Early last evening I watched the final episode of the inaugural season of the T.V. series Severance. At the time, I did not research to see beforehand if it might actually be the series finale, so I was very much enjoying the rather intense drama as the three "innies" who only existed and worked within Lumon Industries, were finally 'awakened' by a co-worker while they were back in their real lives.
Supposedly most of the employees at Lumon have submitted to having their minds separated into two entities ─ in other words, severed. It is done for secrecy's sake, although even those at Lumon have no idea what work it is that they are actually doing at their stations within the Lumon Industries building complex.
When they set foot into Lumon, their outside identity disappears and they become their Lumon counterparts. And at shift's end, as soon as they step outside of Lumon, they revert back to their 'outside' identities.
Well over the first season, four Lumon employees working together in a pod ─ a group of desks isolated as one unit ─ gradually grew irrepressibly curious as to what their home lives were like.
And so at shift's end one day, one of the four Lumon employees who had gotten close, volunteereed to invade a secure area and activate a couple of key switches that would in turn activate the "innies" or Lumon employees after they had gone home and were then their outside selves. The "innies" would awaken and the outside personas would become dormant.
Note that it was becoming clear over the first season that Lumon had some diabolical security people who did not need to be severanced and thus could operate outside of Lumon in a monitoring capacity.
These people might even be deadly.
So yes, the episode was truly intense. The team leader of the pod woke up at a large party at the home of his sister and her husband, but he did not know anybody ─ he had to fake it, gradually figuring out who his sister and brother-in-law were, for example.
Another older employee who was Gay woke up at home with a paintbrush in hand ─ he was putting the finishing touches in a painting of some mysterious door at the end of a hallway that existed at Lumon, and he saw that he had untold numbers of other similar paintings of the door.
He ─ the "innie", that is ─ had a crush on another Gay employee who was leaving Lumon in retirement, so he decided to find out where the guy lived and go and visit him.
The third pod worker was a lovely woman who was awakened in the midst of some sort of gala in which she was going to eventually be making a speech. All over this venue there were huge photo displays of her and her three pod mates. Gradually, she figured out that she was actually the daughter of one of the Lumon bigwigs, and she had been placed into the pod as a plant ─ a sort of sleeper agent. In other words, her real life persona was not a very nice person.
Meantime, the co-worker who awakened the "innies" could only do so by holding open two switches that were intended to be activated by two people ─ his arms were stretched out to maximum. He was wearying. And one of the monitoring Lumon agents who herself had gone home for the day and who was part of the Lumon cover-up ─ an older woman who had supervisory capacity at Lumon over the pod workers ─ recognized that the team leader had somehow awakened. She was at the same party at his sister's home; she was actually the team leader's neighbour, and had an identity role as some sort of glorified midwife ─ the team leader's sister had recently given birth.
I am leaving out lots of detail, but no one came here to read about the series, so I will stop. I will just say that Patricia Arquette is excellent as the matronly but ever-so-serious Lumon supervisor. When Patricia was younger ─ I'm talking back into the latter 1980s and through the 1990s ─ I thought that she and her sister Rosanna Arquette were pretty darned hot!
I have gotten to admire all four of the actors working in the Lumon pod. That is, Adam Scott as team leader; Zach Cherry as the guy holding open the activating switches in that season finale; and John Turturro as the older Gay dude. I do not normally much care about the male actors in shows that I watch. Initially I was only drawn to the new woman who joined up as part of the pod of four (her predecessor supposedly quit and just never came back to work, but none of the pod members understood how that could be, for he had never told them he was leaving). The actress (Britt Lower) has such intense, beautiful features.
Her character's rebellious introduction was primarily what the couple or so initial episodes revolved around ─ in fact, she was so completely in denial that she refused to believe that her outside self had signed up to work at Lumon. She tried many times to just leave during her shift, but was never allowed to. She even attempted suicide!
You might wonder why it was so important to her to just walk out when she would simply be leaving at day's end following her shift of office routine. But it has to be realized that she never had any memories of leaving work ─ none of the severed employees ever did. They just had to take it at face value that each of them would leave at shift's end and go home, even though none of them knew anything other than their lives there in Lumon.
