If you watched “The After Hours,” the latest episode of Severance, and you’re a fan of The Twilight Zone, you might have caught some parallels to an episode of that series with the exact same title. Even before this week’s Severance aired, an eagle-eyed viewer on X (props to you, seriously) took note of the similarity and advised watching “The After Hours,” the Twilight Zone episode, as a preamble.
And that vintage slice of existential dread is indeed a very cool companion piece. You can tell the creators of Severance, who have no doubt looked to The Twilight Zone as inspiration all along, took some specific cues from Rod Serling and company on this one. With the recent reveal that a different Twilight Zone episode helped shaped Ryan Coogler’s upcoming horror film Sinners—and really, just the exceedingly strange era we’re living in—it’s a good reminder that it’s never a bad time to keep The Twilight Zone (streaming on Paramount+) in regular rotation.
Spoilers for 2025’s “The After Hours” and 1960’s “The After Hours” follow.
In the Severance episode “The After Hours,” Ms. Cobel must speak to a skeptical security guard to get Devon (and Mark, who’s hiding in the back) access to a compound containing a cabin that’ll allow Mark’s innie consciousness to awaken outside of Lumon. It’s a very odd exchange:
Cobel: “We’re going to cottage five.”
Guard: “I don’t have anyone scheduled.”
Cobel: “She’s one of Jame’s. No one’s to know… Miss Marsha White, ninth floor.”
Guard: “Specialties Department.”
Cobel: “I’m looking for a gold thimble.”
That does the trick and Cobel, Devon, and the hidden Mark drive through. While many Severance viewers likely first seized upon what “she’s one of Jame’s” could mean (lots of theories, all of them icky), it’s the latter part of the exchange we’ll be focusing on here. Anyone who stopped by another dimension on the way to Kier will recognize the lines almost verbatim from The Twilight Zone‘s “After Hours.”
First airing late in the show’s freshman season, on June 10, 1960, “The After Hours” stars Anne Francis (familiar to sci-fi fans for her memorable turn in 1956’s Forbidden Planet) as a woman who strides into a bustling department store looking to buy a gold thimble as a present for her mother. The narration eases us in as she heads to one of the store’s elevators: “Express elevator to the ninth floor of a department store, carrying Miss Marsha White on a most prosaic, ordinary, run-of-the-mill errand.”
The elevator dial indicates that the car only goes up to the eighth floor, and then the roof, but sure enough, the operator takes Marsha—the only passenger, despite the otherwise crowded store—to the ninth floor, which is strangely deserted aside from one odd saleswoman who is selling… gold thimbles.
The narration continues, as do the Severance parallels: “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.”
After making her purchase, Marsha’s back on the elevator before she realizes the thimble is damaged; it’s scratched and dented and no way is she going to give it to her mom as a gift in that condition. The store managers are perplexed when she describes shopping on the ninth floor. The store has no ninth floor! That would be alarming enough already, but then she spots the peculiar sales clerk who sold her the thimble… and realizes the woman is actually a mannequin.
The shock is enough for her to pass out, and when she wakes up, it’s “The After Hours” in the store. Nobody is there, except the mannequins, who start moving around and calling out to Marsha. It’s probably one of the scariest Twilight Zone sequences of all time, and is certainly up there with horror movies like House of Wax and Tourist Trap and possibly even the rom-com Mannequin as nightmare fodder for anyone with an unnatural fear of you-know-whats.
The twist, as there must be a twist, is that Marsha herself is a mannequin, and—during a brief period of freedom in which she’s allowed to come alive—she’s forgotten who she really is. She’s back in her frozen state by the end, complete with a mannequin eerily crafted to look just like Francis.
“Marsha White, in her normal and natural state, a wooden lady with a painted face who, one month out of the year, takes on the characteristics of someone as normal and as flesh and blood as you and I,” Serling explains in his episode-ending narration. “But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it, just how normal are we? Just who are the people we nod our hellos to as we pass on the street? A rather good question to ask—particularly in The Twilight Zone.”
Fastidious detectives might look deeper into “The After Hours” to find more Severance clues (we do have some nagging suspicions that Lumon PR flack Natalie might be a wooden lady come to life), but it seems more likely that Severance‘s “The After Hours” is echoing themes more than actual plot details here.
The Severance dialogue feels deliberately nonsensical in Cobel’s exchange with the security guard—almost like they’re speaking in code. Rather than it being an in-universe Twilight Zone reference (do Lumon employees watch The Twilight Zone in their free time?), it’s more like a wink at the audience acknowledging this clever echo. After Marsha realizes who she is, a fellow mannequin scolds her for forgetting who she really is during her time with “the outsiders.” They are “the real people.” The outies, if you will.
And Lumon’s severed employees are indeed similar to these store mannequins: they’re allowed to come alive under certain controlled circumstances, and they must also endure being reminded that they’re not really human. Though these two episodes titled “The After Hours” are couched in separate contexts, they nevertheless feel very in concert with each other.
Or maybe, who knows, there are also mannequins that come to life roaming Lumon’s halls. We’ve certainly seen some freaky stuff happen in that office.
If you’re like us, diving down this particular Severance rabbit hole now makes you wonder what other Easter eggs and references you’ve been overlooking this entire time. If you’ve found any particularly exciting ones, please share them in the comments!
You can stream The Twilight Zone on Paramount+; Severance streams on Apple TV+.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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