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This article contains spoilers for Severance season 2 episode 9.
We’re in the endgame now, and following the jaw-dropping “she’s alive” moment from the Severance season 1 finale, fans of the hit Apple TV+ series are expecting something equally Earth-shattering for the season 2 conclusion. During a season that’s largely split the arcs of Innies, Outies, and Lumon execs into various strands, season 2’s penultimate episode brings the whole gang back together for an unexpected crossover with The Twilight Zone.
Even before season 2’s ninth episode aired, many fans clocked that it shared its title with a June 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone. While not remembered up there with icons like “Eye of the Beholder” and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” “The After Hours” isn’t even classed as an underrated episode of The Twilight Zone. Some suggested watching the black and white episode ahead of this Severance installment, and for those who did, the Uta Briesewitz-directed hour took on a whole new meaning. While it might’ve been hard to connect the dots between the two sci-fi shows, Severance’s latest episode is packed with references to The Twilight Zone.
The Twilight Zone’s “The After Hours” follows a young woman called Marsha White, who visits the ninth floor of a department store in search of a gold thimble to gift to her mother. Things go awry when Marsha learns there is no ninth floor, nor are the sales assistant or lift operator who’ve been helping her seemingly real. Marsha eventually realizes that the ninth floor is a holding area for mannequins who take it in turns to come to life and live among the “outsiders” for a month at a time. As well as learning she’s actually a mannequin herself, Marsha comes to accept her fate that she’ll be confined to the shadowy ninth floor. If this doesn’t sound like an allegory for the Innies of the Severed Floor, nothing does.
all of the parallels between “The After Hours” episode of the twilight zone to severances ep of the same name and the show as a whole: a thread 
#SEVERANCE pic.twitter.com/zMkgTkWOHq
— paige (@hellynaswife) March 14, 2025
Over on X, user @hellynaswife shared an in-depth breakdown of all the Easter eggs and references, starting with Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) arriving at the Damona Birthing Retreat with Devon (Jen Tullock). Presumably some sort of code to confirm Cobel’s seniority, she says, “Miss Marsha White, ninth floor. I’m looking for a gold thimble.” The thread also highlights how the eerie Perpetuity Wing and its various Eagan statues echo the imagery of Marsha on the ninth floor.
The season 1 finale ended with the shocking reveal that Helly R. (Britt Lower) was the Innie of Helena Eagan, with her, Mark Scout (Adam Scott), and Irving (John Turturro) briefly being able to take over from their Outies thanks to the overtime contingency. This was then flipped on its head when it was revealed that Helena has been posing as Helly on the Severed Floor since the start of the season, but like The Twilight Zone’s mannequins getting to live for a month on the outside, could this be teasing another dramatic escape for the Innies?
Others are taking things one step further and think The Twilight Zone is much more important to the mythos of Severance than we first thought. The crux of season 2 has been about Mark trying to get back to his wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman), who Lumon is currently keeping on the Testing Floor. Gemma’s Innie was going under the guise of Ms. Casey, and given that the next episode of The Twilight Zone following “The After Hours” was called “The Mighty Casey”, Redditors have pointed out there’s some mind-blowing potential.
That episode follows a robot called Casey, who decides to rebel against his creator when he’s given a human heart and emotions. The episode after that is called “A World of His Own” and follows a man whose wife catches him with another woman. All of these could have major ramifications for the Mark/Helly/Gemma love triangle and whatever Lumon is doing with the latter on the Testing Floor.
Long before the episode 9 came out, Reddit user D_Beats linked Severance to The Twilight Zone and theorized that if the twist is the same, Miss Casey was an Innie first and “Gemma” was her forgetting she was an Innie: “She could be an experiment from the very start which is why they went as far as to fake her death and recruit Mark to work for them.” There are some gruesome theories here, and with Devon masquerading as “one of Jame’s,” does the episode confirm that Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry) is regularly impregnating his Severed workers (see them as mannequins) as some sort of twisted plan to keep his lineage going?
It’s also not looking good for Helly, and after her father finds her on the Severed Floor, she could soon be taking a trip to Severance’s own hypothetical ninth floor (the Testing Floor) she was desperate to find. Either way, the typically grim endings of The Twilight Zone episodes don’t fill us with much hope as we head into the Severance season 2 finale.
The Severance season 2 finale premieres Friday, March 21 on Apple TV+.
The post Severance Season 2’s Twilight Zone Easter Eggs Could Explain Everything appeared first on Den of Geek.
