Can consent exist in ‘Severance’?

Severance’s second season delivers a pair of complementary sex scenes that add further depth to the show’s conversation around bodily autonomy and consent.

Episode 4, titled “Woe’s Hollow,” sees Innie Mark (Adam Scott) have sex with Helly (Britt Lower) for the first time during the Outdoor Retreat and Team-Building Occurrence (ORTBO). Except he isn’t with Helly at all — he’s with her Outie Helena Eagan, who is pretending to be Helly in order to keep an eye on the Macrodata Refinement Innies. Severance contrasts their intimacy with a horrifying dream Irving (John Turturro) has, highlighting that something is off even before we get the Helly/Helena reveal.

Two episodes later, once Helly has returned to Lumon, she and Mark decide to reclaim the memory Helena has taken from them. They have sex in an unused office, using a tarp to recreate the tent where Helena and Mark slept together. The result is far sweeter than episode 4’s — no Irving nightmares here!

Yet each sex scene raises questions about the role of consent in a show where you can sever part of yourself and essentially create a new person within your body. There are so many levels here, from deceit surrounding Innie/Outie identities to the experience of a dormant consciousness during and after sex.

“One of the common mistakes about consent is that it can be understood as a black and white, yes or no decision,” Michele Meek, associate professor of communications at Bridgewater State University and author of Consent Culture and Teen Films, told Mashable. “So what this show is really raising are some of the complexities of consent that make us really uncomfortable, but actually get right to the heart of some of the questionable and concerning yellow ‘proceed with caution’ areas are.”

So what are the ethics of sex in a severed world? And is consent even possible in Severance?

Helena and Mark’s sex scene raises questions about mistaken identity and informed consent.

Adam Scott and Britt Lower in “Severance.”
Credit: AppleTV+

The Helena and Mark sex scene may feel strange in the moment due to its juxtaposition with Irving’s nightmare, but it develops an extra layer of discomfort once we learn that Mark wasn’t having sex with Helly at all. Their intimacy was under false pretenses, making it a violation of trust and lessening his agency. According to Planned Parenthood, sexual consent is defined as “freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific,” so Helena’s deceit makes informed consent an impossibility for Mark in this situation.

While the severance procedure is completely fictional, Meek likens the scene to the real-world possibility of someone thinking they were having sex with one person, only for them to unknowingly be having sex with their twin instead. “Under that circumstance, I could imagine that we would feel really uncomfortable with the fact that this person was consenting at the time, but that wasn’t the person who they thought they were,” Meek said. “So most of us would read that as non-consent.”

The Mark and Helena incident falls under the legal and philosophical term of conditional consent, which specifies that if someone consents to an act under certain conditions. When these are not met — like Mark consenting to have sex with Helly, only for her to actually be Helena — the act is non-consensual. If a place includes conditional consent in their legislation, deceit like Helena’s could legally be considered rape, making this scene a legal issue as well as an ethical one.

Another worrying angle to the Severance sex scene is the fact that Helena is using Mark for her own ends. She’s surveilling the Innies from within, but she’s also taking advantage of Mark’s feelings for Helly in order to experience the kind of romantic relationship she may not be afforded in her outside life as a high-level Eagan. There’s also a vengeful quality to her actions: In having sex with Mark before Helly, Helena can one-up her Innie, with whom she already has a tumultuous relationship.

“The fact that she’s using him makes us really uncomfortable when we think about consent, because it feels unethical to have sex with someone for some other end that they don’t know about,” Meek said.

The Severance writing team did not take these questions of consent lightly. In an interview with TVLine about the Mark and Helena sex scene, Severance creator and showrunner Dan Erickson said they “talked about it quite extensively.”

“In a way, both [Mark and Helly] have been used,” he continued. “Mark thought he was with one person when he was actually sort of with a different person. And then for Helly, it’s a very troubling thing to know that something like that happened without you being there.”

Helly’s realization of that fact plays out in devastating fashion in episode 6, “Attila,” as she reckons with the fact that while her body may have that memory, she never will. “What sucks is she got to have that, and I didn’t,” she tells Mark. “That she used me to trick my friends, used my body to get close to you.”

This talk spurs the two to have sex and create a memory for Helly. Severance frames the scene as tender, and understandably so: These are the romantic leads of the show! Yet the scene also raises a tricky new dilemma. What does sex between severed individuals mean for their dormant consciousnesses, who are unable to consent?

Helly and Mark’s sex scene adds a wrinkle to consent and consciousness.

Adam Scott and Britt Lower in “Severance.”
Credit: AppleTV+

Mark, Helly, and Helena aren’t the only Severance characters affected by the “Woe’s Hollow” sex scene. Outie Mark is also involved, even if he wasn’t awake at the time. The same goes for him and Helena during Mark and Helly’s sex scene. They may not be conscious, but they’re in these bodies as well. Does this lack of consciousness from one inhabitant of a severed body then render every sexual encounter a severed person has non-consensual? Mark and Helly’s encounter is certainly presented as consensual in “Attila,” with the two even pausing to verbally confirm that they want to keep going — a key addition, as consent is ongoing and can be withdrawn at any point. But the question of their Outies lingers.

Does this lack of consciousness from one inhabitant of a severed body then render every sexual encounter a severed person has non-consensual?

