If Severance pay If your brain hasn’t already turned you into a garbled maze of confusion and Lumon propaganda, then the recent revelations about the original script will. In the debut episode of The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scottthe hosts reveal that our introduction to the Severance pay The world was once very different from the one that ended up streaming on Apple TV. And it would have completely changed the entire series.

Series creator Dan Erickson’s original idea for the pilot from his 2015 script called for Mark (Adam Scott) to be divorced rather than widowed, and for him to actually conduct a job interview at a video store called Crazy Eagle Video after accidentally running over a cat has. When he goes back to see if the cat is still there, he finds that it has disappeared. So he knocks on the door of a house and his Lumon boss, Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette). At that meeting we would have seen the one element that would have made the series completely different.

“There is a sequence where she shows him her pet rat, which she then tortures. However, it turns out that the rat is separated. So she switches and suddenly the rat cuddles up to her. That’s how she explains to him what a severance package is,” Erickson says. After this encounter, Mark returns to Cobel’s house and sees it replaced by a porta potty, which Mark communicates to Cobel in an unspecified manner.

In particular, this rat sequence would have given the audience the idea that animals can not only be disconnected, but can also instantly switch between disconnected and conscious states. That would have given a little more explanation as to why there are goats on the separated floor later in the season, a mystery that is still one of the major unsolved questions Severance pay fans.

Introducing Mark’s outie Cobel as a Lumon employee who recruits him to get him fired would have removed one of the main tensions of the first and upcoming second seasons. In the series as we know it, he goes through the severance process to deal with the grief of his wife’s death. It’s an important factor throughout the series and creates the big twist that his wife is probably not dead, as she is the wellness consultant Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman) on the separate floors. His Innie has this revelation, and it is the impetus for much of his awakening to the world upcoming second season.

Another change is that in the original version of the pilot script, Mark woke up on the table in his Lumon orientation and was then, according to Erickson, “born from a giant sphincter in the ceiling.” The episode followed his first day at Lumon, where he was trained by Helly R (Britt Lower), got lost in a never-ending storage closet, and saw his welcome video from his outie.

This is drastically different from the pilot episode we’ve all come to know and love, where Helly wakes up on the table and is trained by Mark. She doesn’t end up in an endless storage closet, but she does keep running through an exit door that pulls her back into the partitioned floor before seeing her outie’s welcome video explaining her decision to go through the severance process. This change alone would have changed the dynamic of the core cast. Instead of Helly being the one willing to write a message in her outie’s arm or attempt suicide to leave the segregated floor, it could have been Mark.

Eight more episodes of the podcast will be released before the second season premieres on January 17th. If we get these kinds of revelations in the first 20 minutes of the first episode, we may never know Severance pay The same applies when we finish listening.