I’m currently something of a fanboy of the Apple TV series Severance. It doesn’t neatly fit a genre, being mystery/thriller/sci-fi/horror/drama. It’s what you call a slow-burn. There’s not much in the way of action. There are long gaps between dialogue. Indeed, you could get to the end of an episode and wonder whether anything much had even happened. And yet it’s absolutely riveting.

Every scene, every image, every word has significance, and the whole show acts as a giant metaphor. It’s the sort of series that when something is revealed in, say, the 4th episode of the 2nd series, you feel like you have to watch the entire show from series 1, episode 1 again. What it’s a metaphor for is the question that has been delved into online in abundance, with a ton of theories around. It truly is a work of sublime art.

It is the metaphor (or one possible metaphor) I want to talk about in this post, but I need to explain the show a bit first. Warning: spoilers coming. If you haven’t watched it yourself, another warning if you’re going to check it out, for strong language.

The story takes place in a company called Lumon, founded by Kier Eagen in the 19th century. One floor of their office building is what they call the ‘Severed’ floor. That is, employees on that floor are Severed. To be Severed is to essentially have your memories blocked off, so that while you are at work, you are unable to remember anything at all from your private life, and when you are not at work, you can’t remember anything at all from your work. In essence, we end up with two separate people: one while at work (called an ‘innie’), another while not at work (called an ‘outie’). It’s what they call having their memories ‘spatially determined’.

At first glance, work life on the Severed floor in Lumon is surreal. We focus on the team in the ‘Macrodata Refinement’ department, where they look for numbers amongst a field of numbers that give them certain emotions. They then separate those emotion-inducing numbers from the others and put them in digital boxes. They have no idea why they’re doing what they’re doing, only that it’s ‘mysterious and important’.

The show tackles themes of work-life balance, it’s a commentary on often bizarre corporate culture and practices, and it deals with complex issues such as who we are as individuals and how we are shaped by our experiences. For example, an ‘innie’ doesn’t know whether their ‘outie’ is married, so what does it mean if an ‘innie’ develops feelings for a work colleague? Is it cheating? Does it matter?

‘Innies’ don’t know why their ‘outie’ chose to be Severed. Maybe they’re a spy, or they’re running away from life. In one instance, a wealthy Senator pays for his wife to have the Severance procedure so that only her ‘innie’ experiences the pain of childbirth. What are the morals of that?

But above all of this are cultish/religious metaphors. The ‘innies’ are only allowed to read material produced by Lumon. They’re never given answers to questions, only that the work is‘mysterious and important’. They must strictly obey their managers, no matter how ludicrous the instruction. There are biblical looking paintings of the founder, Kier Eagen, around the building; there’s one of him sick in bed as a child and another of him in military uniform (bringing to my mind paintings of Joseph Smith in my own LDS tradition). They have songs praising Kier, and even use the phrase ‘Praise Kier’ in their communication. Their manuals are in large bound books with gold edging, looking and reading much like scripture. The team leader is supposed to meditate/pray before the image of Kier every morning when he opens up the department. They even have a full reproduction of the house in which Kier lived in the ‘Perpetuity Wing’ (again, much like replica buildings in my own faith tradition). For some of the team it’s a reverent experience to visit it, while others mock it by playing ‘Kier Bingo’.

When you disobey, you are sent to the ‘Break Room’, where you are essentially forced to ‘repent’, but it is literally mental torture. It’s also impossible to leave your employment there – you can’t quit.

Severed employees are referred to as Kier’s children, and there is a stated ambition for the entire world to become Kier’s children. Add to this a repeated reference to bees, with the fact that all the worker bees exist to support and sustain the single queen and we start to get an idea of where this is headed.

Because sinister though some people might find many of these things, scratch beneath the surface and things get much darker. For example:

• The first episode of the first season is entitled, Welcome to Hell
• Goats appear at regular intervals, the goat being a Satanic image
• There are numerous references to the Severed Floor being ‘Hell’
• When they first visit the Kier replica house, the new member of the team sees it and says ‘Jesus’, while a team member replies, ‘No, Kier.’
• Part of the floor in Kier’s house is a copy of the floor in Freemasonry temples
• A handshake in an episode in season two appears to be a Freemason handshake
• One of Kier’s statements is ‘Illumination beyond all’ – Lucifer is/was the ‘lightbearer’. Even the Lumon name appears to reference this
• The name ‘Kier’ means Dark, or The Dark One.
• In one episode, the main character (Mark S), calls his sister (Devon) Persephone. In the story, it’s a joke between them, but the metaphor is that the Greek goddess Persephone lived half her life in our world, and half in hell.
• They also reference their bodies being ‘vessels’, which has me curious as to whether we’re going to see some form of ‘possession’ in the future.