She could not stand never knowing what it was like to not be working inside of Lumon. To her, she needed more from life than mere acquiescence to being assured that she did have an outside existence.
Can you imagine only knowing of life as being what you experience at work? That your only reality begins once you step into your workplace; and when you step out of it again, there is nothing, for your next awareness is once more being back at work? There was never any 'down' or 'me' time outside ─ that part of you might well not even exist.
What if it didn't actually exist? What if Lumon was all there was, and you were a prisoner there and could never know any differently until the day you died?
Yup, a darned good series.
Incidentally, that finale episode ended when security finally broke through the door where the fourth pod worker was holding the switches open; and the three other "innie" workers who were seeing for the first time their real lives were about to snap back into those home life personas in the midst of the drama that each "innie" was now immersed into as a sort of escapee from their Lumon prison.
By the way, I have not seen this episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit from December 5, 2012 ("Dreams Deferred"), but even as recently as then, Patricia came across as still convincingly hot while portraying an ageing prostitute:
I was to watch nothing else last evening because I had a walk planned that was supposed to see me rise at 2 a.m. to quickly prepare for.
I should have accepted that my suspicions as to why I was feeling so awake at one point in the night might be founded. I had been awake for some while, but resisted checking the time. And when my cellphone alarm sounded, it rather shocked me ─ I don't like that.
I fast responded, and then readied myself for the five or better miles I would be walking.
Once I was outside and at street side, I had a couple or so seconds of bewilderment when I saw the time, for it was not computing ─ it read 2:45 a.m., but ought to have been reading 2:15 a.m.
And then it dawned upon me ─ somehow I had stupidly set the alarm for 2:30 a.m. instead of 2 a.m. Since I had gotten to bed shortly past 9:30 p.m., this meant that I had been in bed nearly five hours ─ I have trouble sleeping that long during a normal night, so it was no wonder I had been so awake for so long.
I briefly considered suspending the walk, but I felt it imperative I go.
I never mentioned yesterday that when I had my morning exercises around 10 a.m. out in the backyard tool shed ─ specifically the six sets of pull-ups and chin-ups ─ I had weighed myself while fully clothed and in a pair of runners: 196 pounds.
So managing my current ceiling of repetitions in those sets (i.e., 4 - 3 - 3 - 2 - 2 - 2) was a feat for this 73-year-old.
I later weighed myself while naked just before I had an early evening bath, and without having eaten anything since my noontime only meal of the day to that point, I somehow hit 194 pounds.
Well, just before I left the house last night for my walk, fully clothed I weighed 201 pounds. Consequently, when I made my usual stop at an elementary school playground early into my walk, managing the repetitions that I did in the six sets of pull-ups and chin-ups that I achieved was comforting ─ i.e., three in the first set, and two in each of the remaining five sets.
Everything was dripping with recent rain, and it was then raining still ─ an almost inconsequential mist-like rain. I don't know if it ever did stop while I was out, for at times it was not even noticeable.
Anyway, there was nothing much of note concerning the walk except that I am going to have to be far more vigilant in avoiding people, for on my return and approximately a mile from home, a street person wearing a white sheet saw me from across King George Boulevard in the vicinity of the old Surrey Taxation Centre.
I had seen him earlier when I passed that area ─ he was with some chap pushing a bicycle, and both headed onto the Browns Socialhouse property (Google Map). He was one of those street people who are oddly bent over ─ this guy was walking with his upper body bent at a forward angle of at least 45º, if not even 40º.
The gist of this is that I stopped and paid him some heed when he kept calling out to me after he noticed me, and I obligingly met him on the wide highway median.
He regaled me at first with the profanity-rich claim that he had gotten hassled by someone ─ and he gestured over to the Browns Socialhouse property where I had seen him and the cyclist go over an hour earlier.
Then he had to give me his tale of woe on how he had somehow gotten taken recently by an ambulance or something to the hospital for medical attention entirely without his will, and in the process they kept all of his "stuff".
