Rewind Review: Severance, "The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design" | Season 1, Episode 5
While worldbuilding remains strong, a deflating lull at the season's mid-way point
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While there was once a time when you could generally presume that television seasons would be one of two lengths—22 episodes on broadcast, 13 episodes of cable—it has been years since this has been a safe bet. Streaming accelerated an existing trend toward variable season lengths, and now it feels like it’s a stab in the dark to guess how many episodes a show might produce in a given year.
What I realized watching “The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design,” the mid-point in Severance’s nine-episode first season, is that my knowledge of how many episodes are in this season is not necessarily “normal.” I know this is the mid-point of the season because I looked up how many episodes there were on Wikipedia, but if someone doesn’t look that up, and didn’t read a Deadline article about the show getting picked up, how would their understanding of the episode change accordingly? I remember seeing a TikTok about HBO Max’s Peacemaker—I watched the first five episodes and fell behind, I’ll catch up eventually—where someone erroneously thought it was only a six-episode season, and there’s no question that person would have assessed that episode differently as a penultimate hour as opposed to just the fifth episode out of eight.
I bring this up—and made a Twitter poll about it—because “The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design” takes the momentum from last week’s cliffhanger and immediately halts it, shifting back to slow burn worldbuilding in a way that frustrates. However, one’s level of frustration will probably vary depending on where you think we are in the season, although I’m not necessarily sure if there’s any mental calculus that would make this not feel like a bit of a letdown from where the show was beforehand.
It’s not shocking that Helly survives—she’s a major character, it’s only the mid-point in the season—but the issue I have with the episode is how it elides the aftermath. Helly woke up on the outside after Mark and Grainer pulled her down, and we don’t get to see her “Outside” reaction, leaving us to simply watch Mark go through the days of her recovery reading Ricken’s book and being slowly radicalized by what he’s learning. It’s a pivotal step toward creating all-out revolt, and works in tandem with what’s happening between MDR and O&D in the other sections of the episode, but to have had such a visceral response to the cliffhanger and then have it make little to no impact on the show is a deflating experience.
It’s also the point, I realize: the whole design of the severed floor is that things like Helly’s suicide attempt are meant to be resolved without incident, not disrupting the workers from the task at hand. But as much as that makes thematic sense, it doesn’t work narratively in a case where there’s only nine episodes to work with. This is where my knowledge of the season’s length plays against the episode, because I know that this is one of only nine installments, and it feels like we were inching forward at a time when expectation from the cliffhanger suggested a more seismic shift. Reverting back to slower pacing may be a byproduct of diegetic story elements, but this doesn’t necessarily mean it works as part of viewer experience.
What I’m curious about, though, is whether someone who isn’t aware that this is a nine-episode season would respond differently. Would presuming it was, say, 13 episodes make someone feel like this is just a natural act one reset point, and accept that a breather episode is logical here? Certainly, going back to my discussion of the show’s similarity to Lost last week, those of us who watched broadcast shows with a mystery premise are very used to this kind of pacing, but even in a cable context this episode ends up failing to adjust the goalposts significantly enough to feel satisfying.
The biggest piece of the puzzle that falls into place is a clearer sense of the mythology of the interdepartmental dynamics on the severed floor, and how Cobel and Milchick are meant to be managing it. Dylan’s tall tale about a “coup” by Optics and Design seemed a bit extreme, but Irving stumbles onto a grotesque painting of such a slaughter in the printer, placed there by Milchick as part of a conscious misinformation effort to sow distrust between the groups. When Burt eventually stumbles his way toward MDR to reconnect with Irving, he confirms that O&D has heard its own rumors about MDR, and we later learn they have an inverse painting of MDR committing atrocities against them in storage. Cobel refers to it as “running a 266,” suggesting it’s an established strategy to sever the severed from their peers.
I love the implications of this, but it was already sort of presumed: we know that the mythos of the handbook is a constructed artifice to keep workers under control, and so the idea that Dylan’s stories and his distrust of O&D were a byproduct of similar propaganda campaigns isn’t a major revelation. And while we also get some more insight into how much of Cobel’s daily activity—including having Ms. Casey leave Wellness to watch over Helly directly—is being done without oversight by the board, this again was something we had already presumed. While none of what happens in the episode diverges from these productive paths, it also doesn’t move things along in any meaningful way.
