Editor's note: The below article contains spoilers for Episode 7 of Severance.

Apple TV+’s Severance is inarguably one of the strangest series airing at the moment. The show centers on a group of employees who agree to allow the company they work for, Lumon, to sever their memories so that they are able to separate their work and personal life. This allows two versions of themselves to exist — but as the seventh episode of the series reveals, it also doesn’t stop the two worlds from colliding in the way Lumon would have wanted.

Episode 7 continues from where the previous one left off, with Mark (Adam Scott) getting in touch with Petey (Yul Vazquez)’s confidante. Although she never formally introduces herself by name, from what we’ve heard from Patricia Arquette’s Harmony in the past episodes, it seems that this is likely Reghabi, a former Lumon surgeon in charge of the severance process and Petey’s reintegration. Upon meeting Reghabi (Karen Aldridge), Mark becomes an accomplice to the murder of Doug Graner, who his outie doesn’t recognize and is given his security clearance card.

Things have also taken an odd turn at Mark’s workplace where they’re not permitted to mingle anymore. However, everyone is on edge and for once Helly seems the most well-adjusted person in the room. Over the course of six episodes, the series has done a solid job of building the characters and singular motivations of Irving (John Turturro), Helly (Britt Lower), and Dylan (Zack Cherry). This means that when Dylan spills about his experience under “overtime contingency”: Lumon’s method of waking their employees while they are out of their office and accessing their memories, the others are more willing than ever to use this to their gain. Severance has long been building up to a workers’ mutiny in its ever-present commentary about workplaces that have unrelenting control of their employees' lives and the far-reaching consequences of such power. With Episode 7, that is finally in motion with Irving climbing on board at the end after Burt (Christopher Walken) ’s forced retirement.

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Image via Apple TV+

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While the first few episodes suggested that it would simply be Helly and Mark against the company, the addition of Dylan and Irving are welcome with the latter’s incredible knowledge about the company and its founder. Dylan is singularly driven by his need to counterattack after Lumon made his innie aware of his son, as well as the breach of his outie’s personal life, which makes him more dedicated than ever to hack their way out of the system, but it also makes him more of a risk over others. We’ve known since the first episode that Lumon’s control over their employees didn’t physically exist within the confines of their workplace, due to Harmony’s presence in his own and his sister’s life. With the overtime contingency though, we can better understand why the company is able to have such a tight grip on its employees at all times.

This undoubtedly factors into the shocking reveal at the end of the episode, where it is made clear that Mark’s wife Casey is actually Gemma (Dichen Lichman), who is very much alive and working with him at Lumon. One could theorize that Mark may have signed up for an experiment to see the limits of the severance procedure and in doing so, agreed to allow the company to tinker with his memory to make him think his wife had been killed in a car accident. This would explain Harmony’s presence in his outie’s life as well as her asking his sister if he still sees her, as this would mean she was ascertaining if the experiment was going according to plan or not. This would also explain why Casey is now called Gemma and is now serving as a wellness counselor for Lumon.

The show has often seemed like a machination of screenwriter-director Charlie Kaufman, and this latest twist borrows directly from the plot of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Just like in the aforementioned feature, while Mark and Casey don’t remember each other in the workplace, there is some part of their subconsciousness that registers what they share, with Mark building the model of a tree in clay when he goes for his counseling session at work despite technically being unable to remember his wife or where she "died." There are other possibilities that could point at Lumon having the ability to sever Mark multiple times, making him forget some aspects of his life, or Lumon staging Casey’s death. These are all wild but possible scenarios, and thus far in the series we’ve only scratched the surface of what Lumon is capable of.

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Image via Apple TV+

The next episode is all set to take the team back to the control room, where they will try to Macgyver their way into awareness outside of Lumon using the overtime contingency setting. We still don’t know what Reghabi has in store for Mark’s outie and if ditching his bloodied clothes in his own garbage can will be a decision that comes back to haunt him or not. But there are a lot of unanswered questions; we have no idea what the others’ outies do, although it seems likely that Dylan’s outie is as much of a Regular Joe as Mark's seems to be. This episode did seem to indicate that Harmony’s vested interest in Mark’s outie’s life could have to do with Casey, and Lumon checking or perhaps covering their tracks to see how out of the loop he is.

There are theories aplenty about whether this is all an experiment or not, but so far there doesn’t seem to be some kind of indication to validate the popular one that it is all a military-run experiment on subjects suffering from PTSD. We also don’t know the involvement in Lumon of the other outies, Helly’s outie seems very content with letting her innie suffer, and that could very well be due to her having a deeper stake in the company. For all of Irving’s fanboying, we don’t know how radically different his outie is. What we don't know is whether this fight against Lumon will be as personal for everyone else as it is for Mark, and if the others are all a victim of the kind of reality-shattering illusions that he and his wife have turned out to be.

Severance has always been as much about freedom and solidarity as it has been about the corporate powers that be abusing their control over their subjects — but with a resistance in force, we have a better idea of how the rest of the season will pan out and where a potential Season 2 could go.