The ‘Severance’ Masturbation Story Is Actually Important

Look, Severance is weird. It’s a show about employees who split their consciousness in half, at a company founded by what increasingly appears to be a sinister cult leader, at which there exists a…goat room? But even by those standards, the Apple TV+ show’s fourth episode of Season 2 drops some of its most bizarre lore about the firm’s founder yet.

During a work trip, the four macrodata refiners are read a story by Lumon founder Kier Eagan, a never-before-seen text “of sanctity”—as manager Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman) puts it—dictated just hours before his death. In it, Kier drops a bombshell.

He had a twin, Dieter, who persuaded him to run away to the woods with him as children, abandoning work at their father’s ether mill. Kier describes Dieter taking to the forest as a natural, and him having to hear his brother masturbating. When he eventually suggests they return, however, Dieter can only get out a whimper before, in a scene of startling body horror, he’s transformed into part of the forest with his hair turning into moss and an eye popping out.

If Kier really did have a twin, there’s an unnerving undercurrent to the story that implies he killed Dieter, the story’s supernatural elements being a way for him to distance himself from the crime.

What’s more likely is that he didn’t have a twin at all, and “Dieter” is just a name for the shameful, sexual parts of himself he chose to violently repress. He describes Dieter as a “bosom friend” whose path eventually diverged from his, just like innies and outies share a body but have vastly differing personalities. Dieter bears the fallout of Kier’s actions, in the same way innies undergo painful childbirth for outies who want children, or spend their whole lives as corporate slaves because of a choice their outies made.

But what accounts for Kier’s disgust towards sex? Probably that his parents had a “close biological relationship” but chose to consummate it anyway, leaving him a sickly child who suffered from “consumption.” His warped view echoes into present-day corporate policy. One of the “perks” Lumon offers high-performing employees is a “Waffle Party,” or sexual experience. Except they must wear a Kier mask while being seduced by four people dressed as Kier’s “Four Tempers,” or emotions that must be “tamed.”

“You can have sex, it’s not wrong, it’s not dirty—as long as it’s all about Lumon and reverence for Kier,” Severance creator Dan Erickson explained to Variety. In the story, Dieter doesn’t just masturbate, he “spills his lineage on the soil,” phrasing that indicates Kier’s irritation is at his brother’s wastefulness. Sex, in Eagan philosophy, is an act of service performed for another. Masturbation, an act of pleasure performed for oneself, cannot be tolerated.

The story is obvious propaganda, and a warning, for the innies: Stray from being a Kier-like dutiful worker, and entertain Dieter-like thoughts of freedom or pleasure, and you will be eliminated.

The wilderness trip is presented to the group—forever trapped in the Lumon workspace—as an opportunity to finally experience the outside world after they briefly broke free in Season 1. Unlike usual team-building experiences however, there is no sightseeing or fun games here. Only the freezing cold, animal carcasses and disconcerting dreams. Lumon paints a (skewed) picture of the real world as harsh and unfriendly; the story, in which Dieter’s desire for escape kills him, is their way of further quashing the innies’ rebellion, making them believe the indoors is the only place they’re safe.

The characters also find themselves reflected in the story to a more specific degree. Eagan heiress Helena (Britt Lower) openly mocks the story, mirroring Dieter’s disinterest in his heritage. Later, she has sex with her colleague Mark S (Adam Scott), a “transgression” that ends with her, like Dieter, being “killed.”

Irving B (John Turturro) sees the entity Woe, just as Kier did, and drags Helena to the waterfall—the same place Kier fled to drown out his twin’s cries—to drown her. It’s a full-circle moment for the once-fervent Kier disciple who has since lapsed. And if Kier invented a dead double to repress his shame, then Mark has also split himself in half to repress his wife’s death.

In a show about mind control, this seemingly strange bit of mythology not only tells us where Kier’s head was at, but where Lumon expects its employees’ to be.