What Severance is actually about (it's not what most reviews think)

The dominant reading of Severance is as a workplace satire / anti-corporate allegory. This is correct but partial. The show is also a sustained meditation on the relationship between different temporal selves — specifically, whether the person who made a decision has any authority over the person who has to live with it. Mark consented to severance. His innie didn't, because his innie didn't exist yet when the consent was given. The show dramatises this as horror but it's a version of a general philosophical problem: can you bind a future self to a commitment when that future self is meaningfully a different person? This threads into arguments about advance directives, long-term contracts, and whether the preferences of your past self should constrain your present self. The show doesn't resolve these — it makes them viscerally uncomfortable, which is the point. The corporate critique is surface texture. The show underneath it is about consent, identity across time, and whether escape from a self you didn't choose is even possible.