In Severance’s latest episode, “The After Hours” (season 2, ep. 9), the show makes its most direct reference yet to another television series. Could it be more appropriate that it’s The Twilight Zone? Specifically, the thirty-fourth episode in season one, “The After Hours,” which aired on June 10, 1960. For those of us who like to look for hidden references, this one isn’t much of a challenge (“The After Hours” = “The After Hours”). The directness of the reference continues near the end of Severance’s episode when Harmony Cobel and Devon are smuggling Mark into the Damona Birthing Retreat, and Harmony seems to be giving some kind of password to the guard: “Marsha White. Ninth floor,” she says, adding “Specialty Department. I’m looking for a gold thimble.” The Twilight Zone’s “The After Hours” begins with Marsha White taking the elevator to the ninth floor – the Specialities Department – looking for a gold thimble.
Now that Severance has directly evoked The Twilight Zone’s “The After Hours,” the similarities are striking and many. The ninth floor of the department store to which Marsha White is whisked does not – as far as the “normal” world is concerned – actually exist. We see multiple shops of the elevator indicator going up only to the eighth floor and then the roof. As several characters say to a bewildered Marsha White who leaves the ninth floor and then tries to get back to it, “There is no ninth floor.”
More importantly, the narrative and emotional centers of both The Twilight Zone’s “The After Hours” and Severance are built on the seemingly dichotomized worlds of “innies” and “outties.” In The Twilight Zone episode, the protagonists are living and sentient mannequins (at least when the store is closed), who, like Severance’s “innies,” live their lives ‘inside’ a building, and who deem those who inhabit the world beyond the confines of that building wholly other – the ‘outsiders’ they’re called in The Twilight Zone. In both, the elevator is a crucial transitional space between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside.’
Marsha starts to realize she is a mannequin in the elevator, confronting a saleswoman who herself transforms from mannequin to seemingly human in the elevator
Just like the innies and the outties in Severance, moreover, the mannequins and ‘outsiders’ in The Twilight Zone’s “The After Hours” share the same body – a body that inhabits both worlds. Every month, one of the mannequins gets to leave the store and live as an ‘outsider.’ They must return, though, precisely at the end of the month so that the next of them can enjoy their own fleeting freedom.
The tragedy of consciousness . . .
The Twilight Zone’s “The After Hours” begins as Marsha White enters the store looking for a golden thimble for her mother. She is, we learn later, a mannequin returning a day late from her month as an ‘outsider,’ but she seems fully human. Indeed, not only does the audience not know that Marsha is not human, but neither does Marsha. Helping her in her quest for the golden thimble, an elevator attendant ushers Marsha to the ninth floor (and, remember, there is no ninth floor in the store). On the empty and darkened floor – looking a lot like the empty, haunting hallways of Severance – Marsha is waited on by a saleswoman whom she thinks is ‘odd.’ But Marsha doesn’t know her, doesn’t remember her, even though the woman is a fellow mannequin, trying to make Marsha remember who she really is. Finally, realization dawns as the saleswoman corners Marsha in an elevator; Marsha sobs as the truth that she is a mannequin, that her freedom is illusory, sinks in. She had rebelled (or been selfish, depending on how you see it) – stayed away an extra day, stolen more freedom (and stolen it from the saleswoman, whose turn is up next).
Marsha’s narrative arc makes it clear that the mannequins do not remember that they are mannequins when they are on the outside. When they are mannequins on the inside, though, they are profoundly aware of the ‘outsiders’ – people whom they feel have, compared to their own, a full and free life – a life they long to join, eagerly awaiting their turn for a month living with them.
This knowledge, this awareness, gained by those confined to the inside – the mannequins and the ‘innies’ – is utterly tragic, the emotional center of both shows. We see it in Marsha as she breaks down sobbing in the elevator, even before she has fully remembered who she really is, and we see it later when she can’t quite – yet – join in with her fellow mannequins’ excitement at seeing off the next one of them to the outside world.
Marsha transforms back into mannequin after her month (and one day) of freedom with the ‘outsiders.’