One final thing I want to mention is the colouring. Colours play an essential role in Severance and appears to relate to our brain waves and states of consciousness. We have five different wavelengths of brainwaves. Delta waves have the longest frequency and appear when we are in deep sleep; they are represented by the colour blue. The colours then cycle through green, yellow and orange, before ending with red, representing gamma waves, which appear when our mental effort is at its maximum. You’ll notice that much of the show, and everything on the Severance floor, is blue (we occasionally get green or yellow). The show-writers are telling us that everyone on the Severed floor is asleep to what is really going on.

I could go on, and others could add more still, but when we pull all of the above together, we see that those Severed employees are being used for some (almost certainly) nefarious purpose, while the employees themselves are expected to simply believe the countless lies they are told, with no possible way for them to learn the truth about their situation. Practically nothing they believe is actually true.

Now let’s come out of the show and into our world and take this quote from William Casey, Director of the CIA between 1981-1987, ‘We’ll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American people believes is false.’

James Angleton, who rose to the top of the CIA and stayed there from near its inception shortly after WWII until the mid 1970’s when he retired, at the end of his life spoke of the ‘grand masters’ of the CIA – Dulles, Helms, Wisner – and said, ‘If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell. I guess I will see them there soon.’¹

My intention here isn’t to pile on the CIA, although I do believe they are thoroughly evil. But the CIA didn’t operate in isolation; they were in league with huge banking corporations, law firms, and American business, with powerful individuals and families. Together they controlled who got put into office, they pulled off coups in many countries around the world, regularly overthrowing democracy to install a violent dictator they preferred.² And they did it all in the shadows, with no-one the wiser. Because they also had the press in their pocket, everyone believed their lies.

This is the world we inhabit. Whether we like it or not, we are Severed. We are asleep to what is happening all around us. If nothing else, the Epstein files prove this. I’ve been musing the last few days on the fact that our Prime Minster, Keir Starmer, may lose his job over the Epstein files despite his not appearing even once in them, while a possible replacement if there were a general selection today, Nigel Farage, appears in the files 40 times and is under no pressure whatsoever. Whether you believe Starmer is competent or not, or whether you like government policies or not, the reason for his potential ousting is completely perverse. The one guy who isn’t in the Epstein files is the one likely to lose his job over it.³ Someone, it seems, is controlling the narrative …

My recent posts have been about how essential it is that we learn to identify and avoid deception. A few months ago I wrote about how we need to ‘Awake’ to the truth of our situation. The truth is that we have all been deceived in a great many things. This deception continues, and will continue. Satan is the father of lies, who deceived our first parents, Adam and Even. They are his servants who rule this world and give us our information. Whether you are thinking of governments, business, entertainment, or even religion, we are Severed – we are asleep – if we heed any mortal man or rely on the arm of the flesh. Only God will give us the truth, and so it is to Him that we must go if truth is what we seek.

The Truman Show and The Matrix were two films that turned our current state of ignorance into metaphors on the big screen. I’m sure there are others. Severance is now added to the list. Discerning between good and evil, between truth and falsehood, are more important today than ever. I pray we can truly understand that.

© Copyright Jeffrey Collyer 2026

1. From, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, The CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, 2015, David Talbot. This is an excellently researched book about the origins of the CIA, and while it is in many ways chilling, it doesn’t even delve into the CIA’s recruitment of Nazi doctors experimenting on humans, leading to the MK Ultra programming and more. If you want to explore more about who controls our governments, Whitney Webb’s book, One Nation Under Blackmail is worth checking out.
2. The CIA almost certainly orchestrated the assassination of JFK, because he was the odd one out – the one President they couldn’t control.
3. This isn’t a political statement. As I said in my last post, I’ve voted for almost every party in the UK and am a member of none. Even if you think the Prime Minister should be removed, using the Epstein files to do it is thoroughly perverse and should ring alarm bells.