Severance and the Post-Roe Reckoning with Women's Bodily Autonomy

Severance, the new Apple TV+ series that’s been stirring up buzz and, in some quarters, shattering minds, might look at first glance like the kind of dystopian sci-fi nightmare that’s been cataloged in glossy paperback covers for decades—an eerie, sleek corporate utopia where workers undergo a procedure to surgically sever their minds into two distinct, irreconcilable selves: the dutiful, mindless “innie” who shows up to the office every day with no memory of the outside world, and the free-willed “outie” who carries on a normal life, unaware of the torment that the innie endures. It’s an arresting, near-future conceit, the kind of tech-saturated horror that feels plausibly just out of reach. But what’s interesting—and what the show nails, in a way that might be uncomfortable to admit—is that Severance’s vision of a world where bodily autonomy is stripped away, leaving individuals trapped in a kind of emotional and physical servitude, is less some far-flung Orwellian fever dream than a hyperreal commentary on the present state of things. After all, who needs dystopia when the erosion of bodily agency, particularly for women, is happening in full view, in real time, right here, right now? Severance is less about a future world we should fear and more about a present one we should understand—and perhaps, just maybe, start questioning.

(L-R) Adam Scott, Zach Cherry, John Turturro and Britt Lower

The premise of Severance, the new Apple TV+ series from creator Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller, feels like it’s drawn straight from a waking nightmare where dystopian sci-fi bleeds into corporate satire—except that it’s not as much a future we should fear as a present we should recognize. As mentioned before, the show revolves around a surgical procedure, called "severance," which divides a person's memory into two distinct selves: the "innie" who exists at work, with no recollection of their life outside the office, and the "outie" who goes about their life, blissfully ignorant of the laborious monotony the innie experiences. This neat, unnerving twist on identity and bodily autonomy doesn’t just dissect the alienation of work-life balance; it cuts to the heart of a much deeper, more disturbing question: What happens when we voluntarily surrender ourselves—our identities, our agency, our autonomy—to systems that demand it? Severance asks us: what if we could sever the parts of us that are inconvenient to the corporate machine, and how would we feel if we realized that we’ve been doing something pretty close to it all along?

The cast is a perfect mirror to this crisis of self. Adam Scott plays Mark Scout, the unassuming, tragic protagonist who works as an executive at the mysterious company. His performance is a study in quiet, creeping disintegration—his innie is a robot, his outie a man in mourning, constantly grappling with the loss of a life he can no longer fully remember. But it’s the women in the story, especially Helly (Britt Lower), who steal the show, embodying both the raw rebellion and quiet resignation that comes with being forced into a system where your autonomy is stripped away. The ensemble—John Turturro’s conflicted Irving, Christopher Walken’s strangely tender Burt, and Zach Cherry’s wary Dylan—offers a landscape of fragmented selves trying to make sense of a world that refuses to give them back control. Erickson's vision isn’t so much about some far-off future totalitarian state; it’s about showing us a world where the true cost of surrendering our bodily autonomy doesn’t look like a big, flashy disaster, but rather the quiet, everyday erosion of self that happens when we let others define our value. The whole thing is so unsettling because it’s both far-fetched and painfully familiar—like Severance is holding up a funhouse mirror to our present and asking, "How different are we, really?"

Severance is, among other things, a long, slow, excruciating meditation on the way bodies—especially women’s bodies—are reduced to nothing more than instruments of power, to be managed, controlled, and surveilled, often under the guise of “choice.” The show’s treatment of bodily autonomy is as unsettling as it is precise, and it’s through the character of Helly that this thematic thread really comes into sharp focus. Helly's decision to undergo the severance procedure, ostensibly one made of her own free will, becomes the first of many ironic fractures in her autonomy. Because, of course, as soon as she’s severed, her "innie" becomes a kind of corporate drone, trapped in a cube farm designed for her to obey orders and perform repetitive tasks without any real understanding of why. The procedure, in its cold, bureaucratic precision, is a literal and figurative cutting off of her agency—and not just her memory, but her very ability to exist in her full, integrated human complexity. Her body becomes a tool for productivity, forced to perform in a system where her only function is to work, and work, and work, until the body itself begins to lose any sense of the person it once was.

This loss of agency is underscored in one of the most jarring moments of the show, when Helly’s outie sends a video message in response to her innie’s emotional pleas for release, saying: “I understand that you’re unhappy with the life that you have been given, but eventually we all have to accept reality. Here it is: I am a person. You are not. I make the decisions.” This moment encapsulates the chilling core of the show’s critique—Helly’s outie, the person who supposedly holds the power of “choice,” completely denies her innie’s existence as an autonomous being. This isn’t just an expression of hierarchical control; it’s the affirmation that the innie’s body and mind are subjugated to the whims of the outie, who treats the innie as nothing more than a cog in a larger machine. The show’s exploration of this is chilling not just because it’s happening to her, but because it’s happening to her in a way that feels so deeply familiar, if not immediately recognizable. The patriarchal systems in Severance are not just faceless corporate entities but structures that demand compliance, making the body not a site of personal agency but of endless performance—something women, like Helly, know all too well. She tries, in the early episodes, to resist, to scream out, to reject the imposed passivity of her severed self, but the system, which is inherently male-dominated and structured by corporate patriarchy, simply crushes her attempts. She’s punished for her resistance not just by the company but by her own body, which—because it’s been surgically altered to forget its real desires—isn’t even able to articulate its own dissatisfaction. This entire setup echoes the broader ways in which women’s bodies are often treated as something to be divided—be it between the professional and the personal, the public and the private, the “good” and the “bad” self, or just as a site of endless, invisible labor for systems that never ask, much less care, if you want to be there. Helly’s struggle to break free from her severed existence becomes, then, not just a fight for personal autonomy, but a universal metaphor for how women’s autonomy is constantly circumscribed by a society that treats their bodies as property, as objects, as things that can be severed from their own will, their own desires, and their own selves.

