I think I would be picking at the Plur1bus post every day if I let myself, so I'll leave it alone at this point. I want to move on to Severance as my second example of Speculative Fiction that I have been immersing myself in, with several provisos or caveats mentioned up front.
I call it speculative fiction but it's a how, not prose on a page. Same with Plur1bus.
I do read other speculative fiction, just not as often. I read Til We Have Faces and The Memory Police in the last year or so and plan to read them again. In the last five years I have read Ursula LeGuin and Dune and Hyperion and Wool (Silo). Overall, I tend to read literary fiction that is set "in the real world."
Both of these shows touch or "Venn Diagram" into typical space and technology science fiction but are definitely more about the psychological matters involved.
Most people know the premise of Severance. A huge multinational corporation, apparently providing health products, "allows" its workers to undergo a procedure where a chip or capsule is implanted in their brains that is geographically activated. When the workers enter the headquarters and ride down an elevator, their consciousness blocks out all knowledge of their "outer lives"--hence, they are severed into their "outie" and "innie," selves, a nickname that one character derides as childish.
Viewers get to see the workers, well, six or seven of them and occasionally a few more, in the headquarters and outside. Outside their work habitat, the employees are not supposed to know anything about their work, which is "highly mysterious and important" although it looks like an old game of Pong from the 1970s.
The story follows the tension between the in life and out lives. The procedure is touted by the corporation and even some politicians as the next best thing in work-life balance. However, there is a bigger question. Why would anyone agree to go through it? Is it really a choice the employees can make? and what really does this company do to make money, which they clearly have a lot of? What is their history and purpose?
As to why the employees would choose it, we find that out. The main character, played by Adam Scott, wants to go to work and forget about his wife who (he and we are told) died in a car wreck. One fellow is kind of a loser and agrees to be severed to make more money to support his family; he has had trouble holding down a job, and it looks like LUMON, the company (awfully close to the name of other entities) is the only game in town for a job. Apparently they all live in Northern Canada or the Arctic Circle because it's always snowy. The third worker, played by John Turturro, is a true believer in the value of being severed and may be escaping a painful past of PTSD from military service and/or being gay. The fourth employee, a female, well, we don't know about her except that she really hates being severed to the point that she tries to commit suicide. By the end of the first season, we find out her backstory and more about the company, which is a family-based cult of deeply creeped-out dimensions.
Before I go any further, I am not sure I will go back to Severance if it ever comes back on. That is one reason, long periods between the show's seasons, three years in the case of the time between season 1 and 2. So I may not have to worry about it. Second, the show was instigated by Ben Stiller. I think the first season was meant to be satire with some speculative fiction elements. It debuted during COVID, for one thing, when so many corporate drones were working from home and definitely did not have work-life balance. The second season seemed, to me, to drop the satire vibe and go full-on Twilight Zone.
We also meet their supervisor, his supervisor, the CEO of the corporation, and a few others. Elements of the company just get weirder and weirder. There is a group of severed employees who herd goats in office attire. Why goats? I think that got put in there and then the writers had to find a way to make narrative sense of it, something to do with a big research project on identity and consciousness and the need for a sacrifice in the process, I don't know. Another unit of severed employees is over the the artistic depictions of the company that are put on the walls. Those paintings or lithographs look like a mix between religious works one would see in Sunday School literature or Victorian works. They tell the myths about the company's founding and the Egan family who run it. This group is mysteriously "severed" as in closed so that its leader, the always weird Christopher Walken, has to leave. This involves an equally weird subplot where Turturro and he are in love with each other, which had to be something the writers put in while they were laughing up their sleeves.
As for the satire, I thought it worked in the first season. The actions of the "family" to create a culture that the workers can feel devoted to seems very real to me. I have always balked when a company (or college) is called a "family." You don't fire your family or include them because they have certain credentials. It's a manipulation to do so. In Severance, only those who consent to the procedure get to be manipulated, but it's all out, lots of little parties and silly incentives.
In the second season, the show focuses more on the main character's growing connection to the female employee with her own dastardly secrets (as in, is she really severed?), to what happened (maybe) to the deceased wife, to everyone's growing dissatisfaction with the set-up, and more and more revelations, extremely weird, about the company's origins and how/why they started the severing procedure.
The actors are all good, big names, like Patricia Arquette, but they get to be pretty over the top.
The last Severance aired back in March of 2025, I think. Anyone interested in these shows can still see them on Apple TV (which will cost you something) and watch the dozens of YouTube videos on them. You are probably better off just to watch the shows and not waste much time on the YouTube videos. Many of them are done in the process of the season and are, well, wrong about what is happening and will happen. You'd be better off to just enjoy the shows yourself, or not. They are not family fare, to say the least, but neither are they full of naked rolling grunting bodies.
That said, they are excellently produced and fun to watch. I am just not sure that Severance raises the same questions about human existence that Plur1bus does and in same credible way.
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