The second season of “Severance” just wrapped up with its longest episode yet. We have thoughts. Spoilers abound.
Whose Side Are We On?
There are endings that give you what you want. There are endings that don’t give you what you want. There are endings that give you what you don’t want.
Then there are endings that make you wonder what exactly you should want, which was what the “Severance” Season 2 finale did.
The first season of “Severance” gave us some clear rooting interests. We wanted Mark Scout to find his not-dead-yet wife, Gemma. And we wanted Mark S. and the rest of his innie colleagues to find freedom, self-determination and love. But the finale hit a realization that the season had been building to: These two wants might not be compatible, at least not easily.
The two Marks having the world’s weirdest Zoom conversation at the birthing cabin laid the conflict out. The series has shown them to date as twin protagonists wronged by the mighty Lumon corporation. But there’s a power dynamic between the two of them as well, as innie Mark says with growing frustration.
Outie Mark has more agency, more legitimacy under the law, more life on earth. And as the conversation goes on, we see him through the eyes of his innie. The sweet, sad, grief-stricken man we’d come to know begins to look … a little smug? A little cagey? He tries to say the right thing, but there’s a bit of a lip-service vibe, like he wants to make restitution without actually sacrificing anything. It’s like he’s making a land acknowledgment for his own brain.
We know outie Mark has a heart. But can you blame innie Mark for wondering if he’s just giving a kinder, gentler version of Helena Eagan’s dismissal to Helly from Season 1: “You are not a person”?
Maybe there’s a win-win solution; maybe reintegration will really work; maybe both can share joint tenancy of one body. Or maybe outie Mark is blowing smoke! The finale doesn’t resolve this — or much else — but it does force us to wonder, push comes to shove, whose happy ending we want. (Not to mention whose happy endings matter: Gemma makes it out, but what about the dozens of innies nurtured in her brain? Are they any less real than Mark S. and Helly R., simply because we spent less time watching them on TV?)
Innie Mark chooses himself, and Helly R., escaping through the klaxon-blaring chaos of the Lumon halls as the episode ends, à la “The Graduate,” with the elation on the lovers’ faces shifting to seeming anxiety. There is no certain future for them inside Lumon, after all. But sometimes you can’t help getting in your own way.
—James Poniewozik
Sympathy for the Manager
The second season of “Severance” ended with multiple innies dramatically taking charge of their half-lives.
They include Mark S. and Helly R., who, in the closing moments of the chaotic finale, forsook Mark’s wife and embraced an uncertain future of running through hallways together. Dylan G. seemingly dropped his resignation plan and recommitted to Team Macrodata Refinement. Even Lorne the melancholy goat queen decided she’d had enough and beat the ghoulish Mr. Drummond into submission. (Here’s hoping we see Lorne’s outie in Season 3 — she must have lots of questions.)
But let’s also spare a thought for the man who was charged with maintaining order and utterly failed: Mr. Milchick, last seen facing a defiant Dylan and an angry marching band. (This show is so nutty.) Milchick’s dejected reflection in the bathroom mirror, as the red alert blared and he realized it had all gone wrong, was as poignant as anything else in the episode.
I was moved partly in solidarity with a fellow middle manager but mostly because Tramell Tillman has been the show’s M.V.P. all season. Consider a small sample of what “Severance” has asked him to do: tell a bonkers campfire story in one scene and extinguish an innie in the next; endure loaded critiques of his vocabulary and maintain a chilly professional relationship with a child; and, in the finale, co-host a laugh-tracked tribute show with an animatronic statue and flaunt halftime-worthy drum major moves with the marching band.
Tillman has managed to make all of this and more work while delivering the show’s best lines — “I feel the theremin works best in moderation” — and transmitting the bottled fury of a man who has given all of himself and been rewarded with disrespect and racist microaggressions from his Lumon superiors, including the statue. (Again, nutty.)
Midway through the finale, Milchick gives Dylan his outie’s reply to his resignation request. “As it may yield an embarrassing emotional response in you, and as I’m duly swamped,” he says, “I shall leave you to read it in solitude.” I too am swamped. But if Milchick is involved, I’m here for it.
—Jeremy Egner
My Outie Is Concerned
“Severance” gets my brains working, which can be a problem.
My TV brain — call it my innie — understands that Mark S. stays in the offices of Lumon Industries at the end of the Season 2 finale because that is the only place he is alive, and the only place he can be with Helly R., the woman he loves. It understands that this makes sense, and is heartbreaking, within the parameters of the show.
But my real-world brain — that nagging outie — sees Mark’s wife, Gemma, standing outside, thinks that his decision makes no real-world sense and loses any sympathy it had for him. Unfortunately, unlike Mark, I can’t turn that one off.
I have been on board from the beginning for the show’s startling premise, and for the muted uncanniness of its execution. Mark and Helly’s season-ending dash through the corridors of Lumon, like rats in a maze or romantics in the Louvre in a Godard film, was exhilarating.
An emphasis on novelty and style can come at a cost, though, and the bill came due as Season 2 went along. The element of ritualistic cultlike weirdness in the workings of Lumon felt more artificial and frivolous than ever after the finale’s marching-band performance and aborted goat sacrifice. The ultimate answers to what Lumon is up to — mind control? digitization of consciousness? — felt less interesting. What seem to me to be the holes in the ingenious premise (why would anyone sign up for separation knowing that they had to clock out and come home every night?) got more bothersome. And without John Turturro’s Irving and Christopher Walken’s Burt, the finale was missing the show’s two most appealing performances. Oh well, no waffle party for me.
—Mike Hale
The Meaning of Work
In the Season 2 finale of “Severance,” Mark S. completes his 25th macrodata refinement file. A celebration ensues, culminating in a performance by a full marching band. The scene, however sinister, enacts a fantasy that hard, tedious work will be rewarded. The episode also insists, for perhaps the first time on “Severance,” that the work the show’s characters do has a material purpose, that it matters.
A chilly, bizarro tragicomedy, “Severance” is fundamentally about work and the numbing futility (enlivened by friendship, flirtation and the occasional egg bar social) of most office jobs. For 19 episodes, Mark S.’s job has been an empty exercise: using a trackball to sort and group seemingly random numbers. (It’s like the dullest grayscale version of Candy Crush Saga.)
The finale reveals that this seemingly pointless work has a point, sharp and painful, involving Gemma, the wife of Mark S.’s outie, now trapped on the company’s testing floor. Or as Harmony Cobel, Mark S.’s former supervisor puts it, “The numbers are your wife.”
“Severance” has always depended on the paradoxical — but maybe also at least somewhat true? — notion that work is both a respite and a hassle. Mark S.’s outie agrees to the severance procedure so that he won’t have to mourn his wife during work hours. (He also, in his video conversation with his innie, indicates that it was perhaps the only way he could function in a workplace after her “death.”) A bonus is that his outie can elide the tedium of number sorting. Working for the weekend? Congrats. Your outie is all weekend. The show has never before insisted that the work itself is vital.
Though the timing is obviously coincidental, the finale arrives in a moment when many thousands of federal workers have been asked to justify their jobs. And it suggests that even tasks that seem needless, superfluous, might be absolutely essential.
But even if that’s true of the work, it’s not necessarily true of the workers, who might be let go at any moment. Discarded, as Cobel colorfully explains, “like a skin husk.”
—Alexis Soloski