There’s no question that viewers respond to these types of “table setting” episodes differently when they know a season isn’t 22 episodes long, and it’s probably safe to say that one’s tolerance for them decreases the shorter a season becomes. And “The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design” does indeed set the table. Mark’s time with Ricken’s book gives him the fortitude to start reconstructing Petey’s map and convincing Helly he’s on her side, while Burt and Irving admit their feelings for one another, and reveal enough of Lumon’s attempt to pit them against each other to convince even Dylan they need to work together. And given that the real-world analogue here is workers organizing, the fact this isn’t happening overnight is true-to-life, and I would say in general I prefer a too-slow burn to an attempt to tell this story too quickly and lose out on potential nuance.
But half-way through a season, I needed there to be more new material here, or at least new ways of looking at the material we have. I remain very much interested in even the “table setting” scenes on Severance, but there’s a fine line the deeper you get into a season. For example, everything around Devon’s birth experience was low key interesting, but it doesn’t add up to much at the moment—it feels like her encounter with the wealthy neighbor next door meant something much more significant than just a trip to get coffee, for instance, but there’s a piece of the puzzle missing in this and most other stories. And while the discovery of a random lambing room is certainly a new wrinkle, it’s an inscrutable one, and inscrutable is not the vibe a show is looking for at the mid-way point in its season.
Of course, this brings us back to my awareness that it’s the mid-way point in the season, and we could also bring in the week-to-week schedule here—if you’re reading this while binging the season, you didn’t sit for a week anticipating escalation only to get deescalation, a reality that gets lost with time for those who arrive at a series later.
The fact that Severance is activating this type of narratology is a good sign about my level of investment in its storytelling; the fact that I spent so much of my review of “The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design” talking about it is a bad sign for this particular episode’s contribution to that storytelling.
Stray observations
I’m curious if we ever meet Outside Helly again. While getting that glimpse of her arrival was an important bit of worldbuilding to learn about the process and actually see the chip go in, at this point Outside Helly is an antagonist, and thus I’m not shocked we didn’t get to see her reaction to the suicide attempt given how embedded we are in Inside Helly’s perspective.
On the outside, Mark is getting closer to investigating what happened to Petey, and nearly tells Devon that he thinks Lumon is up to something nefarious, but he still doesn’t get back to answer the phone, and Devon goes into labor before he can speak to her more candidly about it. Another of the episode’s momentum killers that makes sense for where the character is, but contributes to the overall pacing issue.
Nikki M. James did indeed return as Devon’s midwife, although she doesn’t get much to say beyond the awkward conversation about Mark forgetting he could not indeed avoid seeing her again after how the date ended.
“If the thief reads the book, it will have been worth it”—Ricken is a fun character, and I appreciate the idea that Outside Mark finds him intolerable while Inside Mark is transfixed by his words. It gave the opening montage a really interesting tension in the earnestness, which makes me roll my eyes and yet feels profound when compared to what the handbook is offering.
Speaking of the handbook, and the paintings, Burt justifies his feelings with Irving with a very “modern interpretation” of the story of Kier and his wife Imogen as told through a painting—rather than simply bonding over their love of industry, the painting suggests they were co-workers, pushing back against the handbook’s disapproval of inter-office relationships.
I really thought there would have been more than 7 people in Optics and Design based on the size of that room, but I guess it was deceiving.
While the overall aesthetics of the show aren’t changing dramatically between episodes, the introduction of the “following lights” as Mark and Helly searched the halls was fun, and reminded me of the time I was jetlagged walking through a grocery store aisle at like 6am and was the first person to activate the lights in the freezer section while listening to “Light Of The Seven.”
Why do you think Ms. Casey chose to tell Irving that Burt was in the conference room? She certainly noticed him as she walked by, but why tell Irving? I’m certainly quite convinced that she is severed, unlike Milchick, Cobel, and Grainer, so maybe this was her own “programming” kicking in and leading her to sent Irving to help him given she was busy taking care of Helly?
I have to say, John Turturro sort of stole The Batman for me, so it’s been a real Turturrosaince this past month. I’m here for it.
I mentioned last week the question about why no one was surveilling them, and basically we learn here that Harmony is and she’s just…choosing chaos? It makes sense for her to be holding back information regarding Petey until they have more answers, but why she’s letting the departments converge? And surveilling Mark outside of work? Those are bigger questions, and she has to have some type of game plan here for it to make any sense.