Hello and welcome to the bunker where the work is mysterious and important.

I am Andrew H. Today, Severance, if you're not watching Apple TV's haunting science fiction satire on the modern workplace, which reaches its season two finale this week, then you probably should be.

Severance rests on one simple and brilliant premise that with just the lightest brain surgery, you can separate your work self from the one that exists in the outside world.

What you get is like the office remade by Franz Kafka.

Enter the workplace and you become your iny,

with no memory of who you are outside,

not any aspect of your life beyond the office.

Clock out at the end of the day and your outy, the original you,

remembers nothing at all of the iny's working day, their workmates,

or even what they do for a living.

To all intents and purposes, your innie ceases to exist. And the work and the rituals that surround it are meaningless.

It is literally Marx's alienation of the worker transferred from dark satanic mills to an antiseptic white-willed apple store-style environment.

Why is Severance so good? Why is it so popular?

What's it saying about our working world and where do we think it's heading? Here to talk about

Severance, I have two valuable team members, Marilla Kant. Welcome, Marie Elsie. Thank you. Where is this?

Who am I? I don't know. We're going to find out together. Aunt John Eledge, welcome John E.

I think my in you would be jealous of the fact that Marie gets an extra letter.

I think that would really bother me.

Well, it implies that there are several of the maries somewhere in the large underground

labyrinth that the bunker is connected to.

Seven of them are goots.

Many of them, yes, many of them. So we're going to try and avoid most spoilers, particularly for season two, because not everybody has caught up. But season one finished like three years ago. So I think we can consider that fair game, can't we? That's a long period between seasons. I just thought it sounded like a really interesting concept.

...