The ‘Severance’ title sequence has been hiding secrets all season

Watching a good title sequence is like reading a letter that was written in invisible ink. More often than not, the message is there all along, you just don’t have all the tools to decipher it until the very end.

With the second season of “Severance,” that moment has come. Over the past two months, the internet has spent countless hours pointing that flashlight over various parts of the show’s opening credits. Its mastermind, Oliver Latta (who is known as Extraweg) gave so few interviews that fans and reporters alike were left to theorize. And unsurprisingly, speculations ran wild. Is Lumon raising children so they can live solely on the severed floor?

As the season 2 grand finale draws near, Latta—whose work on the first season’s title sequence won the Emmy Award for outstanding main title design—agreed to take out his flashlight and help shine light on the intro. When we spoke, eight episodes had aired, two remained.

Latta doesn’t know how the show ends. He specifically didn’t want to. “I have more creative freedom to work when I don’t know,” he told me. But he does know the season’s plot twists, which Ben Stiller, the show’s executive producer and director, sent him in the form of sparse sentences. No images, no explanations, “just small notes, one sentence each,” says Latta. (He did receive one image, of Adam Scott’s character, Mark, holding balloons in the hallway, and balloons became a leitmotif in the title sequence.)

Here are the clues we could’ve seen all along, and what to look out for in the finale.

Spoilers ahead!

The clues that were there all along

Mark reintegrated. In the first season, the title sequence encapsulated the show’s premise with a surreal interpretation of Mark’s innie going to work and Mark’s outie going home. In the second season, the intro sketches out what is arguably the show’s biggest arc: Mark’s outie, in his bright red pajamas, goes spelunking in a cave that looks an awful lot like a brain, albeit green. “I designed the second intro as a journey Mark is going into his own brain,” says Latta.

This journey, we now know, was a poetic interpretation of Mark’s dangerous reintegration process, which begins at the end of Episode 3. Latta had been on set and so he knew that Mark would be reintegrating in his basement, which is why he showed the character going down a gloomy stairwell. But in the “Severance” world, reintegrating also means delving into parts of your brain that feel foreign to you because you’re not aware of them. The steps, then, became a metaphor for the subconscious. And those balloons became a metaphor for “memories you can’t touch.”

Cobel is the real mastermind of ‘Severance’. Around the 1-minute mark of the opening credits, we watch an unmistakable outline of Cobel close an abstract picture book with Mark in it. The scene suggested Cobel’s importance, but as of Episode 8, “Sweet Vitriol,” we know its true meaning: Cobel wasn’t just running the severed floor. She invented the severance  procedure itself. (Latta says the visual of the book was inspired by Episode 8, where Cobel finds her old notebooks with the circuit blueprints and base code for the procedure.)

Mark’s innie and outie are most likely going to meet. In fact, they keep bumping into each other in the opening credits. First, when his outie shines a flashlight at his innie. Then, on the icy lake, when his innie turns into a balloon that subsequently drifts off, then again when he carries his outie through a portal. If the show’s Episode 9 is any indication, these hint at the season finale’s unavoidable end: Mark’s innie is set to have a conversation with his outie at the birthing cabin.

The clues we’re yet to decipher

What’s up with all the babies? Latta says there is specific number of babies illustrated in the title sequence and that number is intentional. Apparently, Stiller wanted Latta to add lots of babies crawling around, and when Latta asked why, Stiller simply said: “I like babies.”

The multitude of babies could be a twisted reference to Mark and Gemma’s harrowing journey through miscarriage and IVF, but that wouldn’t explain the sudden appearance of a bearded Kier Eagan baby crawling by Mark’s feet towards the end of the intro. “I can’t tell you anything,” says Latta on that matter.

What’s that in Irving’s mug? The little trinkets flowing out of Irving’s mug are neither paper clips, nor trumpets. They’re euphoniums—a brass instrument that sounds like a mellower trombone. And that is all we know. “Ben [Stiller] wanted to have every scene connected to a specific to moment in the show,” says Latta. This (probably) means we should expect the musical instrument—or whatever it stands for—to make a clear appearance in the show. Perhaps something to look out for in the season finale.

What is Mark wearing on his face? Around the 30 second mark of the intro, right after those euphoniums pour out of Irving’s mug, Mark catches a glimpse of his reflection in a scratched-up mirror. His face in the reflection is eerily white, as if wearing a mask. Latta says he expected that scene to come up in the show already, but it still hasn’t. Another one for the finale?

What’s the deal with the goats? Right after Mark sees his reflection in the mirror, he jumped into a desk of his head that soon morphs into a goat, rendered like a painting. The moment is rife with symbolism so, unsurprisingly, Latta danced around it. “Creatively, the transition from Mark sitting at the desk to goats symbolizes disorientation and the shift in Mark’s internal conflict,” he said. The painting aspect is connected to a scene in Episode 2 where Mark enters an empty room with outlines on the walls where paintings once hung. “There is more to tell,” he says, “but since I haven’t seen episode 10, I don’t want to spoil anything.”

We can probably expect those goats to make a comeback in the finale. Or at least a painting of them.