The sounds in the Break Room

There have been a lot of posts lately about innie/outtie selves overlapping more than we think, even when they’re not reintegrated. For example, oIrving’s paintings and iIrving’s ink hallucinations, Jame’s mysterious “my Helly” line, Petey saying “you bring the hurt down there with you, you just don’t know what it is”, and more.

I caught a detail in a rewatch that suggests the severance procedure hasn’t been perfected and the emphasis on Gemma going to multiple severed rooms has to do with Lumon fine-tuning the absoluteness of severance.

When Helly comes back from the break room in season 1, she and Dylan discuss it, and he tells her for future reference that you can trick the sensors by imagining a scenario in which you would be sorry. She asks about the “grumbling voice” she heard, and Dylan says he hears a crying baby.

As we’ve seen more of oDylan and oHelena in season 2, I think Dylan feels guilty about the husband and father he is and feels like he’s failing, and therefore hears a crying baby. Helena has a strained relationship with her father in which she is never good enough, so she hears him grumbling at her in disapproval.

Lumon knows that some visceral things can’t be fully severed, and uses sounds from the lives of employees’ outties to more effectively “break” their innies, because Lumon knows it will affect them on a subconscious level. Evoking a scenario in which they would be sorry, like iDylan figured out. If Lumon knows that, they know severance hasn’t been perfected. In the mean time they use the flaw to their advantage, but ultimately want severed selves COMPLETELY disconnected, and testing on Gemma is part of this process.

Edit: punctuation/grammar