Photo: Atsushi Nishijima/Apple TV+
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The advantage of making a show on Apple TV+ is that you have access to the entire Appleverse. You can, for example, put out a real excerpt of a fictional book that plays a pivotal role in the plot of your series. That is what the Severance creators have done, releasing an excerpt of The You You Are by Dr. Ricken Lazlo Hale, Ph.D. For the uninitiated, Ricken, played by Michael Chernus, is protagonist Mark Scout’s (Adam Scott) vaguely New Age-y doofus of a brother-in-law who makes his living writing self-help books — the latest of which ends up in the hands of Mark’s “innie” (or, his severed work persona) and ends up radicalizing him to the point where he and his Refiner colleagues go rogue.
In season two, Lumon commissions Ricken to write an updated version of the book to be distributed to all severed employees. And now, we finally get to read the original for ourselves — or at least part of it. It seems to foretell coming drama around the book’s re-publication: “Unfortunately, events beyond my control have led to a brief delay as I liaise with several corporate parties as to precisely where and in what form the book should be released. On the advice of counsel, I sadly cannot say more at this time,” he writes. What follows is a close reading of what Ricken can say at this time, including all the new information we’ve learned.
Photo: Apple TV+
In the introduction to The You You Are, Ricken introduces his concept of a “Youtype.” Potential identities include: the Coward, the Warrior, the Dove, the Scribe, and the Vestal. All are welcomed “upon this journey with equal affection.”
New lore drop! In chapter one, “Name, Name, Go Away,” Dr. Hale shares his personal backstory: “Readers of my previous books know that both my conception and birth took place in a small theatre behind a defunct perfumery in Western Oregon, as part of a nine-month performance art piece originated by my parents titled ‘Smells Like Afterbirth, F**ker.’” He goes on to pontificate gorgeously on his relationship to both his surname and his first name and refers to art as his brother. We learn that his parents were later arrested and imprisoned for a subsequent performance art piece in which they held a bar in Boston at gunpoint. “This and other endeavors led to long stretches where I was alone, and it was in these silent periods that a grim and intrusive resentment — of my parents, my lineage, and even myself — began to take hold,” he writes. Throughout the rest of the excerpt, he mentions his social worker, Mrs. Duft, twice, and we can assume that she was the person who at least partly, if not primarily, raised him.
In the second chapter, “Pollen Nation,” there’s a brief aside that feels like it might become very important. On his way to talking about a couples’ hike Ricken and his wife, Devon, took with “Flip and Nan,” the anonymized monikers he uses to write about Mark and his wife, Gemma, Ricken writes: “My glorious wife, whom readers of Petard already know as Devon, had felt increasingly anxious with city life since the Dorner truck explosion the previous year, and had been urging me to away with her to the woods.”
The Dorner truck explosion, as far as I can recall, has not yet been mentioned on Severance. But we do know from the show that Gemma died in a car accident, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this truck explosion, too, was linked in some way to Lumon’s mysterious, nefarious activities.
In the latest episode of Severance, the Refiners had their very first officially sanctioned field trip in response to their “desire to see the outside world” — dubbed an Outdoor Retreat and Team Building Occurrence, or ORTBO, by their supervisor, Mr. Milchick — during which they had to hike a fairly treacherous path to get to their campground in the Dieter Egan National Forest. In “Pollen Nation,” Ricken spends most of the chapter narrating the hike, writing, “We snaked our way up to Musher’s Outcropping, from which we enjoyed a beauteous view of Loch LeForge.” Considering that during their hike, the Refiners go to “Scissor Cave” and “Woe’s Hollow,” I’m wondering if perhaps the couple’s hike, too, took place in the Dieter Egan National Forest.
He goes on to tell of his discovery of what a beehive actually looks like, mentioning that he “interned at a honey plant as a young scholar” and had never seen a nonindustrial beehive. We know Lumon is raising goats … perhaps they’ve experimented with bees as well? This is where I start to get a sense that Ricken may have a prior connection to Lumon, especially since he goes on to compare the worker bee to the human laborer. He then says that after his “thesis on bee theory” was met with “cruel mockery,” he was forced to “briefly rejoin the workforce” before Gemma’s death. Coincidence? I think not!!!!!! He also gives us a rough timeline: The hike took place a year and a half before Gemma’s death, and he’s writing the book two years after her death. Considering that he gives Mark a published copy of it in season one, we can probably estimate that the show begins two to three years after Gemma’s untimely demise.
