Severance Season 2 Episode 9 Takes Its Title From A Twilight Zone Episode

Go ahead and take the elevator back up if you haven’t watched season 2, episode 9 of “Severance,” titled “The After Hours.” There are spoilers down here on the severed floor!

“Severance” never does anything by accident. Everything from the show’s musical cues to the props scattered across both the severed floor at Lumon — where our merry band of “innies” toil away as macrodata refiners, unaware of the real world inhabited by their “outies” — to the items we see in the homes of various characters has some sort of importance. Think of the “rabbit or duck” sculpture visible in severed floor manager Seth Milchick’s (Trammell Tillman) office, or all of the Eagan-related trinkets Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) found in her childhood home in the prior episode, “Sweet Vitriol.” This is all to say that the ninth episode of season 2 of Dan Erickson’s nightmarish workplace drama “Severance” is titled “The After Hours,” and that is not a coincidence.

Why? Well, there’s an episode of the famous anthology horror series “The Twilight Zone,” the show spearheaded by Rod Serling that became one of the biggest television phenomenons in the history of the medium, that’s also called “The After Hours.” This particular episode was the 34th installment of the show’s very first season and aired on June 10, 1960. So how does this episode of “The Twilight Zone” connect to “Severance,” aside from the shared name? There’s actually an astonishing amount of overlap here … which, again, is no accident. 

At the beginning of the episode of “The Twilight Zone” titled “The After Hours,” a seemingly normal woman named Marsha White (Anne Francis) is searching for a gift for her mother, and somewhat weirdly decides that the ideal gift will be a gold thimble. When she asks an elevator attendant at a department store, she’s informed that the ninth floor is home to the thimbles. One problem: According to the elevator’s own buttons, the store has only eight floors. (The show’s customary narration here says, “Express elevator to the ninth floor of a department store, carrying Miss Marsha White on a most prosaic, ordinary, run-of-the-mill errand.” After she leaves the elevator, it continues: “Miss Marsha White on the ninth floor, specialties department, looking for a gold thimble. The odds are that she’ll find it — but there are even better odds that she’ll find something else, because this isn’t just a department store. This happens to be ‘The Twilight Zone.'”)

Marsha arrives on the mysterious ninth floor, which is dark and largely empty except for a saleswoman (Elizabeth Allen) who shows Marsha that there is a gold thimble for sale. Everything about this situation weirds Marsha out: The saleswoman appears to know her name, and also, literally the only item available to purchase on floor 9 is this gold thimble. As Marsha leaves, she realizes the thimble is pretty heavily damaged, so she takes the elevator down to the complaints department on the third floor and is subsequently told that there is no ninth floor where she could have possibly purchased the thimble, and since she paid cash and doesn’t have a receipt, she can’t even prove it.

Finally, the twist is revealed. Marsha isn’t a real person; she’s a mannequin come to life, albeit briefly. That odd ninth floor serves as the holding space for mannequins, who take it in turn to “transform” into apparently human women and traverse the real world for a month at a time, but Marsha, enjoying the outside, stayed too long. She’s forgiven for her delay, and passes the transformation baton over to the next mannequin — and the next day, a mannequin of Marsha graces the store. Obviously, the idea of two selves that inhabit two distinct spaces is what “Severance” is all about, but that show’s episode bearing the same name doesn’t just share themes. There’s a direct reference in the script.

Let’s connect this back to the 2025 television episode titled “The After Hours,” which dropped on Apple TV+ on March 13. Again, the similarity of a “secret floor” where people take on a different yet eerily similar persona feels like an obvious connection, but in this “Severance” episode, a plotline featuring Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), Mark Scout (Adam Scott), and Mark’s sister Devon Scout-Hale (Jen Tullock) makes such a specific reference to that episode of “The Twilight Zone” that you literally can’t miss it.

Mark, who’s been experiencing some medical issues with the “reintegration” process — meaning a merging of one’s “innie” and “outie” so that a person can access both memories, which we’ve never seen succeed (the only example we saw was unsuccessful enough that a guy died) — finally agrees, after Devon insists, to meet up with his former severed floor manager Harmony. He’s not exactly happy to deal with her, but considering that Harmony might be the only person who can help Mark find his wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman), whose “innie” is Lumon’s wellness counselor Miss Casey and whose “outie” is currently being tortured and tested in Lumon’s secret training floor, he and Devon agree to go to Lumon’s “birthing cabins,” a place that will allow them to speak to Mark’s innie.

With Mark hidden in the bed of a pickup truck and Devon feigning pregnancy, Harmony pulls up to the guard house outside of the cabins and is stopped by security, who says that nobody is scheduled to enter cottage five at this time. After claiming that Devon is “one of Jame’s” — referring to Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry), Lumon’s creepy CEO — and that this whole thing is a secret, Harmony says to the guard, “Miss Marsha White, ninth floor. I’m looking for a gold thimble.” (The guard’s response: “Specialties department.”)

“Severance” never does anything by accident, so choosing the name “The After Hours” for this episode was clearly an important decision. Considering that the episode ends with Mark’s “innie” in a birthing cabin — his version of the “ninth floor,” so to speak — with Devon and Harmony, we’ll have to see how this all shakes out in the season 2 finale “Cold Harbor,” which drops on Apple TV+ at 9 P.M. EST on March 20, 2025.