If Severance hasn’t already twisted your mind into a mangled maze of confusion and Lumon propaganda, then the recent revelations about its original script will. On the debut episode of The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller & Adam Scott, the hosts reveal that our introduction to the Severance world was once much different than the one eventually streamed on Apple TV. And it would’ve completely changed the entire series.
Show creator Dan Erickson’s original idea for the pilot from his 2015 script involved Mark (Adam Scott) being divorced instead of widowed, and actually had him interviewing at a video store called Crazy Eagle Video after accidentally running over a cat. When he goes back to see if the cat is still there, he discovers it’s missing. So, he knocks on the door of a home, and its Lumon boss Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette). It’s in this meeting that we would have witnessed the one element that would’ve made it a very different series.
“There’s a sequence of her showing him her pet rat, who she then tortures. But, it turns out the rat is severed. So, she switches, and suddenly the rat is now snuggling her. That’s how she explains to him what severance is,” Erickson says. After this encounter, Mark returns to Cobel’s house only to see it replaced with a Porta Potty, which Mark communicates to Cobel in through some unspecified way.
Notably, that rat sequence would’ve introduced audiences to the idea that animals can not only be severed but also switched between severed and conscious states instantly. That would’ve given a bit more explanation as to why there are goats on the severed floor later in the season, a mystery that is still one of the main unsolved questions for Severance fans.
Mark’s Outie being introduced to Cobel as a Lumon employee who’s recruiting him to be severed would’ve eliminated one of the main tensions of the first season, as well as the upcoming second season. In the series as we know it, he goes through the severance process as a way to deal with the grief of his wife’s passing. It’s a major factor in the entire series, setting up the big twist that his wife is, in fact, likely not dead, because she’s the wellness counselor Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman) on the severed floors. His Innie has this revelation, and it’s one that is the impetus for much of his awakening in the upcoming second season.
Another change is that the original version of the pilot script involved Mark waking up on the table at his Lumon orientation, and then being “birth[ed] out of a giant sphincter in the ceiling,” according to Erickson. The episode would’ve followed his first day at Lumon, where he’d be trained by Helly R (Britt Lower), get lost in a storage closet that never ends, and see his welcome video from his Outie.
This is drastically different from the pilot episode we’ve all come to know and love, in which it’s Helly who wakes up on the table and is trained by Mark. She doesn’t end up in an endless storage closet, but she does repeatedly run through an exit door that warps her back into the severed floor before seeing her Outie’s welcome video explaining her decision to go through the severance process. That change alone would’ve altered the dynamic of the core cast. Instead of Helly being the one willing to write a message to her Outie into her arm or attempt suicide, all in efforts to leave the severed floor, it could’ve been Mark.
There are still eight more episodes of the podcast set to be released before Season 2’s January 17 premiere date. If these are the types of revelations we’re getting from just the first 20 minutes of the first episode, we may never see Severance the same way when we’re done listening to it all.