TV Review: Severance season 2

After you've betrayed yourself, can you trust yourself again?

After its season 1 ended in a thrilling cliffhanger, Severance took its sweet time to return to screens. And it (literally) hit the ground running: now our protagonist, Mark, knows that Gemma, his wife, is still alive, hidden somewhere in the restricted levels of his workplace. Now he'll need to enlist the help of his other self, the separate identity the company created for his job, but he has his own budding romance to worry about. An added problem is that said love interest is Helly, the work self of the company's heiress, whose agenda appears to be not fully in line with her father's or her unwitting coworkers'. Meanwhile, the rest of the Macrodata Refinement team have to deal with the consequences of their escape attempt: Irving struggles to keep a sense of purpose now that Burt has retired (even though their external selves seem to be getting acquainted), and Dylan still hasn't gotten over the revelation that he has a full family—but what he learns from pursuing that route may not be the antidote to loneliness he's seeking.

One of the best things about Severance is the richness of levels of interpretation that it allows for. While Season 1 focused mainly on the corporate dystopia side of the story, season 2 aims inward and explores the personal trauma side. We knew that Mark's reason for undergoing the severance surgery was to avoid experiencing the pain of having lost Gemma, which creates the separate identity that lives during office hours in his stead. An implication that was not immediately obvious in season 1 is that this process resembles the survival mechanism that occurs in people with dissociative identities: to protect itself, the mind creates other selves who will bear the burden of trauma that the core self finds too much to face directly. As we discover Gemma's whereabouts, the reason she's being kept there, and how that relates to the real purpose of severance technology, we find more dots to connect that bring us nearer to the full picture: in fulfillment of the doctrine of its mythologized founder, Lumon plans to permanently subdue the Four Tempers.

A key step in this plan is Macrodata Refinement. In this season we learn what those funny numbers our protagonists spend endless workdays sorting mean, and the answer reveals yet another side to Lumon's unflinching cruelty. In fact, even those most loyal to Lumon can be tossed away without a thought. We saw in season 1 how Harmony Cobel went through a collapse of her entire worldview (and season 2 reveals the extent of how much she actually did for Lumon); this time it's Seth Milchick who gets pushed to the limit of his patience, not so much by the employees' already established rebelliousness but by the totalitarian capriciousness of upper management, whose disciplining methods start to grow increasingly degrading.

Another important shift relates to location. We get more episodes set outside of Lumon, some of which are the highlight of the season, which showcase how far and how deeply Lumon's reach has corrupted the world around it. These episodes help us better understand the motivations of Harmony, Burt, Seth, and even Gemma and Helly, but these are the kind of brilliant revelations that don't close off follow-up questions. Yes, now we know what those characters want, but why would they want that?

This insight into hidden motives and strange choices informs the central relationship of the season: that between Mark and his work self. Each half of his identity knows only part of the puzzle about Gemma, and they're going to need to work together in order to rescue her. But of course, it's hard to join forces if each Mark exists only while the other doesn't. The external Mark's efforts to communicate with his workplace half escalate in desperation until both versions of him realize how little they know each other and how incompatible their goals truly are. And here's where the story's various interpretative possibilities come into play. Rather than a separate character, office Mark can be seen as a part of Mark's mind that he's neglected and refused to acknowledge. It's a substitute self that helps him skip the necessary steps of his grieving process. After so much time spent nurturing such an unhealthy coping strategy, it shouldn't be surprising that the original act of self-betrayal becomes multiplied. Mark, who has been suffering intensely without the love of his life, should know better than to try to inflict the same pain on someone else. And yet, in his moment of need, that's exactly what he offers to his other half. The latter's response is shocking, but understandable.

After a stellar first season, Severance found a way to raise the bar even higher. Somehow managing to juggle the interpersonal tension of the panoptical workplace, the dark dead-ends of unprocessed grief, and the ever-worsening difficulty of staying true to oneself under a system of coerced devil's bargains, Severance continues to be a masterpiece of psychological intrigue and imaginative storytelling.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Never Let Go

What's there to be afraid of? Wouldn't you want to go see it for yourself?