[Spoilers below for s. 2, ep. 9 of Severance]
This tragedy also pervades Severance, and is on full display in its own “The After Hours” episode, as “innie” Dylan, who has been most fully embroiled in his “outtie’s” world, finally decides that he can’t go on without the life ‘outside,’ which he has glimpsed – experienced – ever so fleetingly in the visits of his outtie’s wife. For Dylan, who once seemed perhaps the most content of the four central innie characters, the knowledge of what he does not have is unbearable; it makes his own existence, one that once satisfied him, untenable. He resigns from Lumon, effectively ending his own life. What Severance does in invoking this Twilight Zone episode is to make it crystal clear that what matters in Severance is the emotional world – the emotional struggle – of the innies. That’s what we care about. When outtie Irving and Burt have their own tragic encounter at the train station, culminating in Irving walking away, it’s as devastating as it is because they are reiterating the prior tragedy of their innies. That’s what matters.
The difference between innie and outtie . . .
“Marsha White – in her normal and natural state . . .”
The Twilight Zone’s “After Hours” also explicitly directs us to one of the central existential questions explored by Severance: what’s the difference between the outties and the innies, anyway? Why is there the presumption that the outties are more alive, more conscious, more fully human and, conversely, that the innies are less so?
The Twilight Zone’s “The After Hours” consistently erodes the difference between those ‘inside’ and those ‘outside,’ not least by tricking the audience right at the beginning – presenting them with a mannequin who seems utterly human. The episode ends with a zoom-in to the face of Marsha White – our protagonist – returned to her ‘true’ mannequin state, as Rod Serling begins his closing narration:
Marsha White in her normal and natural state – a wooden lady with a painted face, who, one month out of the year, takes on the characteristics of someone as normal and as flesh-and-blood as you and I. But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Just how normal are we? Just who are the people we nod our hellos to as we pass on the street? A rather good question to ask – particularly in the Twilight Zone.
In typical Twilight Zone fashion, this closing explicates what the show itself dramatizes: who are the mannequins and who are the “flesh-and-blood” humans? Which state is in fact, “normal” (Serling uses the word to describe both)? And how can we tell, anyway? How do we know this is a distinction at all, a distinction that matters?
Severance’s “The After Hours” explores the same question – and it’s one that’s been central to the whole series. In season two, this question has been driven most, perhaps, by the fact that when Helena Eagan infiltrated the innie world, the others couldn’t tell. In “The After Hours,” Helly is trying to console Dylan in his despair that “we’re stuck down here with no lives and no family.” But Dylan lashes out at her, telling her, “It’s your fault we’re down here at all” – blaming Helly for what Helena did, conflating the two. And then he adds, “And if we’re so different from our outties, then how come we couldn’t tell when you were gone?” It’s a crucial question – and a cruel one to ask Helly. She responds that Irving could tell, but Dylan delivers the harsh retort: “Mark couldn’t.” Mark – who had sex with Helena and couldn’t tell it wasn’t Helly, the woman he (innie Mark) appears to be in love with. In both Severance and The Twilight Zone, then, it’s actually not easy to discern who is an innie and who is an outtie, who is a mannequin and who is “flesh-and-blood.” And that inability, that failure, collapses our certainty about our own humanity.
“I needed the day . . .”
Finally, The Twilight Zone’s “The After Hours” resonates with Severance in outtie Mark’s phone call with his boss, Milchick, in which he explains why he’s not at work that day. He pretends to be sick, but then he just says, “I needed the day. Life stuff.” He adds, “Work is just work, right?” Here, outtie Mark claims his own existence, his being ‘outside,’ as “life.” He’s claiming his existence as important, consequently condemning innie Mark as lesser: “Work is just work, right?” This moment is a direct reiteration of what happens in The Twilight Zone, as the narrative is set in motion because Marsha White takes an extra day on the ‘outside.’ The mannequin whose turn it is next to leave for a month tells Marsha it was “very selfish,” but Marsha says, “I forgot. When you’re on the outside, everything seems so normal – as if . . . we were like the others, like the outsiders, like the real people.” Everyone, even those who are excluded, value the “outsiders,” the “outties.”
But, again, that’s not exactly true, is it? The emotional center of The Twilight Zone’s “The After Hours” is the mannequins . . . just as the emotional center of Severance is the “innies.” As Rod Serling asks, who exactly are “the real people”?