In chapter three, “Good God?,” Ricken tackles religion via a lengthy criticism of Sister Act, which he says he saw in the movie theater with Mrs. Duft on its opening weekend. Sister Act opened on May 29, 1992, so this factoid confirms what we all knew: Ricken is definitely a millennial. He also refers to St. Anselm’s Proslogion as a “hit novel,” which in many ways is true.
Of his own religious views, he says that he “dabbled in Catholicism” but was never confirmed, and that he currently ascribes “to no defined religion.” He suggests possible faith pairings for each Youtype: Puritanism for the Coward; the teachings of Egyptian sun god Ra for the Warrior; the Freemasons for the Dove; agnosticism for the Scribe; and finally, the Pennsylvania Mennonite faith for the Vestal.
In chapter four, “A Coitus Among Us,” the esteemed Dr. Hale gets into yet another taboo topic, sex — or as he repeatedly refers to it, “the sex act.” He writes that he himself has “made love 786 times, and each was a unique adventure into the very mouth of personhood.” We don’t learn a ton from this chapter, except that he has always found sex to be “deeply erotic.” He talks a little about being horny for Mrs. Duft after witnessing her fall into a salmon-hatchery pond. The salmon-hatchery pond was a potential flag for me — industrial farming seems to be a theme — as was the word bear, which is used repeatedly throughout the excerpt, mostly to refer to actual bear but this time as a way to describe Mrs. Duft’s anger. It feels like a puzzle piece here!
In chapter two, “Pollen Nation,” Ricken prints the poem he wrote for Gemma and performed at her funeral. Chapter five, “Destiny,” is an acrostic for the word destiny. Later, sharing a personal exercise he uses to reframe insults, he does some more acrostic poetry. This guy’s got range! The poem itself has an Eganian tinge to it, using the words Dreaming, Energy, Stewardship, Terror, Eyes, Newness, and Why. All in all, thematically it smacks of the cultlike mythology surrounding the Egan family.
Chapter six, “Wait, What Was That?,” is spent processing the previous chapter, which Ricken identifies as his employment of the popular military strategy “Repetition and Subversion.” He claims to have learned about it “during a ten-day retreat of global thought leaders in the moth fields of Spain” — once again, the raising of animals is afoot — and explains that the tactic was “employed by the likes of” Hannibal, Washington, and Grant. It’s all very silly, but if my theory about Ricken’s covert involvement with Lumon holds any water, it could tell us something about the mysterious work that Lumon’s Refiners do. Maybe?
In the seventh chapter, “Wounds Unhealed,” Ricken gives us more key backstory regarding his relationships with both Mark and, before her death, Gemma. He gets into this via a story about his final birthday gift to Gemma, “a self-produced Tuvan throat-singing album,” and his quest to get it back from Mark. First, just to contextualize, this is what that sounds like. Honestly? I’m a fan. But I digress. He recounts an argument between himself and Mark when, six months after Gemma’s death, he visited Mark to borrow the tape so he could make a copy. By this point, Mark has started working for Lumon — Ricken begins the conversation by asking if he really thinks he will stick with the job. After Mark fails to find it, they get into a fight, and Mark tells Ricken that he and Gemma only listened to the tape to laugh at it. This is where he introduces the “poetic metamorphosis” strategy, transforming Mark’s insult, “Everyone laughs at you the second you walk out of the fucking room,” into a very long acrostic poem listing his positive traits. We learn that Ricken has no debt and is an archer, a horse lover, and an arborist who outlived his childhood rival. I’m not sure if this tells us anything about Lumon, but it does help illuminate Mark’s relationship with his brother-in-law.
Chapter eight, “Pull Up a Charity,” declares that Florence Nightingale invented charity and proposes to the reader that they should start a charity, using his own charity, “The Accolades Experiment,” as an example. “The concept I birthed that day was elegant but simple: Take snippets from positive reviews of my books, and replace my name with that of a group whom I feel is more in need of the compliment. Usually this is ‘The Poor,’ but it varies by case,” he writes. He also mentions a previous lover called Danise and describes his charitable work, which basically equates to taking donations so that he can travel to “impoverished communities” such as Monaco, Santorini, and the Maldives and loudly harass “the Poor” with compliments. He also discusses the importance of making all travel plans via handwritten correspondence (which his assistant, Balf, does for him). He takes the opportunity to solicit donations to his own charity for those who “lack the aptitude to run a charity.”