In a remote house in the woods, a mother raises two kids. They have no contact with other people. This is by choice. They subsist on what they can find in the forest, but they're terrified of what could lurk out there. Whenever they walk outside, they tie themselves to a long rope whose other end is attached to the foundations of the house. As long as they're tethered to a place built from love, they can feel safe. There's no telling what might happen if they lost contact with the rope.

Never Let Go is a subtle kind of horror, one based on the anticipation of unseen things. It's no coincidence that the Bible gives "anticipation of unseen things" as a definition of faith. The mother (Halle Berry) has created a cultish dynamic in the house, constantly warning her kids about a nameless, formless evil that could devour them with a single touch without the protection of the rope. She makes them recite litanies and spend hours inside a dark box to purify their souls. It soon becomes clear that she'd have no problem killing any member of the family touched by the evil, and the dialogues establish that she has already done it more than once. Understandably, the kids are growing up in a very confused state, unsure of what they should fear more: the forest and its mysteries, or their mother and her zeal.

Several questions emerge as we learn what few bits of backstory the mother is willing to disclose. The central one in the movie is: Do you feel afraid because you're seeing monsters, or are you seeing monsters because you feel afraid? And also: Is there such a thing as loving your family too much? Are the archetypal intrafamilial betrayals (Hansel and Gretel's parents, or Cain and Abel) fated to reoccur in each generation? How do you tell when love is starting to demand too high a price? And what space is there for you to grow when the extent of your world is one person?

The child characters are far from prepared to face those questions, and the child actors convey that anxiety marvelously. Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) is the more devoted one, happy to be disciplined and eager to prove his loyalty to his mother. Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) is the more curious one, willing to question arbitrary rules and investigate what the real danger is. When the family's food supply dwindles to an alarming degree, and the mother makes a desperate proposal to ensure everyone's survival, the children's opposite perspectives finally clash, and the fragility of their self-imposed isolation is shattered by uncomfortable truths.

The ever-present rope that connects this family is a powerful symbol. A rope can be a lifeline, or it can be a noose. Adhering to an invariable rule of never letting go can blur the line between staying safe and staying trapped. The mother is eventually revealed to have lacked a healthy model of parental love, and the way she's chosen to handle her own turn at parenting makes the kids' doubts justified.

The movie plays a clever game with the audience's beliefs. The dreaded evil has so far been invisible to the children; it only manifests to the mother's eyes in the shape of people she's watched die. Why don't the children see it? Is the evil merely in the mother's head, or is it playing a long game to catch her sons with their guard down? For a good stretch of the movie's runtime, both possibilities are presented as equally likely. It's immediately obvious that the mother isn't entirely reliable, but (and here's one of the oldest tricks in the horror arsenal) what if she's right? What if the world really did end in mass murder and this family is all that is left?

Later plot developments that must not be spoiled give a cruel spin to these questions. The choices that the kids make when their mother is not next to them appear to demonstrate the resourcefulness of evil. Then again, the evil that those choices express wouldn't have happened if the mother hadn't taught them about evil in the first place. Do we become tainted from simply hearing about the human imperfections? Does this mean that not even solitude in pristine nature is a refuge from the flaws of society?

Never Let Go starts as a survival movie about a mother bravely fighting to protect her children, but it gradually reaches the idea that you cannot shield children from evil forever. They will grow, and you will die. They need to learn how to face evil without you, and if you seriously try to keep them safe forever, what you're actually doing is make them your prisoners. Obsession with hidden enemies typically leads to seeing enemies in each other. He who fights monsters, etcetera.

In a scene loaded with layers of meaning, the mother explains to the kids that pictures do more than show images: they show feelings. To me, that's an invitation to not read the movie literally. This picture is not simply the story of a family hiding from a threat that ended the world. It's a picture that says that our fears don't have to be our children's fears, that what creates enemies is the very concept of enemies, and that a form of love that is unwilling to let you go is precisely the form of love you most need to let go of.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Scare: The Sixth Sense

A creepy character study that holds up over time

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Oscar-nominated cerebral horror film The Sixth Sense. I consumed a fair amount of Bruce Willis content during his heyday, but this one escaped me. At the time, I wasn’t in the mood for creepy content, so I took a pass. Over the years, the film became a classic, showing up on best of lists, particularly for best plot twists. Thanks to the internet and repeated discussions of the film, many elements of the story were unavoidable even for non-viewers. As a result, the “twist” at the end was spoiled for me long before I saw it this month. But instead of making me less interested, the fact of the twist made me more fascinated by a story that I previously imagined as creepy and subdued. Now, in honor of our First Scare project, I have finally watched M. Night Shaymalan’s award-winning The Sixth Sense.

