If you follow “Severance” season 2, you know there is no shortage of “Severance” rumors.
That’s partially by design. The Apple TV Plus thriller has crafted an incredible retro-futuristic story centered around a cult of personality that controls the largest company in the world. It begs you to speculate and to think about what’s coming next.
I’ve largely stayed away from speculating because I find many of these theories get far too ahead of themselves. Plus, the show often takes you in a direction you don’t expect, like the shocking season 2 episode 8 reveal we got about who really created the severance procedure.
But after last week’s episode, I’ve gone down a rabbit hole and come out as a conspiracy theorist because of a clue that could be hidden in the season 2 episode 9 title: “The After Hours.”
Spoilers for “Severance” season 2 to follow
‘Severance’ stealing from ‘The Twilight Zone’ can’t be a coincidence
If you think you’ve heard the name “The After Hours” before, don’t worry. You’re not struggling with reintegration. While it’s the title of episode 9 of “Severance” season 2, it’s also the title of episode 34 of “The Twilight Zone.”
In this “The Twilight Zone” episode, Marsha White (Anne Francis) is shopping in a department store with a mysterious ninth floor.
If you want to watch the episode for yourself, you can watch it on Paramount Plus, but the short version of the story is Marsha discovers that she is a mannequin brought to life, and is part of a group of mannequins on the ninth-floor of this department store that take turns living among the humans for a month at a time each.
Marsha, it is revealed, loved her time amontg the humans so much that she spent a day too long with them, which serves as the impetus for the episode’s plot.
Now, the prominence of an elevator would be enough to start ringing alarm bells in any “Severance” fan. It’s where we see the workers of Lumon’s severed floor transform from Outie to Innie. But I think the link between “The After Hours” runs deeper than that, and connects directly to the season finale “Cold Harbor.”
Could “Cold Harbor” bring a Kier resurrection?
Going into “Cold Harbor,” there’s still a lot we don’t know. But we know that Mark (Adam Scott) is the only one that can complete the Cold Harbor file, likely due to something related to his lost wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman).
We also know that Lumon CEO Jame Eagan (Michael Sidberry) is greatly awaiting this day, and is also greatly awaiting his “revolving.”
Finally, we know that there’s a baby version of Kier Eagan that wanders across the floor in the “Severance” season 2 opening credits.
My theory is that Cold Harbor is ultimately a way for the Eagan’s to (at least temporarily) revive Kier as an Innie personality for Jame. He’d be revolving (aka turning) into Kier, paying off that comment from earlier in the season and the baby Kier from the opening credits.
This would allow Kier to temporarily live among the humans, much like the mannequins from “The After Hours” in “The Twilight Zone.”
Full disclosure: I know this theory isn’t airtight.
For starters, the idea that Mark has been compiling data on Gemma so the process can be replicated with Kier data to create an Innie personality in Jame isn’t exactly a clean theory. It’s reminiscent of Charlie Day in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” explaining why Pepe Silvia doesn’t exist.
Second, there’s some really compelling theories out there about how “The After Hours” connection is about Gemma not being real after all, and that she’s actually like the mannequins from the department store in “The Twilight Zone” (h/t The Independent).
That would undercut the impact of season 2, episode 7, “Chikhai Bardo,” a bit, given that spends so much on setting the stakes of Gemma not only being alive but still herself. But it’s not something I’d rule out.
Regardless of how right or wrong my theory turns out to be though, I do remain convinced that the Eagan’s ultimate goal is to bring Kier back to life. We’ll have to watch “Cold Harbor” to see just how they do it.
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