The Bubble Episode: Part II (Speculative Exploration)
Immerse Yourself in Severance, A Lumon Wellness Session In VR Awaits
The Following is a speculative exploration1 companion to The Bubble Episode: Part I (Essay)2
This post is a collab with Director, Taryn O’Neill, a fellow Near Future Laboratory lab rat. She mentions this post among many other interesting ideas in her weekly Future Film Friday newsletter.
Your Wellness Session XR Experience
A Bubble Episode, available on Apple Vision Pro
You are seated across from Mrs. Casey in the Wellness Room. The lighting is soft. The table is white. She smiles. Faint music plays in the background—a lilting Lumon-approved instrumental.
“Hello,” she says. “Welcome to your Wellness Session. Today we’ll be focusing on your Outie.”
The Bubble Episode takes place entirely in the Wellness Room. A space known to Severance viewers as a sterile, scripted haven meant to ease employees—but often doing the opposite. In this immersive installment, Mrs. Casey reads affirmations about you. Not your character. You.
“Your Outie is curious. Your Outie has excellent taste in music. Your Outie once stared at a lake for twenty minutes and felt something close to peace.”
Some of these statements feel flattering. Some feel fake. Some feel just a little too accurate.
You never speak. You just sit. And listen. And look.
Pre-Viewing: The Setup
Apple announces the event quietly. Teaser spots and bumpers appear across Apple platforms.
“Your Outie is doing their best. Let’s celebrate that.”
The episode drops one week before the Severance season finale—only viewable on Apple Vision headsets. A limited-time rental program allows users to borrow the headset from Apple Stores for 48 hours. Upon reservation, users opt into personalization based on name, city, recent activity, and mood-based data from HealthKit (opt-in only).
During: The Wellness Session
The Wellness Room surrounds you—light humming from fixtures above, barely-there music in the background. Mrs. Casey sits across from you, holding a Lumon folder. She begins reading.
“Your Outie is admired by friends, and mostly respected by coworkers. Your Outie is not afraid to try new recipes.”
The affirmations sound scripted—but something about them feels close. Too close. That’s because they are. Every statement Mrs. Casey recites has been generated specifically for you, using AI trained on your consented metadata—your screen time, your text tone, your photo history, your calendar, your purchases. Everyone gets a bespoke reading. Everyone gets a slightly different version of the truth.
Scattered on the table are personal artifacts: a plant clipping in a labeled vial. A branded mug. A torn note. You can’t pick them up—but looking at them reveals more:
Looking at the clipping triggers Mrs. Casey to mention: “Your Outie once tried, and failed, to grow tomatoes on a fourth-floor balcony.”
Looking at the mug prompts her to say: “Your Outie drinks decaf and still gets anxious.”
Looking at the note causes her to frown, close the file briefly, and change the subject.
At one point, the lights flicker. She tilts her head. Says nothing. Then continues.
Show Integration: An Episode That Moves the Story Forward
While the Bubble Episode is immersive, interactive, and personalized, it remains fundamentally an episode of the show. This is not a detour, side-quest, or spin-off—it is canon. Mrs. Casey’s Wellness Session is positioned between two pivotal moments in Season 33 and contains narrative developments that tie directly into the main arc.
For viewers watching on traditional television, the same episode is presented in a linear format. The dialogue is fixed. The objects on the table are generic. The affirmations are scripted. It’s still Severance, still effective, and still vital to the season’s plot. But it lacks the layered intimacy and speculative tension that the VR4 version unlocks.
Only the Bubble Episode gives viewers the chance to see their own lives reflected through the unsettling clarity of Lumon’s worldview. The TV version shows you the wellness procedure. The VR version makes you feel like you’ve lived it.
Small narrative clues hidden in your personalized affirmations—references to secret project names, brief facial expressions, flickers of audio—may tease what’s to come in the season finale. In this way, the episode doesn’t just fit into the show’s structure—it adds texture to it. It deepens the mythology.
Replay Value & Interpretation: A New Kind of Rewatch Culture
In traditional television, a second viewing reveals missed lines or subtle glances. In the Bubble Episode, rewatching becomes an entirely new encounter. Because the session adapts to what you notice—and how long you linger—no two experiences are identical. The order of affirmations, the emphasis on specific objects, even the emotional tone of Mrs. Casey’s delivery may shift depending on how you interact.
This subtle interactivity creates an entirely new replay culture.
Did someone else get a completely different set of affirmations? Did they linger longer on the plant sample? Did they see the torn note rearrange itself during the final pause?
Communities form not just to discuss the plot, but to compare their versions. Players of story-rich games will recognize the impulse: after a deep personal experience, you want to know what others saw—what you missed.
In Severance: Your Wellness Session VR, the entire narrative becomes a puzzle box, where your personalized affirmations may contain distorted fragments of the season’s hidden themes. Interpretation becomes collaborative. Immersive. Rewatchable.
Post-Viewing: The Follow-Up
After the session, you receive a file on your Apple device titled: WELLNESS_SUMMARY_[YourName].PDF
It includes selected affirmations from the session, along with a Lumon-generated personality profile for your Outie. Some sentences are cut off. Others are redacted. A footer reads:
This summary has been reviewed and approved by Lumon Wellness. Please do not share with your Innie.
Meanwhile, fans begin sharing strange affirmations they received:
“Your Outie is capable of deception.”
“Your Outie once stole something small and still thinks about it.”
“Your Outie has never fully forgiven someone who needed them to.”
This Bubble Episode leans into what Severance does best—quiet dread, identity dissonance, and corporate-mandated intimacy. It transforms the viewer from audience into subject. Not through interactivity or branching paths, but by letting the show’s machinery aim itself directly at you.
No need to escape. You’re already inside.
Why It Matters
The Bubble Episode is more than a novelty format or one-time experiment. It’s a glimpse into how immersive media can be meaningfully integrated into the storytelling mainstream—not as a replacement for traditional TV, but as a powerful supplement to it.
By embedding the episode within the canon of Severance, the experience becomes unavoidable, not optional. By personalizing it using AI, it becomes intimate. And by releasing it through familiar platforms like Apple Vision Pro, it becomes accessible.
The episode doesn’t ask viewers to leave the story behind for the sake of tech—it asks them to step deeper inside it. This is the inverse of how most VR content has been positioned. Instead of building new worlds for niche devices, Bubble Episodes invite audiences to re-enter the worlds they already love—with new perspective, new stakes, and new layers of emotional connection.
And perhaps most importantly, the Bubble Episode creates a cultural bridge. It doesn’t just immerse the viewer. It reignites shared viewership, speculation, and rewatch culture. It makes room for new behaviors while preserving what’s always made TV sticky: discussion, dissection, and collective obsession.
This is why it matters. Because for immersive media to evolve, it doesn’t need to break TV. It needs to become it.
The post is a speculative exploration companion to The Bubble Episode: Part I (Essay)
This is a speculative piece including design fiction artifacts. This is not real. All rights belong to Apple and the creators of Severance. Design Fiction Daily is not associated with either. However, if any of the afore-mentioned are reading this, hit me up, I’d love to work with you on something immersive for season 3.
If you have landed on this page without reading the accompanying article, I implore you to go give it a read. It sets up the context for the Bubble Episode concept.
Before you come at me with how this doesn’t make sense considering the current state of the characters … stop. This is a speculative concept. Pretend this is a flashback sequence. Never mind the story specifics and look at the bigger picture for the sake of imagination.
I’m using the term VR as a catch-all of other mixer reality tech like AR, XR & MR.