The story follows Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), a successful child psychologist in Philadelphia, who works with troubled children. The film opens with Malcolm celebrating a prestigious lifetime award for his work in child psychology. His loving wife Anna (Olivia Williams) is proud of him even though she notes that his success has come at the cost of putting other aspects of his life second, including her. However, she says it’s worth it for the children he has helped. This comment serves up an ironic twist of fate: their celebration is cut short when Vincent Grey (Donnie Wahlberg), a former patient, breaks into their home and accuses Malcolm of misdiagnosing him and failing him. The psychotic, distraught, mostly naked teen suddenly shoots Malcolm and kills himself while Anna rushes to stop Malcolm’s bleeding.

Later we see a recovered Malcolm starting to work with another troubled little boy, Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). Grade-school-aged Cole has what seems to be delusions and is generally maladjusted and often bullied by other children for his odd and awkward behavior. Malcolm wants to focus on helping Cole as a way to atone for his perceived failure with Vincent Grey. In the process of visiting and interviewing Cole, we meet Cole’s stressed single mother, Lynn (Toni Collette), trying to support her emotionally troubled son. As the therapeutic meetings continue, we also see the world through Cole’s eyes and discover the first plot twist of the story and the explanation for Cole’s stress: as Cole himself explains it to Malcolm, “I see dead people.” Throughout the film, through Cole’s eyes, we see glimpses of half-burned people, hanging people, bloodied or poisoned people lurking around Cole and sometimes interacting with him. The sudden appearances are nicely creepy and provide quite a lot of jump scares. Later we find out why the child is haunted, and we find out a second important plot twist detail about the ghosts surrounding him.

In addition to his work with Cole, Malcolm also struggles with his relationship with his wife Anna. She seems to be distant from him and is generally melancholy to the point of ignoring him. Ironically, the child Cole, at the end of the film, is the one able to give psychologist Malcom advice on how to reconnect with his wife. That reconnection leads to the last big plot twist.

The most powerful thing about the film is Haley Joel Osment’s stunning child acting. His somber, melancholy, moody portrayal of a little haunted boy is quietly mesmerizing, poignant, and creepy. At times, his sweet, young face and soft voice are tragically endearing. At other times, he becomes angry and cruel, adding an extra layer of scariness and complexity to the story. Mostly, he is coldly and defeatedly accepting of his fate of suffering in a world of abusive children and disbelieving adults. The film has a lot of great (but likely unintentional) messaging about the importance of listening to and believing suffering children. The other excellent aspect of the film is Toni Collette. She delivers a great performance as Cole’s long-suffering mother, who is trying to protect her son from bullies while dealing with her own frustrations at his inexplicably odd behavior.

My least favorite aspect of the film was, ironically, Malcolm. My issue is not with Bruce Willis himself—he does a fine job playing basically the same type of character he normally plays (from Moonlighting to Die Hard). But the character of Malcolm is written in a way that is mildly annoying. His handling of the break-in is confusing. His decision to help Cole is ultimately a self-serving way to try to clear his conscience. But when things get tough with Cole, he decides to abandon the child. Ultimately it is the child, Cole, who helps Malcolm find peace, and Cole is most helped in the end by his final emotional exchange with his mother.

The Sixth Sense is my favorite kind of horror film, quietly cerebral and creepy. I’m surprised at how well it has held up over time. For a film that’s twenty-five years old, it still feels mostly timeless rather than dated (other than some passing comments on divorce and a surprising lack of diversity for a story set in Philadelphia). Despite knowing the big twist in advance, I still felt engaged with the main character, Cole. And for me, it’s all about character, even in a horror film.

