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Warning: This post contains many spoilers for the final episode of Severance Season 2.
The second season of Severance is finally in the rearview, following a finale episode that gave us some crucial answers while leaving just enough questions open (well, actually, quite a few) to have us impatiently awaiting the series’ next installment. There’s much to discuss, from the show’s themes to its stylistic choices to our predictions for where we’ll find all our favorite characters come Season 3. Here, TIME’s Judy Berman, Eliana Dockterman, and Megan McCluskey dive into the details of the final episode and Season 2 more broadly.
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Were you satisfied with how they closed out this season?
Judy Berman: I loved the finale. Seriously, Severance creator Dan Erickson (who wrote the episode) and executive producer Ben Stiller (who directed it) are so good at ending seasons. This time around, that wasn’t necessarily guaranteed after they let the show get a little baggy following that masterpiece fourth episode.
Before we get into the plot, though, I want to shout out the stellar stylistic choices. I especially liked the way Stiller closed the episode. Like most sci-fi/thriller/mystery box shows, Severance stuffed a ton of twists and set pieces into the finale: Mark’s innie confronts his outie! Helly R. has a chilling encounter with her outie’s father! Gemma disassembles the crib! The increasingly conflicted Mr. Milchick leads a marching band to celebrate the completion of Cold Harbor! Brienne—sorry, Lorne—and Mr. Drummond (RIP) and the sacrificial baby goat! Yet instead of keeping viewers in a state of whiplash until the credits rolled, Stiller stretched out the season’s final beat, in which Mark’s innie helps Gemma escape but then chooses to stay in the building with Helly, for nearly 10 minutes. From the red lighting to the “Windmills of Your Mind” (from 1968’s The Thomas Crown Affair) needle drop to that final freeze frame of Mark S. and Helly R., the homage to Stanley Kubrick and Nixon-era thrillers was immaculate. But it also really underscored the emotional stakes of the scene. This might be the most important decision Mark ever makes—and his innie makes it, in part, as an assertion of independence from his outie.
Eliana Dockterman: I was also impressed with the pacing of the final episode. My one quibble with the episode—and the season as a whole—is that even as the show finds resonance in the Mark-Helly-Gemma storyline, it has floundered in its attempts to deepen secondary characters. Milchick’s struggle to decide whether he wants to be a cog in the Lumon machine ended in verbal sparring with an animatronic man. Funny, to be sure, but I think that character could have spent more time exploring what he wants out of his job and his life and less time chasing Mark. I also wanted more time with Irving: We learned the middle-aged man has never experienced love (as an outie), but just as we began to explore his inner turmoil, he hopped on a train, possibly never to be seen again. Miss Huang was more a metaphor for child labor practices than an actual character, and Ricken remained more punch line than believable partner to Devon. Here’s hoping those characters get deeper emotional arcs next season.
JB: I agree that some of the characters were underserved this season. We absolutely need to see more of Miss Huang and Ricken, two loaded characters whose storylines have yet to justify their existence. After watching Milchick stand up to Mr. Drummond and then scrutinize himself in the mirror at the end of the episode, I think whatever decision he makes about his loyalties is going to be a pivotal part of Season 3, and that’s good enough for me. At the same time, I thought Dylan’s storyline this season was excellent—it gave his marriage and family emotional stakes at the same time as it complemented the Mark-Helly-Gemma dilemma. And while we could’ve seen more of outie Irving, that final train station scene, where Irv admitted he had never experienced the kind of love his innie had found with Burt’s innie, totally gutted me.
Megan McCluskey: Overall, I thought the finale was great: innie vs. outie drama, more Milchick dancing, an edge-of-your-seat extended rescue sequence. But I do feel like the show is maybe relying a little too heavily on half-answers to its mysteries (the truth behind Cold Harbor, the purpose of the goats, etc.) at this point. I’m hoping that’s because they’re building to even more shocking/satisfying reveals in later seasons and not because they don’t really know what those answers are.
At this point in the show’s run, what do we ultimately think it’s about?
MM: There’s been a lot of talk this season about how Severance has launched into its own take on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, with outie Mark’s journey mirroring Orpheus’ descent into the underworld to retrieve his beloved wife, Gemma. And for a while, it did appear that was the case. But while the original Greek legend ends with Orpheus breaking his agreement with Hades to not look back at Eurydice until they’ve both reached the surface, thereby dooming her to remain in the underworld forever, Severance instead chose to have innie Mark look back at Helly and decide to remain in hell (er, Lumon) with her while presumably allowing Gemma to escape. The end of the finale seemed to make it clear that the love triangle/square between outie Mark and Gemma and innie Mark and Helly is one of the central cruxes of the series. And also that there are consequences to creating two separate versions of yourself—and one of them is that you might end up with two separate hearts that love two separate people. That’s pretty difficult to reconcile, reintegration or not.
ED: I love this reinterpretation of the Orpheus myth! For me, Mark looking back at Helly conjured a similarly spectacular scene in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I do agree that the show is basically now about a love triangle—err, quadrangle.
