Watching Severance’s title sequence is like being swaddled by a night terror — in a good way. When the series debuted in 2022, there was real pleasure in the distinctive feel of its opening titles, particularly in contrast to the alarmingly similar style present in so many other shows. Designed by Oliver Latta, a.k.a. Extraweg, whom executive producer Ben Stiller apparently found on Instagram, its collection of images is a mix of the surreal, the uncanny, the grotesque, and the beautiful: black sludge oozing out of a crisply rendered recycling bin, hundreds of Marks being sucked up a giant needle, an endless matrix of doors, all depicted against the backdrop of Theodore Shapiro’s eerie theme music. The images linger in the mind even as you drift deep into the episode, and not just because of all the brain symbolism involved.
The second season’s title sequence, once again designed by Latta, doesn’t appear until deep into the second episode, reprising the first-season intro’s creepy abstractions but also serving a slightly different purpose this time around. Where the previous opening credits were purely thematic, focusing on the relationship between Mark’s innie and outie selves along with the general mystery of whatever Lumon Industries is up to, this new iteration seems constructed to feed the appetites of Lost-brained internet sleuths trawling Reddit for theories. Specifically, the credits now foreshadow particular moments that emerge over the course of the season: Look no further than the moment when innie Mark hobbles about a hilly grassland, which turns to be an actual milieu for a scene anchored by Gwendoline Christie in episode three. The credits still have the original function of setting the vibe — especially that final beat featuring innie Mark trying to crawl out the back of his outie’s head, The Grudge style — but this newfound foreshadowing quality fuels an obvious question: What other clues are hiding in plain sight?
The new opening credits might be an invitation to go buck wild with speculation, but there’s probably a limit to how much the sequence can be read as a map for the season. According to an interview with Latta in the Los Angeles Times, while the designer went to work with some idea of the season’s key plot points, he claims to prefer operating with as little specific information as possible, an approach supported by Stiller’s reportedly cryptic directions. “I asked him, ‘Why babies?’” Latta recalled to the Times. “He just said, ‘I like babies.’”
So are the babies in the season-two credits just a cool idea or a nod to how Devon’s childbirth was a major event in the first season? Or does the motif signal that Lumon Industries is actually in the business of pumping out faceless babies? Sure, at some point, the scale of hypotheticals all this inspires might start to feel ridiculous, and yes, some of these questions sound outlandish, but Severance does have the soul of a mystery-box show where anything can happen. Who’s to say the innies won’t encounter a faceless man wandering about the severed floor? With that in mind, let’s go big-brained about what some of the images in the new credits might mean.
Photo: Apple TV+
Balloons are so hot this season. It’s one of the main motifs embedded in the teasers leading up to the show’s return, and they get a starring role in the new opening credits. Generally, they take the shape of Mark’s innie with his engorged head serving as the balloon itself while his tasteful striped tie functions as the string. We first see one of these balloonheads wafting out of the elevator door that takes Lumon employees down to the severed floor, and as Mark’s outie descends into what is presumably his own brain cave, we see more of them floating about. The motif shifts somewhat midway through the credits, when outie Mark bumps into his innie on what appears to be a frozen lake. Upon contact, the innie falls to his knees, whereupon his head swells into a faceless balloon that floats upwards off his body. Outie Mark grabs his innie’s tie and ascends, with copies of his innies around them also succumbing to the balloon-head disorder.
As much as I’d love to see a scenario in which somebody’s head literally swells up into a giant lollipop, the balloon motif is probably just a cool metaphor for Mark being adrift in mystery. In any case, Severance didn’t waste much time dishing out a concrete representation of the motif, with Mr. Milchick presenting a giant bouquet of blue balloons to Mark as a welcome gift back to the severed floor in one of the very first scenes of the season premiere. Still, the more prominent detail here is that frozen lake, which features what appears to be Harmony Cobel’s car half-submerged within it. Does this foreshadow a scene somewhere in the real world outside of the Lumon offices? Or does the corporate campus feature a room that simulates a frozen lake? Either way, grab your parka.
Photo: Apple TV+
Goats remain very hot in Severance. They were first memorably introduced in “The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design,” when Mark and Helly are lost in the severed floor’s labyrinthian hallways and stumble onto a room filled with baby goats and an unnamed employee feeding one with a milk bottle. (“They’re not ready! It isn’t time!” he shouts at them.) Season two’s “Who Is Alive” expands on the discovery when Mark and Helly discover a room containing a replica of a hilly countryside, foreshadowed in the opening credits, where they are accosted by the room’s unexpectedly hostile workers, led by Gwendoline Christie.