Highlights:

· Oscar-worthy child acting
· Cerebral plot twists
· Survives the years of spoilers

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris—Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Film Review: Blink Twice

What you don't know will absolutely hurt you

That the über-rich act as if they were exempt from the law of the land, common rules of courtesy, and basic human decency isn't news to anybody. Nor is their disturbingly common tendency to build secret lairs that keep the world out (and its pesky laws). And the disingenuous non-apology apology has become the rare genre of drama where bad men all recite the same lines while hoping no one will remember the spectacle.

Zoë Kravitz's debut as a film director, Blink Twice, points an irate finger at the uselessness of the public apology tour. The story is deceptively simple: a working-class woman crashes an exclusive party for billionaires, gets the attention of a sketchy creep with money, and joins his entourage for a tropical getaway at his private island. Soon enough, we learn that the reason this place is disconnected from the world is exactly what you were suspecting when you bought your movie ticket.

During the first half, the storytelling is cleverly anchored on what it's not showing: at the private island, our protagonist finds all the gourmet dishes, cocktails, sunny afternoons at the swimming pool, and wild drug-fueled parties that anyone would imagine the 1% have an endless supply of. This goes on day after day until you suddenly wonder: hey, if this is supposed to be a hedonistic extravaganza of excess and licentiousness... where's the sex? What we've seen so far is surprisingly chaste.

What are we not seeing?

Of course, it turns out there is sex on this private island, and oh boy does it make you wish you hadn't seen anything.

The modus operandi of the villains in this story is a terrifying logical extension of what happens in real life: the focus isn't on not doing evil, but on not getting caught. If you're used to controlling thousands of subordinates, it's easy to be lured by the prospect of controlling perception and memory. The same sociopathic traits behind the harmful actions of powerful people can produce elaborate mechanisms of deceit. Nothing to see here, keep going, don't believe your own eyes.

Channing Tatum plays the main villain with a dramatic potency I never suspected he had, especially in a tense scene toward the end, where his character spells out his worldview with raw fury. Maybe this achievement in acting should be attributed to Kravitz's direction, which makes the whole feat even more artistically interesting: she's crafted a burning portrait of evil from the image of her real-life fiancé.

Blink Twice has a mystery plot, but it's very direct about it. There are no layers of symbolism or allegory. It could be because the message it conveys needs to be shouted clearly: #MeToo has been a big necessary step, but it's been far from enough. Roman Polanski still walks free. And Woody Allen. And Bryan Singer, and Bill Cosby, and Brett Ratner, and Louis C.K., and James Franco, and Kevin Spacey, and untold numbers of other perpetrators who haven't been exposed yet. It hits hard to watch Blink Twice while the Neil Gaiman case is still unfolding.

It's a no-brainer to empathize with this protagonist, but I'm ambivalent about the revenge fantasy with which the movie ends. After the secondary villains have been dispatched with bloody gusto, the final boss gets trapped forever in the bliss of ignorance. One thing I'll grant is that this choice leads to an important point of discussion: what's an appropriate punishment for unrepentant abusers?

Blink Twice is an effective thriller that knows how to maintain high tension even long after all the secrets have been revealed. The trick it plays on the viewer is the same one abusers execute on their victims: it's absolutely obvious that something very wrong is happening, but as long as no one acknowledges it, the pretense can continue.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview [Video Game]: Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise by White Owls and Toybox Inc.

I wish that a premonition warned me about this game.

The first game in this series, Deadly Premonition, was a cult classic that was released in 2010. The game received mixed reviews and was one of those love-it-or-hate-it kind of games for most. The best compliment I can give the game is that it was memorable. There was a uniqueness to the title that evoked a specific feeling of whimsy whenever the title was mentioned. That's not to say I don’t recall all of the game's negative traits (of which there were many), but the distinct essence of Deadly Premonition kept the game in a more positive glow for this reviewer even after a decade. Three years ago, Swery and the teams at Toy Box Inc. and White Owls decided to throw us back into the shoes of Francis York Morgan so that we could solve the case of the red seeds and figure out who’s been chopping people up all while discussing films in a wholly unusual and obsessive way.