Then he got down to it, asking for the handout. He was still leaned over, and could only look at me by turning his head sideways. Standing erect appeared an impossibility.
So I parted with $3.40.
I do these walks when I do because I want to avoid traffic and people. From this point on, anytime I see anybody in the distance that is suspect, then if I cannot avoid them entirely, I will do my best to be as removed as I can from them when passing beyond them. This will include not allowing them to engage me in any conversation.
I am not out there and missing sleep just so I can part with my money to some likely junkie.
By the time I was back home and outside the locked front door, it was 4:37 a.m. Some slow and plodding jogging had eaten up some time earlier in my walk.
It was at least 6:38 a.m. by the time I returned to bed. I later almost rose shortly after 8 a.m., but I resisted, and managed to zone out until a little past 9:30 a.m.
My brother was just about to watch some T.V., so I soon joined him. And when he invited me to put our Android TV Box into action, I tuned in the February 16 hour-long upload to Rumble's Children's Health Defense Canada channel: Professor Provost stands for Integrity what Science is actually meant to represent.
Amanda Forbes & Brigitte Beaudoin (Provincial Director for Quebec), sit down with Professor, Patrick Provost to discuss his experience of speaking out as a scientist during the pandemic, as well as what has happened to actual conflict free science and debate as a whole.
Thereafter I had something further in mind, but my brother requested another video that he knew about on Rumble's Action4Canada channel ─ it was also from February 16, and was nearly two hours long (1:54:13): Canadian Race Relations with Christine Douglass-Williams.
Christine Douglass-Williams, award-winning broadcast journalist, joins Tanya on the Empower Hour to tell her story of how she was fired by Justin Trudeau as a Director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation (CCRF) in the Heritage Department, for criticizing Islam. They also discuss multiculturalism, Motion M-103, Bill C-11, and the backlash over the recent appointment of Amira Elghawaby, Canada’s first “anti-Islamophobia” representative.
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Christine Douglass-Williams bio and references
https://action4canada.com/christine-douglass-williams-and-rocco-galati-feb-15-2023
The Harms of Multiculturalism and Immigration Without Assimilation and Integration
https://action4canada.com/the-harms-of-multiculturalism-immigration-without-assimilation-and-integration
Amira Elgawhaby: Canadian Islamophobia Czar
https://action4canada.com/why-the-backlash-against-amira-alghawaby-anti-islamophobia-czar
This was an extremely good interview ─ I am so very impressed with beautiful Christine Douglass-Williams, for the woman is clearly of exceptional intelligence. Trudeau is an utter dolt by comparison.
There has to be a mass overthrow of government and other bureaucracy at every level throughout Canada, but I cannot imagine how it can be accomplished. I think that it can only be done by the return of Christ to wholly correct the entire planet.
This video actually took us well past 1 p.m., but my brother gave up on it at the end of the noon hour because he needed some bed rest before venturing forth for the day to socialize once again.
I barely got into my bed for a nap before I heard him stir and then come forth from his room to leave.
We had rain for likely the whole morning, at times a steady pouring. I was lucky where the weather was concerned on that walk.
Things dried out with the afternoon.
My wife is presently in Rome, Italy, visiting a sister of hers who lives there. She has posted four photos today to her Facebook account, so I will here post the two earliest ─ uploaded to her Facebook at 2:42 a.m. Pacific Time Zone, or 11:42 a.m. local Rome time, my wife is posing at the Fontana del Tritone.
The second pair of photos are selfies my wife took of herself and her nephew Daniel while having an evening meal with the sister and some other gent in an unidentified restaurant. My wife posted these photos at 12:39 p.m. Pacific Time Zone, or 9:39 p.m. local Rome time:
Concerning the restaurant, my wife also posted this video of 2¼ or so minutes at that same venue:
I was hoping that I might manage to watch a movie early this evening before my brother's return, but this post consumed far too much of my time ─ I doubt it will be possible to watch anything other than a regular T.V. episode of something.
It seems to me that there was something further I wanted to post about, but I am drawing a total blank.
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