There are two details in the opening sequence that should pique one’s curiosity. The first relates back to that hillside, which in the credits is populated not by goats but by some mix of little headless Marks crawling about on all fours and what appear to be engorged head balloons of both Mark and Helly. (Yeah, super-creepy.) The second is a beat that reprises a similar visual from the first season’s credits where outie Mark jumps into the head of his innie, which he proceeds to control with a Lumon computer terminal. What’s now different here is how the visual aesthetic then shifts to one resembling an oil painting — presumably a nod to Lumon’s oddly placed premium on classically rendered corporate art, and perhaps also to Irving himself being a painter — whereupon we watch Mark transform, Animorphs-style, into a goat. There’s an obvious big-brained hypothesis to pull from this: Are the goats … raised to be vessels for human consciousness? Compared to the head-balloon motif, this one feels a little more plausible within the universe of Severance.
There’s also a metaphorical layer to pull from the goat imagery. A fun Reddit thread, written by user Shayray around the time of the first season, draws a link between the motif and Pan, the half-goat Greek god of fertility, sex, and music — an all-round good-time guy. Now, Lumon Industries isn’t exactly a good time, despite Mr. Milchick’s best efforts to execute corporate-approved activities of merriment (see “defiant jazz”). But given all the emphasis on babies in this new intro sequence, maybe there’s something to the sex and fertility part of Pan’s identity. Or maybe Mr. Milchick is the Pan figure. My head hurts.
Photo: Apple TV+
Aside from the sprinkling of mystery-box clues, another big difference with Severance’s second season credits is the inclusion of characters beyond Mark. Among them is Harmony Cobel, a.k.a. Ms. Selvig, who makes an exceptionally creepy appearance as a towering figure with her face swapped out for a gaping beam, not unlike a massive spotlight, looming over the grassy hillside room. At first, the thematic idea in this imagery might not seem particularly tough to grok: Cobel being the main manager of the severed floor and the master of whatever strange design that the Macro-Data Refinement team’s efforts are leading up to.
At least, she was. It’s been tough times for Cobel in this season so far. Pinned with the blame for Mark, Helly, Dylan, and Irving’s rebellion, she’s formally benched by Helena Eagan, a.k.a. Helly’s outie, before she flips out and storms off at the end of the third episode. Patricia Arquette is a major player in the cast, so it’s pretty much a given that we’ll see Cobel again, but in what capacity? What does the opening credit’s motif of Cobel looming large over Mark’s descent into his own mind indicate about her relationship to Mark? And did we ever get to the bottom of why she was posing as his neighbor?
Photo: Apple TV+
We’re not quite done with the gaping hole in Cobel’s head. The climax of the title sequence sees the camera’s point of view rising into the space where her face should be, which produces a scene where Mark bolts down the dark hallway towards the ominous elevator with the red “down” symbol. As the camera assumes Mark’s first-person perspective and zips down the hallway, we see Gemma, his supposedly dead wife who is also “Ms. Casey” on the severed floor, inside the elevator — but as we accelerate closer her bodily form flickers back and forth with that of Helly.
The dark hallway is one of the bigger pillars of Severance’s overarching mystery, additionally appearing as an image that Irving’s outie persistently paints from his subconscious. It’s probably safe to bet that Gemma/Ms. Casey, deemed to be missing at the outset of this new season, is down wherever the elevator leads to. The more interesting detail here is the flickering effect between Gemma and Helly, likely a nod to the complicated web of romance at play. It’s less a love triangle than a love … pair of lines? Depending on how you square the philosophy of the mind of it all, Mark’s innie and outie are two different people who happen to share the same body, so it’s less a situation where Mark is torn between the two recipients of affection and more his body between torn between two providers of affection. Oww, my brain.
Photo: Apple TV+
Yeah, I dunno. I’ll be honest: For the longest time, I thought that was baby Irving. The obvious hypothesis here is that whatever Lumon Industries is cooking up in the severed floor probably has something to do with an effort to rebirth its vaunted founder, maybe by downloading his consciousness into a goat or maybe by some feat of designer baby engineering. Or maybe we’ll end up with a scenario where Mark S. — who Ms. Cobel and Lumon Industries seem to be treating with extra special emphasis — is being prepared to be the body that will give birth to Baby Kier. Who knows with this show. I need to lie down.