The most simple way I could describe Deadly Premonition 2 is that it is exactly what a sequel shouldn’t be. The game attempts to create another bizarre story (and boy is it bizarre), but in the process loses out on what made the original unique and memorable in the first place. Now, there is a high possibility that I may be forgetting some of the fine details of the original, and my mind and views on the world and its politics have indeed changed these last ten years, but I don’t recall the original’s quirk being tied to incest and transphobia. When I think of this game in ten years, these are the things I will remember.

This isn't to say that the game’s director/writer intended any sort of transphobia (though one non-transphobic character misgenders at some point) through the lens of the creator, but it’s used more as a tool to create an uncomfortable otherness. It comes across as ignorant, not to mention the glossed-over conversation of race in the American South. It attempts inclusion by incorporating persons of color, a trans character, and a character with mental disabilities, but fails to have a reason to do so. The inclusion isn’t meaningful and ends up setting these characters up as caricatures to be used for the plot. It’s a wasted opportunity that unfortunately brings to light the need for more well-researched and appropriate inclusion of minorities in video game media.

All this aside, the story is an unhinged mess. One of the final cutscenes has so much going on that I’m not quite sure the writer understands what it means to create rules within a universe and then abide by them. So many things go unexplained, and not in a quirky and mysterious way that makes me want to continue to figure everything out. There is some random guy named Houngan who appears on reflective surfaces and gives you oracles that essentially allow you to solve the case. Who is he? Why does he exist? Does he exist? I have no idea. I Googled him, thinking maybe I missed something because I skipped so many awful, unrewarding side quests, but no. There is no clear answer about the character or whether he exists. While there is a chance that I could discover more about the creator’s motives through multiple play-throughs of the game, that would mean playing the game again.

The gameplay is abysmal. The controls feel awful, like no time has passed between 2010 when the original game was released, and 2020’s sequel. The skateboarding segments feel worse than the old Tony Hawk games from the ‘90s. The shooting also feels antiquated. I can’t think of a single gameplay aspect I can commend this game for. The original game’s shooting mechanics were understandable (though still awful), they were a last-minute addition to increase the entertainment value of the game. They knew the sequel would include them from the start and still bungled it. It is not exciting or fun to play almost any aspect of this game (except for the maybe the stone skipping mini-game). At one point, the game tasked me with following a dog that moves faster than I walk, but slower than I run, so I had to keep a constant pace with him as we seemingly traversed the entire town of Le Carré. Halfway through this mission, I put the game down for a week. I almost never put a game down in the middle of a mission, let alone for a week.

The final segments of each chapter force the player through long, boring shooting segments that astound me. Over the twenty hours of gameplay the main story provides, you face off against maybe seven enemy types. Three of them are animals (wolves, alligators, and bees (yes, bees)) and are encountered in the daytime. You'll find the other four in the other world and a new one is unveiled each chapter. But here’s the thing; the AI is awful, and in addition, they repeat the same audio over, and over, and over. “Snip, snip, snip!” It’s laughable.

The performance? You guessed it; atrocious. You would think that a game with basic semi-cell-shading graphics, low-poly geometry, and simple animation would perform fine, but the game stutters constantly. It’s never fully unplayable, but it constantly reminds you that you're playing a poorly optimized game. While I played this on the Switch, it’s not an excuse. The game doesn’t push any graphical or gameplay boundaries so the hindrances are unwarranted.

There are some redeeming factors to the game. It never crashed on me despite performance issues. The story is followable for the most part and some of the characters bring some charm to the small town, like Patricia. Despite the basic graphics and lack of an endearing art style, the game manages to eke out a sense of a unique small town vibe for Le Carré, and though it isn’t particularly pretty to look at or explore, it has an odd coziness to it. There were moments that I enjoyed exploring Le Carré with Patricia and trying to solve the gruesome murders, but I frequently found the rest of the game getting in the way.

