question of at what point does the any have rights of its own, At what point does the ENnie stop being this part of the AUDI that the AUDI can use and if need be discard for its own actualization versus being a fully sentient being that has therefore to all of its own rights and be killed.

And I find the discussion between Mark Scout and Mark S over whether Mark S should be destroyed in order that Mark Scout can have a happy life fascinating, And when that's reduced to which woman will he be with, it feels like it very much cheapens Gemma and all the racial aspects you're talking about there.

But it's also just kind of misogynistic in general, because it's also like saying, well, the whole the whole conflict is now just about like which of this love triangle aspect instead of this philosophical question of who is he and can he be a unification of these two selves or does he have to pick one or the other.

And Yeah, it just felt like deciding to represent those two as one woman or the other, it just felt very tropy.

And maybe I'm coming down so hard or not because of the show that has for the most part passed those bars so well, but I felt like it just it changed the question away from the one that I thought was really interesting towards one that we've seen a million times before.

Yeah.

Absolutely, And I just want to go back real quick before I move on on that to the whole rom com thing.

I want to acknowledge that there have been several good rom com I think on Netflix there was to All the Boys I Loved Before, which I believe the romantic lead is Lana Condor.

Yep, and she's Korean and half Korean, half white, and their career there were a really beautiful story.

Yeah, there were two.

There were two of those movies in that series, and I loved them and they're really good.

So like that, I think the trend is definitely changing and getting better, and I hope to see more of it.

Lilian Dash was another one I watched, So I want to acknowledge that.

And I'm not saying like throw them all away, like but but we need more, we need better always like that is my desires, like more and better please, like let's keep going and let's not let's try not to regress too much.

So there's that regarding Mark in that Gollum conversation with himself, when Mark Scout the Audi mentions like the reintegration process.

I think that any like correctly brings up the point like well, you've lived thirty years and I've lived for two you know, two years slash only at work, so like a third of two years.

And what is that going to look like if we reintegate, Like you're gonna be ninety percent of us or me?

Right?

And yeah, like that ends up being boiled down into this which woman thing?

And I agree like that it's much more The question is much more interesting than which woman will we end up with?

Like the aspect of like ninety over ninety percent of him will be the AUDI is to me much more interesting and like, oh yeah, what would that look like?

Right?

Yeah, I think so, And I think it's funny.

I was trying to think about curious where we would come down on this show, and I didn't think we'd wind up being this negative.

And again, there were a lot of parts of the show that I really enjoyed, and I am looking forward to season three, especially if you know, but I really want some firm answers.

But I think that this just was a I don't know, it is so hard to capture lightning in a bottle twice.

And we'll talk about and or a bit in the bonus section for members, but I you know, I think there's a lot of questions about WOD.

Season two sort of capture that again.

And I think season one was just so interesting and so out there, and season two really had this question of like, are you going to therefore continue down those roads or you're gonna sort of say, Okay, now that we've built this really interesting sandbox, we're just going to tell you stories you've heard before.

And I just I'm just disappointed they went more of the second direction.

I'm gonna say that I really enjoyed maybe like the first two thirds three quarters of season two, but I just think that the ball was dropped at the end, like, if we want to talk about stuff I loved.

Yeah, the episode where the audis go on like the expedition and the snow covered mountain was a fantastic episode.

Not just like how interesting it was, but the cinematography was great and.

Myotography was gorgeous, and the you know, it's funny how both this and a couple other things I've watched recently have felt like that the writers were really good prognosticators, because they were basically saying, if our current situation continues, it could turn into this like parody of the end of the line and the reality is it's turned into that already, at least to some extent, you know, because all of this corporate you know, the cult of the corporation.

I think they very much were thinking about Elon Musk.

They very much were thinking about Steve Jobs.

They everyone for thinking about these sort of cults of personality that have built up around these people.

And you know, they didn't write it in the last year and a half, but certainly in the last year and a half, like Auto, people probably ben't forgotten about people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs because Elon Musk has so much become that and the degree to which, like I was watching this, Wow, we were really starting to realize all the ways in which Elon Musk has so much power in the government now.

And it was just hitting both me and Mary so hard.

Like these people predicted it, this is exactly what's happening, and it's terrifying.

Yeah, absolutely it is.

I also want to mention the other episode kind of in the middle of the season that I loved was when Harmony Kobell, the character play by Patricia Arquette, goes on her trip to her old hometown where Luhman had like some kind of factory and like where she grew up and where she was indoctrinated into Luman and that that those are the aspects of mystery Box that I love, where they sprinkle in these details and it's like what does this all mean?

And there's probably a lot of stuff in the background or the things that they said and dialogue that we don't understand yet they will the connections will be made.

And I think that was a great mystery Box episode killing killing a goat not there for me, what.

I think, especially because one thing you captured really well is my favorite mystery Boxes.

And I think this again goes to where the authors know all the answers when they start.

The process is ones where by the time you get to the end, you can now go back and watch it again and the goat makes sense, you know, and all the little weird details about the Lumen cult you now have the contact that it fits into and you're like, oh my god, this show is even better watching it the second time, knowing what I know about the answers were finally given.

And I think that's gonna wind up affecting a lot of how people feel about the show is whether or not we get there or not.

Yeah, and I think the stuff in Kobel's hometown mm hmm.

What it is is it feels real.

It feels like a real place.

And then like trying to figure out what mystery took place there is interesting.

And then like if there are hints and clues that later do make a connection, you'd be like, oh, yeah, you can't do that.

