The Overtime Contingency and Lumon’s Terms of Employment

I wlll assume that it is now safe to talk about Season 2 of Severance on the Blog. If you were going to watch it, you would have watched it by now.  In any case, as I am drafting this (in late January), I have only seen the first two episodes, so I don’t have any big reveals.

For the uninitiated, I will just say that Severance is the story of four “severed” employees of Lumon Industries. They are severed in the sense that their work selves (Innies, or as the Ricken character, played perfectly by Michael Chemus, would have it,“Workies”) have no knowledge of their lives prior to the severance. They are only conscious and self-aware when they are on Lumon’s severed floors. Similarly, their non-severed selves (Outies) have no knowledge or memories of their Innies’ lives.

This post is about how the show references terms of service in a way that is, like so much about the show, an eerily familiar element of the strange worlds of Lumon Industries and Kier Town. During Season 1, Dylan (played by Zach Cherry) pilfered a card while he and his fellow Macrodata Refiners were visiting their co-workers in Optics and Design (O&D). Like the work that the Macrodata Refiners and the O&D people do, the card was important and mysterious. Its mysteries were so deep that Dylan had no sense of what he had taken. Its importance was so great that a Lumon supervisor, Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman), had to trigger the Overtime Contingency (OTC) in order to recover it.

The OTC is a mechanism that causes Innie Dylan to wake up in the walk-in closet of his Outie’s home, presumably in Kier Town. While Innie Dylan is talking with Mr. Milchick about the purloined card, his perhaps six-year-old son runs in and hugs Dylan, who is overcome to learn that he has a son. Mr. Milchick is understandably vexed that the child had not complied with Mr. Milchick’s  simple instructions to close his eyes and count to 1000. The fetid moppet failed to heed the command of the shambolic rube. Mr. Milchick immediately terminates the OTC.

Flash forward to Season 2, where we finally (after a three year wait) learn what happened just after the end of Season 1. At the end of Season 1, the Macrodata Refiners, having learned of the OTC, hatch a plot to awaken themselves, except for Dylan who has to stay behind using a Waffle Party as a diversion, in the Outie world. They are successful for 39 minutes, and then Mr. Milchick catches Dylan, and the OTC, and Season 1, end.

So, in Season 2, Episode 2, Mr. Milchick, doing damage control, visits Mark (Adam Scott), team leader of the Macrodata Refiners. He wants to know what information Mark has revealed. But Mark is still reeling from the experience of having his Outie’s life disturbed and having behaved like a madman when his Innie woke up at a reading of Ricken’s book, “The You You Are” in the home of Ricken and Outie Mark’s sister Devon. The following conversation ensues.

Mr. Milchick: What happened tonight is what we call the overtime contingency. It’s a safeguard we employ if we ever need to access your work personage off company grounds.

Mark: Yeah, you never told me about this.

Mr. Milchick: OTC disclosure can be found in your start paperwork.

It’s like every interaction any employee anywhere has ever had with their HR department.