Whether I was watching a dreadfully long exposition scene, killing mundane enemies with early PS2 shooting mechanics, or listening to York repeat the same conversation to himself a hundred times, I found Deadly Premonition 2 to be a complete slog. It feels antiquated in all the wrong ways and doesn’t particularly reward you for that patience with a great story. It’s interesting, to be sure. It has moments of decent storytelling but overall feels weird just to be weird. And if that’s your thing and you loved the original game, then you may enjoy this. If, like me, you enjoyed the original game for its quirk and uniqueness, but disliked the gameplay and some of its story drivel, you may find yourself repulsed by Deadly Premonition 2’s lack of advancement in any meaningful area of game design. Francis York Morgan may have some charm, but hearing him say “Lollipop, I just wanted to say that” for the fiftieth time begins to grate on one’s nerves. If you have no investment in the series, skip this game.

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The Math

Objective Assessment: 4/10

Bonus: +1 for some catchy tunes. +1 for being completable and mostly understandable.

Penalties: -2 for everything else.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

In 'Severance,' the perfect work-life balance is a horrific illusion

This instantly addictive satire lays bare how easily corporate culture turns totalitarian as soon as it gets a chance

It's every manager's dream: employees who can behave 100% professionally and leave their personal problems at the door. Obedient cogs whose entire philosophy of life consists in loyalty to the company. Eager followers who wouldn't dare form close ties with their coworkers and whose aspirations don't aim further than winning a commemorative paperweight. Hyperfocused nonpersons who will never get distracted from their tasks because that's literally the only thing in their minds.

Corporate culture would love nothing more than to achieve that fantasy. Apple TV's new series Severance, created by Dan Erickson and gorgeously directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, explores the nightmare that would result if companies could wield complete control over human beings without interference from the outside world.

Severance takes place in a biomedical corporation that subjects its low-level employees to a surgery that separates their memories and identities between their office selves and their outside selves. Every day, they drive to their jobs, enter an elevator, and forget who they are. They work their shifts without any knowledge of their personal lives; while in that state, all they can remember is life inside the company building. At the end of the day, they enter the same elevator and switch back: out in the street, they have no idea what they do for a living or even who their coworkers are.

Not that their jobs make the least bit of sense, mind you. That workplace couldn't be any more ridiculously shady: with its endless featureless corridors, creepy supervisors who won't stop smiling cheerfully, outlandish teambuilding rituals, an obscure internal mythology around the company's founder, an obsessive degree of surveillance, and punitive reeducation worthy of a North Korean prison camp, the surreal environment of Severance presents a heightened version of worrying trends that already exist in real-world companies.

The dangers of organizational totalitarianism and CEO worship have been raising alarms for quite a while now. Our jobs already dominate a big chunk of our lives. The main reason they don't exert more control is fear of worker solidarity, public opinion, and legal retaliation. But in a scenario where no one outside can know what happens inside, where not even we can know what is done to us for eight hours of the day, the corporation won't hesitate to claim every part of us. Once it has control of our actions, it will gladly morph into its own little dictatorship. Let it get its hands on our brains, and it will become a cult.

The fictional company in Severance devotes an amount of effort and resources to singing the praises of its founder that is only one step away from the cult of personality of real-life CEOs. When we think the show can't get any more bizarre, the next episode reveals even darker depths of how much these workers are expected to bow at the feet of the founder. His sayings are holy scripture, his image is a focus for displays of reverence, and his recreated house is a site of pilgrimage. While inside the office, employees are forbidden from reading any literature except the company manual, which is written with such disturbing solemnity that, toward the middle of the season, a mediocre self-help manual smuggled into the building proves life-changing for our protagonist.

Said protagonist is Mark (Adam Scott), a recent widower who applied for a split-memory job so he could forget about his pain for eight hours every day. He only starts to question his routine when a man claiming to be a former coworker contacts him with confusing revelations about what really goes on inside the company.

Honestly, you don't even need a conspiracy theory to smell that something is very wrong about that place. In the office, social interaction is impersonal to the point of loss of humanity. Mark's department spends the workday classifying meaningless numbers, so personal achievements feel empty, and when supervisors recognize them, any enjoyment is clothed in an artificiality that robs it of value. No one knows what their work means; the board of directors are only present as an ominous silence on the phone; the floor layout is deliberately labyrinthine to discourage employees from joining forces; and for whatever reason, there's a goat farm.