As a goat.

You can explain the goat and tell us, but there's no way for us to be like, oh, that I should have known that's what the goat is for.

Like, no, there's no way to know what the goat is for.

They're just gonna make something.

Up filling people in part.

What we learn in this episode that it's really kind of a bottle episode is that there, you know, there was a story about why she left her hometown and why certain people feel the way they do about her and her the way she feels about them, and like a mystery box, you're jump You're dropped right into the middle of it.

There's no exposition.

She doesn't like tell someone here's the situation of going back home to But by the end of the episode, you figured everything out, even to the point of you're starting to be able to guess and make those predictions because you know, A leads to B leads to C and now you can predict me and E and so yeah, yeah, I think I think it's it's kind of funny.

That episode was a really good microcosm of what this thing could be.

Yeah, And it did such a great job of developing her character as well.

Like obviously she was in most of that episode, and I feel like it informed us about her and why she is in this cult and why she she believed or still believes, and and now like what why she's trying to take it down?

Maybe I don't know.

We still don't really know.

And it also connects to the little girl Miss Swang haven't even talked about.

I think I think we should quickly talk about Miss Shwang and Miltchick, right, who are like the two supervisors on the severed floor after Kobel leaves is fired.

I guess right, because it it's fascinating.

I like, I still that's the part of this show that still intrigues me a lot, is like Miltchick, He's scary.

Milchick is to me again that perfect representation of the worst aspects of customer service slash HR because he's the person who smiles all the time, but the smile never reaches his eyes.

You know, he's constantly being like, Hey, isn't it great that we have good attitudes all around here?

You wouldn't want to have to happen with what happens with bad attitudes.

We're not like, it's just he's cheery, he's upbeat, and it is so clearly like even say that it's insincere because I utterly believe that he has drunk the kool aid that he is.

He's a true believer for whatever reason.

But he's also like he has no interest in actual, sincere office conversations.

He wants that fakeness.

He wants everyone in the office to not bring in their politics or their feelings, or to argue about the game last night or argue with the movie.

He wants us just to be about the work and just to be about the joy of the melon party that you get if you do the work well.

But he's still also very sympathetic in a way, like when he gets showed out by his boss and he tells his boss to f off or whatever the specific phrase he used, like you kind of cheer right, like, good for you, even though like you're evil, You're still a part of this evil.

And I think that's the actor Trammel Tillman.

I think he's doing a great job.

And the dance sequence is like, I hope we get a dance sequence every season with him, Yeah, because he absolutely kills it every time.

He really doesn't like the set piece at the end of the escape.

Part of it is that like he's brought in this marching band to celebrate this huge accomplishment, and then the marching band is kind of like caught up in the midst of the fight as they try to escape, and it's yeah, it's phenomenally done.

And then but at least I have some grounding for him.

We then get what's wrong to the purposes, I think like a twelve to fourteen year old Asian girl who is just she plays the same kind of role as Meltchik does, and a couple of people joke about her age, but there's never any explanation.

It just is one of those surreal things of there's a fourteen year old girl who's telling all these people in an office what to do.

But they give us the hint right like at the end when Miltchick sends her away, there's like a name for the fellowship or something like that, Like you're being awarded the Fellowship prize, right, and that's the same one that Kobel earned or won when she was a little girl.

So that's like the connection there is that Miss Wang is like showing us where Kobel came from, how she was Yeah, how she was integrated into this indoctrinated so that that that to me was like an interesting connection between them.

For sure.

I have I have read fan theories that try to connect Miss Wang to Gemma and like, get out of here with that nonsense.

Nice because it's I don't know, it's like there's two Asian people, they must be somehow related.

Yeah, it'd be kind of shitty, h So that would not be fun.

Well, this has been a great discussion.

I feel like that, like I kept wanting to jump into the much larger question that I think.

Frankly, I think we're going to do our own app so and on it because this show brings it up.

But other things, you know, it kind of ties into two vis it, ties into so many of these things.

It ties into a big episode question age of the Shield, which is the question of like can this kind of severing happen ethically or is it always going to have these kind of problems and and and there's so much there to discuss.

We'll definitely get into all that.

Yeah, Like I mentioned Dollhouse earlier, which was a show that Dejin Lockman was on, and that I was like rereading the plot.

M hm.

It's like very similar in terms of like basically personalities are wiped out and then like new personalities are rewritten over.

It's like which one is the real person.

I've just meaning to watch Dahouse for a while, so I think we're definitely gonna do this as an episode soon.

This may actually even be our members only episode, uh for May.

We'll see.

I'm gonna let everyone know.

Now you probably heard last week we did a rebroadcast of the Star Wars episode.

I'm gonna do my best to make sure we're getting you new content every week.

But with a lot of family things going on.

The young Padawan is coming into my family pretty soon, some other family illnesses and events and funerals and stuff like that, it's just gonna be a crazy time.

So we'll do our best, but we'll definitely have that episode for you soon, as with a lot of other great content.

I'll probably watch Dollhouse soon so we can talk about that one.

And of course if that is members only or but if not, something else, it'll be great.

And members only, do you get that by becoming a member?

It's only five dollars a month, fifty five dollars a year, all the informations in the show notes.

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You get bonus content at the end of most episodes.

We're gonna talk about and Ora just a moment as our bonus content for this episode, although of course even members you can skip it until you've gone and watched and or which really should have done well.

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Thank you so much for listening.

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