My Severance Theory: Lumon, Time Periods, Mark, Helly, etc.

Warning: S1/S2 spoilers ahead. Please note that I watched S1 more than a year ago and am fuzzy on some of the details.

Disclaimer: I was inspired to post after I was watching S2E1 the other night. I sort of had an epiphany in the middle of the episode and developed a theory for what Lumon is and why people are severed. I came up with it without ever having gone on this sub or having heard another theory about the show, so it's quite likely that it's completely wrong—it just made sense in my head.

Theory

The most important aspect of the theory is that when Mark, Irving, Dylan, and the rest of the Lumon employees descend the elevator from the real world and become their severed selves, they’re not actually entering a real place. What they perceive as their work is actually a computerized simulation of consciousness. And when you agree to work for Lumon, you agree to be their lab rat too.

I think Lumon is essentially creating the ability to upload consciousness to a virtual platform. Every time Mark goes to work, he is sedated and connected, along with his coworkers, to some sort of central machine that enables them to experience what they believe is their work. In reality, they are in the same virtual space, which explains how they can interact with one another—they’re part of a collaborative virtual reality existing on some sort of shared server. This explains several inconsistencies in the show, including parts when characters are trying to escape the offices and come across physical impossibilities that put them in infinite loops in space—this would not be possible if Lumon existed physically.

Time Period Inconsistency

Another piece of evidence that the Lumon is a virtual world is that the offices seem like they are from a different time period than the present day. The technology, architecture, and interior design of the offices are quite dated, and in S2E1, when Milchick says that the Macrodata Refinery team has become famous advocates for severed people’s rights, the photograph that he shows them appears to be from a long time ago. The explanation hinges on the idea that to create a virtual environment like this, it’s necessary to have tons and tons of data about the time period you’re trying to recreate. Although it would be impossible to recreate the present day because you don’t have all the information about it yet, it would be much easier for Lumon to recreate a past environment that you have had time to catalogue all the information about.

Helly

I think Helly was put in the simulation to prove (to investors or some other people in charge) that this system is safe. Because she is the daughter of the CEO of Lumon, it’s a pretty confident move to put your daughter into a system that’s still in the process of being created and tested. However, now that Severed Helly knows about the outside world, the company is incentivized to keep her in the virtual world for longer because they don’t want her telling non-severed people what life is really like for the severed. If the time between S1E8 and S2E1 is actually 6 months, then much more stuff may have happened to further complicate things.

Mark’s Wife

Now, to explain Mark’s deceased wife… I’m not sure about the backstory yet, but I’m pretty sure she’s actually dead in real life. However, she obviously exists inside the simulation, so there’s certainly some story as to how she got there and how Lumon had access to her consciousness before she died. Mark obviously seems to care about her more than anything else and it seems like he’ll uncover the whole story in ensuing episodes.

Macrodata Refinement and Other Lumon Jobs

Each team at Lumon has some specific job, and it’s unlikely their jobs are meaningless. I haven’t watched S1 in a long time and haven’t thought much about what specific jobs could correspond to. I do think that they have to do with the specific people’s brains/minds/memories and involve Lumon accessing them somehow, but I haven’t thought much beyond that.

Predictions

As far as predictions for future episodes, I think there will likely be a large-scale conflict between the current test subjects (Mark, Dylan, Irving, Helly?, etc.) and the Lumon governing body. Not sure exactly how this will look but we could see a similar conundrum to what occurred in Black Mirror’s “San Junipero”—essentially the choice to exist physically for a finite amount of time or virtually forever. Additionally, Mark may be incentivized to stay in the machine for longer because his wife exists there and doesn’t exist in the outside world.

I think there’s a pretty small chance that the show is going to do this, but I think it would be super awesome if all of Season 2 happened chronologically after all of Season 3—in other words if Season 3 took place (mostly) outside of the virtual world and explained everything that happened to set up Season 2.

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this and whether people have come up with similar theories. I've purposefully stayed off of the sub so I don't tarnish my own views with stuff that other people have already come up with!