Everything about this series sounds incomprehensible. But the cast does a stellar job of grounding the absurdity in real human emotion. Britt Lower, who fulfills the trope of the new hire through whom we learn the rules of this world, takes the story into deep existential terror as her character learns that she is her own worst enemy. John Turturro plays a bootlicking senior employee who gets radicalized when he realizes that his office crush's retirement implies that that version of him will cease to exist. And Patricia Arquette is deliciously menacing as the tyrannical manager with an agenda of her own.

The impressive talent starring in Severance would suffice to recommend it. But the ace up this show's sleeve is its visual language. Both directors convey the claustrophobic life of cubicle workers with an impeccable eye for shot composition. We frequently see Mark sitting alone with half the frame obscured, symbolizing the missing half of his life that he no longer has access to. Although the story appears to be happening in our present time, the office space is designed with a vaguely retro aesthetic that heightens the incongruity of the situation. The end result is simultaneously funny, intriguing, scary, unsettling, sad, relevant, and at its core, intensely human.

With this kind of premise, Severance could easily have rolled down the hill of shocksploitation. But it manages to never lose hold of the humanity at the center of the story. Severance is about the unfair demands of "professionalism" and the increasing pressure to not let our personal issues affect our performance. It's about the frustrations that continue to drive the Great Resignation. It's about private corporations' ongoing attempt to build their own secluded societies, isolated from scrutiny. It's about a system of social relations that makes us complicit in our own exploitation.

On a more intimate level, Severance is about our willingness to rip ourselves apart if that's what it takes to avoid confronting deep pain (there's a subplot about a woman who undergoes the brain surgery to create a separate self who will only exist for the purpose of experiencing childbirth). And, like all great stories, it's about the search for happiness and the amounts of unhappiness we can inflict upon ourselves along the way. Severance is the most important television show of the year, and it will remain culturally significant beyond this decade.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview [video game]: Get Even by The Farm 51 (developer)

Mind Bending

The number of video games that actually do something with medium that less interactive media (movies, TV) can't accomplish is so vanishingly small. Video games are so frequently linear affairs without much opportunity for deviation that the rare ones that do something different stand out. Get Even stands out.

You are Cole Black and you can only remember one thing, a hostage rescue gone wrong. You wake up in a run down asylum where Red, your captor, has strapped a headset to you that can explore and replay memories. By replaying these memories and exploring the asylum, you have to put together the pieces to try to find out who you are, what you were doing, and who's behind all of it.

In a lot of ways, Get Even reminds me of Condemned: Criminal Origins. Like Condemned, you have a handful of non-gun tools to explore environments and collect evidence, like blacklights, thermal vision, and an environment scanner. Collecting this information and finding documents are an important part of the game as you attempt to sort out Black's memories. While using these tools to meticulously scour rooms is kind of fun, often I just found myself in rooms littered with documents to dump a lot of information.

However, this isn't a walking simulator. There are guards and mercenaries everywhere. Black is equipped with a couple useful weapons, but discouraged from using them. This means most levels are stealthy affairs, and the stealth in the game isn't exactly great. You can view enemy vision cones with your map, but the enemy's vision extends far beyond what the cone indicates. This is no Metal Gear Solid. Additionally, you're told upfront that your actions, including killing people in your memories, have consequences. So you're given a cool weapon to play with, and told not to use it.

What Get Even does really well is mess with the player. At the start of the game, you know as much as Black does, so the game can reveal things to you and Black at the same time. This exploring of Black's memories where Black doesn't know what happens next leads to some situations where you as the player can and should question whether what you're seeing is what actually happened or only how Black wanted to remember it. This merging of perspectives and unreliable narration are head games that other media can't pull off, so Get Even's experience is pretty unique.

Looking at The Farm 51's past titles, Get Even should be the game that gets them more positive attention. It's a cool game that tries to create a different experience from most games and succeeds in many ways. Get Even seems to have flown under a lot of people's' radars, and it deserves more attention.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 excellent pacing drips out the details of Black's memories

Penalties: -1 environments look a little too familiar sometimes, -1 weak stealth makes not using the cool weapon particularly frustrating.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 (an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws)

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POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: The Farm 51. Get Even [Namco Bandai, 2017]