Since Dan Erickson’s acclaimed workplace thriller Severance hit Apple TV+ in 2022, superfans have been spreading the good word, scouring Reddit for compelling theories, rewatching the first nine episodes to gain new insights, and even listening to Ben Stiller and Adam Scott’s podcast ahead of Season 2.
If you want to fully obsess over Severance before its highly-anticipated sophomore season premieres on January 17, however, we suggest adding one more task to your prep list: Read (or re-read) The Lexington Letter, the Severance companion book that published alongside Season 1 back in 2022.
While the free, 43-page look into Lumon Industries doesn’t answer all the burning questions viewers are left with at the end of Severance‘s first season, it does offer a rare window into another severed employee’s experience at the company, gives a crucial look at The Macrodata Refiner’s Orientation Booklet, and provides additional backstory that will be helpful to have when heading into the sophomore season.
From the minds behind the Apple TV+ series (Erickson and director/EP Ben Stiller), Severance: The Lexington Letter tells a fraction of Lumon Industries employee Margaret “Peg” Kincaid’s story. Like Mark (Adam Scott), Helly (Britt Lower), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and Irving (John Turturro), Peg underwent the Severance surgical procedure and had her work and personal memories separated. She worked as a Macrodata Refiner (MDR) employee on the severed floor of a Lumon branch, but after creatively communicating with her innie, she attempted to expose Lumon’s nefarious inner workings, only to wind up dead.
The book, available for free on Apple Books, shares Peg’s story and a copy of Lumon’s employee handbook via an email sent to Daria Thorn, a reporter at The Topeka Star.
“Until yesterday, I was an employee at Lumon Industries here in Topeka,” Peg wrote Thorn. “I chose to reach out to you because I’ve seen, among other things, your thorough coverage of the Dorner truck incident on November third. I Thought about going to the cops with what I’m about to tell you, but people say Lumon has a lot of connections with the police and City Hall and so I don’t think they would believe me anyway. I hope you believe me. I really need someone to believe me.”
As the letter continued, Peg revealed how she first came to hear from her innie via a note passed through the elevator. What about the code detectors? Well, this was no ordinary note. It was written in Puglish, a secret language made up of symbols that Peg and her sister Meryl invented when they were younger. Using Puglish, Peg communicated back and forth with her innie for weeks, learning as much as she could about the mysterious MDR work, Lumon’s incentives, and the existence (but not the full extent) of the terrifying Break Room.
One day, Innie Peg told Outie Peg that she’d completed an important file called “Lexington,” and Outie Peg realized the file was finished just two minutes before a Dorner Therapeutics truck exploded in New York. Since Dorner was “a major competitor” of Lumon, Peg felt uneasy about a possible connection and reached out to her innie again, but this time, she didn’t hear back. Weeks later, she got a note saying that Innie Peg had been in the Break Room. She gave Outie Peg a copy of the MDR handbook, and later, a note urging her to leave the company, get somewhere safe, and make the training booklet public. Outie Peg quit Lumon, left Topeka, and reached out to Thorn in hopes of exposing the truth.
The Lexington Letter shows Thorn forwarding Peg’s emails to her editor, Jim M — whose full name, we learn, is Milchick! Is he a relative of Lumon’s own Seth Milchick who’s serving the company in another capacity? If not, it would be quite the coincidence, don’t you think? In another twist, after reading the compelling emails, Jim M passed on the story citing past legal retaliation from Lumon and Peg’s obituary, which revealed she died in a car crash one day after emailing Thorn.
While the book doesn’t have all the answers, it does raise more questions and concerns about Lumon and the company’s far-reaching power in Severance‘s world. It shows a troubling pattern of car crashes like the one Gemma was in before her alleged death. (Is Peg really dead?!) It offers greater insight into MDR’s work, the numbers, and the files. (Each cluster of numbers stands for and elicits one of the four tempers.) It suggests that Milchick may have family in Topeka. It shows instances of innies successfully communicating with their outies. And it also explores the humanity of innies in deeper, more thoughtful capacities than we saw in Season 1.
With Lumon’s seemingly endless string of secrets, it’s crucial to gain any knowledge we can about the Severance world, which is why the canon companion book is the perfect pre-Season 2 read.
The Lexington Letter is available for free, exclusively on Apple Books. Severance Season 2 premieres January 17 on Apple TV+ with new episodes dropping every Friday.
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