What is an Outie and Innie in Severance? Explained

Modified Feb 27, 2025 05:08 GMT

An image of Mark, Dylan, Irving, and Helly from the Apple TV+ series Severance (Image via Instagram/@instadan360)

Severance is a sci-fi psychological thriller series created by Dan Erickson, who also serves as its showrunner. The series premiered its first season on February 18, 2022, on Apple TV+, followed by its second season on January 17, 2025. The Hollywood actor Ben Stiller has executive produced and directed several episodes of the series.

The show's premise centers on the employees of Lumon who have volunteered to undergo the company's severance procedure. A severance chip is inserted into the individual's brain, which splits their work and personal memories into two distinct selves known as the innies and the outies, respectively. Thus, the innie and outie are the work and personal counterparts of a severed individual.

The official synopsis of the show's first season, as per Rotten Tomatoes, is as follows:

"Mark leads a team of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives; when a mysterious colleague appears outside of work, it begins a journey to discover the truth about their jobs."

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Everything to know about the innies and outies of Severance

The award-winning series focuses on the Lumon employees who have undergone the severance procedure. It involves inserting the severance chip into their head while they are awake. The chip divides the neural pathways, making their work memories distinct from their personal memories. As such, a severed individual can live two separate lives that never intersect while inhabiting the same body.

All severed employees work on Lumon's severed floor and take the elevator ride down to reach the designated floor. Inside the elevator, a switch flips the outie to the innie. For the next eight hours, the innies work in their respective departments assigned to them. From their perspective, their existence is centered on the work they do at Lumon, as they never get to see the outside world.

The innies are punished for breaking the company's rules by being sent to the break room, where they are subjected to psychological torture intended to force them into compliance. The only way for an innie to escape is to get their outie to resign, but that hardly ever happens as the outies are never aware of the full extent of their innie's suffering.

At the end of the workday, they take the elevator ride up and switch back to their outies, with no memory of the past eight hours. The outies go about their lives in the outside world without knowing what their innies did inside the company.

Although the innies and outies are strictly kept separate at all times, there is one exception that allows the innies and outies to overlap. It is known as the overtime contingency. At the end of season 1, the MDR workers activate the overtime contingency to awaken outside of Lumon and, for the first time, get a glimpse of their outies' lives in the outside world.

Can the outie and innie memories ever recombine?

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In Severance season 2, the show's protagonist Mark endeavors to fuse his innie and outie memories through the process of reintegration. The scientist Reghabi first performed the risky procedure on Petey, Mark's work best friend, in season 1. However, he died from complications known as reintegration sickness.

Reintegration is a multi-step process through which the outie and innie memories slowly fuse together. It can lead to several side effects, like splitting headaches, coughing fits, and hallucinations, where the innie may experience sounds and images from the outie's life and vice versa.

But what happens to the innie's existence once the procedure is complete remains to be seen.