And Rupture hasn’t yet turned your mind into a maze of confusion and Lumon propaganda, but recent revelations about its original storyline will. In the first episode of The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scottthe hosts reveal that our introduction to the Rupture The world was once a very different place from the one that eventually came to Apple TV. And it would have completely changed the entire series.
Series creator Dan Erickson’s original idea for his 2015 storyline pilot involved Mark (Adam Scott) being divorced instead of a widower, and having him interview at a video store called Crazy Eagle Video after accidentally knocking over a cat. When he goes back to see if the cat is still there, he discovers that it is missing. So he knocks on the door of a house, and his boss from Lumon, Miss Cobel (Patricia Arquette). It was during this meeting that we would have witnessed the element that would have made this series very different.
“There’s a sequence where she shows him her pet rat, which she then tortures. But it turns out that the rat is severed. She then changes position and, suddenly, the rat snuggles up against her. That’s how she explains to him what the section is,” says Erickson. After this meeting, Mark returns to Cobel’s house to see it replaced by a porta-potty, which Mark communicates with Cobel in an unspecified manner.
Notably, this rat sequence would have introduced audiences to the idea that animals can not only be sectioned, but also instantly switch between sectioned and conscious states. This would have given a little more explanation as to why there are goats on the severed ground later in the season, a mystery that is still one of the main unsolved questions for Severance pay Fans.
Having Mark’s Outie introduced to Cobel as a Lumon employee who recruits him to be fired would have removed one of the major tensions of the first season, as well as the upcoming second season. In the series as we know it, he goes through the process of being fired to deal with the loss of his wife and is in the process. This is a major factor in the entire series, setting up the big twist that his wife is in fact probably not dead, as she is the welfare counselor Mrs. Casey (Dichen Lachman) on the cut floors. His Innie has this revelation, and it is the one that is responsible for much of his awakening in the second season coming.
Another change is that the original version of the pilot script involved Mark waking up on the table during his orientation in Lumon and then “being born from a giant sphincter in the ceiling”, according to Erickson. The episode would have followed his first day at Lumon, where he was trained by Helly R (Britt Lower), got lost in a storage closet that never ended, and saw his welcome video from his Outie.
It’s radically different from the pilot episode we all know and love, in which it’s Helly who wakes up on the table and is dragged away by Mark. She doesn’t end up in an endless storage closet, but she repeatedly runs through an exit door that sends her back into the cut floor before seeing her O Utie’s welcome video explaining her decision to go through the dismissal process. This change alone would have altered the dynamic of the main cast. Instead of Helly being the one willing to write a message to her Outie in her arm or attempt suicide, all in an effort to get off the severed ground, it could have been Mark.
There are still eight episodes of the podcast remaining which will air before the Season 2 premiere on January 17. If these are the types of reveals we get from the first 20 minutes of the first episode, we may never see them Rupture the same way when we have finished listening to everything.
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