Severance and other TV notes

Just my usual thoughts on a number of shows I’ve been watching.

The third season of Wheel of Time is six episodes in. It starts off with a lot of action and movement. I’m still enjoying the series, particularly since we now appear to be well past what I might have read in the books decades ago, so it’s all new at this point. My only nit is I could have used more of a recap of the previous seasons. If shows are going to insist on having two years between seasons, they shouldn’t expect casual views to remember everything that was going on. Thankfully there are Youtube videos that provide a recap. (Although Amazon could have put one in the episode lineup so we don’t have to go hunt it down.)

I thought the Daredevil series from a few years ago was pretty good. It’s dark nature worked much better for me than the old comic ever did. (Probably due to my changes in taste over the decades.) Daredevil: Born Again revives the series and ups the darkness, immediately throwing the protagonist Matt Murdock into a very dark place.

The show really amps it up with the Kingpin being elected mayor of New York City. I’ve always liked Vincent D’Onofrio’s portrayal of this supervillain, and think he continues doing an excellent job here. I know the show is adapting an arc from the comic book and I’m sure the current season was produced before the election, but the whole storyline feels a bit too much on the nose for the current political situation.

Overall, the show is still working for me, but the political thread I could have done without.

American Primeval is a very grim depiction of a story happening during the Utah War. It’s written by Mark L. Smith, who also wrote the script for The Revenant. If you’ve seen that movie, this limited series has a very similar feel. It’s a version of the old west that’s dirty, grimy, and dark. In many ways, it feels like a grimdark fantasy, which is probably what attracted me to it, although there’s nothing supernatural going on, just a tale of a mother, her son, and others they encounter trying to survive in brutal circumstances.

I enjoyed the show, but have to recommend it with a caveat. I know some Mormons who take strong issue with the way the historical Mormons are portrayed, particularly Brigham Young. It’s generally acknowledged that a group of Mormon settlers committed the massacre that is at the center of the story, but apparently the idea that the Mormon leadership knew and condoned it is disputed. I’m not familiar enough with the history here to have an opinion. But if this is a sensitive area for you, be warned that the show is far from neutral.

I’ve seen Pantheon advertised for years, but never really knew what it was about. Not long ago, I read a glowing review and decided to check it out. It’s a show about mind uploading. While I think mind uploading may be possible someday, I find most fiction about it typically loaded with questionable assumptions. That’s true here as well. Overall the series runs a lot like the singularity stories from the 1990s.

However, the storytelling is compelling. It’s hard not to have sympathy for the characters involved. Individual characters hold many of the same positions that usually come up in philosophical debates about uploading. But it’s mixed with the emotion of dealing with lost loved ones after they’ve died.

The early parts of the series focus on characters who have been uploaded and are being taken advantage of by unscrupulous companies (or governments). We see a scenario where an uploaded character wakes up and believes they’re in a normal workday at their office, while slaving away at some task their captors want completed. At the end of the workday, they wink out, and then awaken again for another workday with no memory of the previous day, except those related to the task they’re working on.

The show also explores a type of low tech alternative to uploading, which is difficult to get into without spoilers. But it reminded me of a story by Eric Schwitzgebel: The Dauphin’s Metaphysics.

Overall I enjoyed the series and highly recommend it. The poster has AMC+ on it, but I caught it on Netflix.

Severance is another show I saw advertised for a long time. The premise, of people having their work memory separate from their memory outside of work, didn’t really draw me in. But with the release of season 2, and the interest shown by several philosophers of mind, I finally relented and took a look.

In some ways, the premise resonates a bit with the initial plight of uploaded minds in Pantheon. Employees have a chip installed in their brain which makes their work self unable to remember anything from outside of work, and vice versa. So to their regular self (the “outie”), they report to work each day, enter an elevator to go down to the “severed floor”, and then immediately find themselves coming back up at the end of the day, with no knowledge of what took place in the office.

But their work self (the “innie”) wakes up for the first time on a conference room table, with a weird procedure involved to introduce and orient themselves to their situation. They awake with no knowledge of their prior lives. So to their work self, their entire life is in the office. They do know basics, like how to talk, use a computer, etc, but have no specific information of the outside world. Some end up wondering what the sky looks like outside.

The end result is that the innie and outie, while sharing the same body, can have very different views and attitudes, and be at cross purposes with each other. In the first episode, a new employee who is hired wants to quit. She is shown the door, but when she walks out, she finds herself walking right back in. In other words, when she crosses the boundary of the door, her outie awakens and decides to reenter, reawakening her innie. An innie can request to their outie, by recorded tape, that they want to quit, but the outie has the final say.

It’s worth noting that an innie quitting is more than just leaving a job. For the innie, it effectively means the end of their existence, a form of suicide. Nevertheless we see a new innie try to quit repeatedly, only to be relentlessly denied by her outie.

It’s also worth noting that the office the main characters work in is a particularly spartan one with an overall soulless and starkly beauacratic feel to it. And the company they work for, Lumon, seems to be a sort of cult revering the company’s founder, Kier Eagan, with “Kier” often used in place of “God”, such as “thank Kier” instead of “thank God.” But that’s only scratching the surface of the weirdness (and menace) of this company.

The outside world seems somewhat normal, but there are oddities. Most of the technologies we see seem to come from the 1980s or 1990s, except of course for the brain chips. Early on we see a cell phone which looks like it’s c. 2000, but in later episodes the phones look more modern. And for the entire series so far, it’s been winter in the outside world, with snow cover a constant. All of which gives the whole show an otherworldly feel.

So there’s a lot going on here, and it’s hard to go much further without spoilers. I’ll just say that the show is a serious mind bender. If questions about identity and personhood interest you, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

That’s some of what I’ve been watching. Have you seen any of them? If so, what do you think. Watching anything else interesting lately?