The following story contains light spoilers for the first season of Severence But none for season 2.
He First compensation season He walked the line between science fiction thriller and Office space-The satire, using an intelligent presumption (the characters cannot remember what happens at work while it is at home, and vice versa) to open new narration possibilities.
It hinted additional depths, but in reality it is the construction of the enlarged world of season 2 that begins to discover additional topics and ideas.
After seeing the first six episodes of the second season and talking to the showrunner and main writer of the series, Dan Erickson, as well as a couple of cast members (Adam Scott and Patricia Arquette), I see a program that is more than criticizing corporate life. These are all kinds of social control mechanisms. It is also a show with a tremendous sense of style and deep influences on science fiction.
Corporation or cult?
When I started seeing season 2, I had just seen two documentaries about cults,The voteon a marketing and training company of several levels that turned out to be a sexual cult, and Love has won: the cult of mother GodOn a small Internet -based religious movement that believed that its founder was the last human form of God.
There were indications of cult influences in the Lumon corporate structure in season 1, but without spoiling anything, season 2 is much deeper in them. As someone who has worked in a couple of very large media corporations, I enjoyed RuptureThe sending of corporate culture. And as someone who has worked on new technology companies, both good and dysfunctional, and who grew in a radical religious environment, now enjoy its sending the social dynamics of worship and power works.
Lumon controls what information is presented to its employees to keep them online.
Credit: Apple
When I talked to the showrunner Dan Erickson and actor Patricia Arquette, I was not surprised to know that it was not just me, the influence of the stories about the cults in season 2 was intentional.
Erickson explained:
I saw all the cult documentaries that I could find, like the other writers, as well as Ben, like the actors. What we find while we develop is that this strange crossover exists. There is this strange gray zone between a cult and a company, or any power system, especially one where there is a kind of charismatic personality at the top such as Kier Eagan. You see that in companies that have a kind of reverence for its founder.
Arquette also investigated a little about cults. “Very early, when I got the pilot, I was quite fascinated at that time with many cult documents,Wild countryAnd I don’t know if you could call it a cult, but see things about Scientology, but also different military schools, all kinds of things like that with that type of structure, even certain religions, “he recalled.