Ms. Casey/Gemma Scout (Dichen Lachman)

Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), who appears at first as a kind of peripheral figure—a wellness counselor with the affect of a slightly malfunctioning sleep-study AI—turns out to be something else entirely. Not merely an innie, not merely a corporate drone, but a resurrected version of Mark's dead wife, Gemma, who is not dead but rather has been repurposed? Rebranded? Reanimated? She has been inserted into Lumon’s hallways not as a full human, but as a tool, a wellness implement, an employee-as-object, which is both precisely what the company wants and what the show is daring us to confront. Because Ms. Casey isn’t just a tragic character. She’s a philosophical weapon. A living postmortem. A person who has literally been hollowed out and turned into a therapeutic prop—like a grief counselor made of plasticine and trauma. She is bodily present but existentially absent, a shell animated by duty and protocol and the company’s algorithmic notion of what “care” looks like. And what makes this particularly queasy is that she thinks she’s helping. Or rather, she’s been programmed to believe she is. She dispenses mandated compliments about “five-minute eye contact” and “melancholy facial expression range” like someone reading from a script in a foreign language they’ve never heard spoken aloud. There’s something uncanny and tragic and also suffocatingly bureaucratic about the whole setup—as if therapy itself has been stripped of affect and handed over to an HR department armed with focus groups.

Here’s the darker implication, though: If Helly is the show’s metaphor for the way women’s choices are illusions—framed by systems that only pretend to offer autonomy—then Ms. Casey/Gemma is what happens after choice has been obliterated entirely. She doesn’t just lack agency. She lacks the self to which agency might attach. She is not even allowed the illusion of rebellion. She has been deleted, rebooted, and reassigned, like a corrupted spreadsheet reopened in Safe Mode. In this way, Ms. Casey embodies the final, hideous endpoint of the Severance project—not separation but erasure. The dream of the corporate machine is not just to fragment the self (as in Helly’s innie/outie schism), but to replace it with something easier to manage. Something docile. Something that smiles when told, “You’re doing so well.”

In a way, the world of Severance is eerily prescient of the post-Roe world—a space where the bodily autonomy of women is increasingly not just questioned, but actively stripped away in ways that feel as clinical as they are disorienting. Helly’s severance, her body and mind physically separated, is a grotesque but metaphorical stand-in for what happens when control over a woman’s body is taken out of her hands and given to outside forces, whether they be corporate, political, or legislative. The video message from Helly’s outie resonates with a terrifying clarity when you consider the current state of reproductive rights in the U.S. In a post-Roe world, the authority over women’s bodies is being consolidated in the hands of those who can make decisions for them, often with no regard for the lived realities of the women whose lives are being shaped by these laws. The message is, essentially, that women’s autonomy is a secondary concern at best—reduced to something fragmented, something that can be overridden, controlled, and compartmentalized for the “greater good,” or at least for the convenience of those with power. Just as Helly’s innie is trapped in a life of subjugation while her outie lives free from the burden of that knowledge, women in this new reality are forced to exist under systems that dictate not just their options, but their bodies themselves. It’s a brutal, disorienting distortion of freedom, the kind where choice is offered in the most limited, infantilizing form—and one that, in a way that feels almost too real, underscores the profound dissonance between the rhetoric of autonomy and the reality of control.

Severance began as the kind of surreal world that could feel comfortably distant—a fevered nightmare about a world where bodies and minds are surgically severed and controlled, a society so disconnected from human experience it’s almost absurd. But here’s the catch: the more you watch, the more it stops feeling like a distant warning and starts feeling like an uncanny version of our own world, eerily close and uncomfortably familiar. The corporate control, the depersonalization, the way systems treat bodies as objects to be partitioned, categorized, and manipulated—this isn’t some speculative future; it’s a twisted reflection of the present, one that’s been distorted just enough to make you wonder: Is this really so far from the way we already live? The show forces us to confront the dissonance between what we think of as our autonomy and the corporate, legal, and social structures that dictate so much of what happens to our bodies without us ever being asked. The beauty of Severance is that it makes this uncomfortable realization not just intellectually engaging but emotionally gut-wrenching, because it’s starting to feel like the dystopia has already arrived, and we’ve been living in it all along. What was once a terrifying thought experiment is becoming, in a way that’s both chilling and strangely familiar, a commentary on a world where bodily autonomy is not a given, but something constantly under threat—something that can be severed at any moment.