What really gets me about Gemma and Mark's life before Lumon is how full of KNOWLEDGE it was! They meet at university whilst donating blood in a library! They're humanities professors! They joke about their students' work! Gemma has books stacked everywhere in her office! When we get to see their house, it's wall-to-wall bookshelves, and where there isn't a bookshelf, there's an open window, or a plant! Can you imagine how much the innies would fuck with that??? Their work is something they love and it bleeds out from their campus and office scenes and visually dominates the flashback scenes! Post-severance, we see Mark watching tv in suburbia whilst drinking in his free time, completely divorced from this love of learning and knowing, are all his books packed away in the basement like Gemma? AND INNIE MARK! We see how strictly Lumon controls the spread of information, how outside materials are discouraged, how they just love making shit up ("tallest waterfall" etc) but when he gets Rickon's stupid shitty book Mark is still enthralled by it! Outie Mark does everything he can to erase his life with Gemma but we still see that love of learning and knowledge COME BACK!!!