“One of the major questions of consent has always been, ‘Is consent what we say and do? Or is it what we think and feel?”” Meek said. “That’s a very complex dichotomy. When we talk about things like affirmative consent, what we’re really prioritizing is verbal action-oriented consent. And while that’s really important, I think that most of us understand consent as an internal yes or no, so we can imagine a situation where someone says, ‘yes’ and means ‘no,’ or vice versa. I think that what Severance is highlighting is this real clear distinction between mind-body consent.”

An Innie or Outie having no recollection of their alter ego’s sexual past is one thing, but Severance has shown time and again that physical conditions move across the severance barrier. In Season 1, a news report reveals that a Lumon employee became pregnant during her time on the Severed Floor. Sudden pregnancy with no memory of how it happened is a horror story no matter how you spin it.

Similarly, in “Attila,” Outie Burt’s (Christopher Walken) husband Fields (John Noble) broaches the subject of sex during a dinner with Outie Irving (John Turturro). He’s aware that Burt and Irving’s Innies had a relationship, but not the extent of it. “Do you think you two ever made love at work?” Fields asks, adding: “There is a non-zero chance that the two of you had unprotected sex, and so I felt the right to ask.”

The unspoken worry about STIs lingers, adding to the mind-body dilemma of sex in Severance. Imagine an Innie or Outie waking up in the Lumon elevator with an STI that they couldn’t explain, or, like the unnamed Season 1 employee, finding out that they were suddenly pregnant even though they themselves hadn’t been sexually active. Would these not constitute a violation of bodily autonomy, no matter how consensual the inciting sex had been?

Perhaps the closest analogy we have in real life to the situation of Severance‘s sexually active severed characters is sex under the influence to the point of blacking out, where someone may be unable to remember the sex act itself but can still feel its physical impact. But even that isn’t a perfect comparison, because in Severance there will always be another consciousness within the body that may have consented to sex.

“If you are not of sound mind or body, then you cannot consent,” Meek said. “You can’t say yes with a gun to your head. Same thing if you’re completely intoxicated or passed out or not conscious in some way, you can’t consent. That’s where we get the sense that this is an obvious case in the show, because they’re not fully conscious, so how could they consent? But of course, there’s more complexity here, too. I think that the whole point of it is that Severance is raising the question of, ‘where do you draw the line here?'”

Severance has always been about consent, but Season 2’s sex scenes bring that conversation to the forefront.

Adam Scott, Zach Cherry, John Turturro, and Britt Lower in “Severance.”
Credit: AppleTV+

While Severance‘s Season 2 sex scenes have highlighted issues about sexual consent within the series, they’re far from the first time that the show has addressed matters of consent in other situations.

In Severance‘s very first episode, Helly watches a pre-taped video of Helena before undergoing the severance procedure. In it, she reads a statement that says, “I give consent for my perceptual chronologies to be surgically split, separating my memories between my work life and my personal life.”

Presumably, Mark, Irving, and Dylan’s (Zach Cherry) Outies all had to read the same statement in which they consent to the effects of the severance procedure. But reading one statement and signing one Lumon contract does not make for total consent.

“Consent is a constant and has to be constantly renegotiated and updated. There’s no presuming consent,” Meek told Mashable.

Yet presuming consent is exactly what Lumon is doing every day. They take the Outies’ decision to undergo severance as a cut and dry “yes” to do whatever they want with their bodies and Innies on the Severed Floor.

Lumon breaches that consent in multiple ways throughout Seasons 1 and 2. In the series premiere, Helly throws a speaker at Mark’s forehead. When Mark leaves work that day with a minor head injury, Lumon tells him that he was hurt in a fall. The lie is a violation of Mark’s trust and consent to work in an office where he won’t come to physical harm. It’s also another reminder of the mind-body divide at play: Outie Mark can’t remember how he sustained the head injury, but his body bears the mark.

The Overtime Contingency is a further example of Lumon overstepping its bounds, a way to hijack workers’ bodies at will. In Season 2, episode 2, Outie Mark claims he never knew about the OTC. Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) informs him that details of the OTC were in his hiring paperwork, but a onetime acknowledgment of the OTC doesn’t mean Mark or the other Outies would consent to its use down the line since, again, consent is ongoing, even in non-sexual contexts.

These moments prove that Severance has always questioned the ethics of consent as it pertains to the severance procedure. But the addition of these complicated sex scenes in Season 2 — something the show already toed the line with in Season 1’s Waffle Party — allows for a natural heightening of these dilemmas, as we so often place consent in a sexual context.

The intimacy of Severance‘s sex scenes may also push us to draw hard ethical lines about who is in the wrong and who is a victim, despite the purposeful complexities Severance has built into these scenes. (For her deceit and her role at Lumon, Helena certainly seems like the most clear-cut wrongdoer of the bunch.) But more importantly, these scenes’ ethical intricacies force us to think harder about the troubling implications of severance. The concept is already unnerving to start with, but it grows more and more so from episode to episode. With that increased scrutiny, and with Severance‘s ever-intensifying study of bodily autonomy, the show invites us to further examine Lumon’s true motives, and how its control winds itself into even the most personal of situations.

Severance Season 2 is now streaming on Apple TV+, with a new episode every Friday.