But if this show is going to churn out more seasons, I think the world has to expand. I appreciated moments in the first season when we got glimpses of what non-severed people think of the severance process: We see anti-Lumon protestors and a politician at a severed birthing retreat and a debate at a dinner party. The political fracas over severance largely disappeared in Season 2, which felt a little odd—enough people know about the abuses inside Lumon now that surely one ought to have called a newspaper. I hope in Season 3, we get a sense of the wider world’s perception of severance.
JB: I don’t think the show has lost itself in the love triangle/square stuff or is going to struggle to shift focus. My read is that the central metaphor of Season 2 was love (and its impossibility for severed people) in the same way that Season 1 worked as a satire of corporate culture and the incompatibility of “work-life balance” with the mind-numbing, if not actively destructive, tasks so many people are asked to do for eight-plus hours a day. I can imagine Season 3 zooming in on power dynamics—maybe by revisiting the politics of severance, like Eliana mentioned, but also by putting the innies’ subordinate relationships to their outies under a microscope. But I think the one constant, overarching thing Severance is about has always been personhood, the question of whether it’s a body or a brain or a unique set of experiences and memories that actually makes us human, and what society owes each person by virtue of their humanity.
What did we make of outie Mark and innie Mark’s Camcorder conversation? Is he truly two separate individuals?
JB: I’m convinced he’s two separate people, yeah, even if Mark S. is basically who Mark Scout would’ve been without a lifetime of jadedness, grief, heartbreak, and all the other emotional wear and tear of being a person in the world. We saw it in the two Marks’ prickly reactions to one another. The outie, who evidently had not fully understood what he’d done by undergoing severance, sees his double as a petulant child; the innie views the outie as condescending, entitled, and manipulative. It’s all leading up to that final moment of insubordination, when the innie chooses Helly R.—and solidarity with his severed colleagues—over Gemma.
ED: Mark is definitely two different people, but I do think those people share underlying instincts, emotions, and possibly even memories. Another way to ask this question is, Can love transcend severance? In a single episode, we get two different answers. A severed Gemma agrees to follow a complete stranger, covered in blood, having clearly just murdered somebody, just because he says he is her husband. There is no rational explanation for that choice except that some deep-seated instinct tells her this man is trustworthy. So, yes, love can transcend severance.
And yet, minutes later, Mark S. abandons Gemma for Helly R., which suggests that the long relationship Mark had with his wife—all their shared memories of academic debates, bizarre conversations with Ricken, and the tragedy of their failed attempts to get pregnant—could not supersede the relatively short (if intense) experience Mark S. had with Helly R., at least when Mark S. is in charge.
MM: Are the outies like Mark who undergo severance thinking their innie will just be a happy-go-lucky employee who loves working in a windowless office building every moment of their existence a bit too naive for anyone else’s liking? I know the Lumon propaganda machine is hard at work convincing people the innies are content, but I definitely wouldn’t blame my innie for harboring some pretty intense resentment toward me. I agree that outie Mark somehow can’t seem to grasp that he’s the one responsible for setting all this in motion by creating a secondary version of himself, and that disconnect is creating an ever-widening gap between him and his innie. Right now, it doesn’t seem like that divide can possibly be bridged.
ED: I think we’re meant to believe that every person who volunteers to undergo severance is deeply broken in some way and doesn’t think through the consequences of their actions—or particularly care. But as severance becomes commercialized, I agree it’s difficult to buy people would be this naive on a mass scale.
JB: Not only is Mark desperate and careless, I think he also feels so victimized by life that he’s blind to the reality that he created a person who’s even more victimized and is thus the perpetrator of someone else’s misery. There are political implications to this false consciousness! And I’d argue that they’re extremely relevant to the way a privileged but not necessarily flourishing majority lives in the U.S. right now.
Back to the question of what Mark’s choice says about the connection between innies and outies, I hadn’t thought much about Gemma trusting Mark despite initially not knowing who he is. Eliana’s read is persuasive, for sure. But I do think there are salient differences between Gemma’s severance and Mark’s that also have to inform her actions. Cold Harbor is a totally new identity for Gemma, and Mark is the first person she meets as that self who seems to care what happens to her, whereas Mark’s innie has had time to overwrite any lingering aspects of the outie with his own relationships, experiences, and understanding of his limited world. Do innies become more their own people the longer they’re around, just like kids growing up?
What is up with reintegration?
ED: When Mark agreed to reintegrate, it seemed like a game-changing decision. But not much has happened beyond Mark suffering a few headaches. Also, on a practical level, Mark could die of infection from running around with a gaping hole in his head.
MM: I feel like the prospect of reintegration is being swung around a little too wildly at this point. Mark started the process way back in Episode 3 of this season and we’ve since learned little to nothing more about how it works beyond the fact that it’s revealed some hazy insights into his innie’s psyche and vice versa. Innie Mark questioning his outie in the finale about how he’s so sure he knows how it will affect both of them seemed completely valid. I also want to know what the history between Reghabi and Ms. Cobel is and whether either one of them is actually capable of completing the procedure. Maybe reintegration is just a big red herring of sorts.
JB: I’m starting to suspect it’s a red herring, too. The way Mark dangled the prospect of reintegration in front of his innie as an incentive to go along with the plan to free Gemma made me a) certain that Mark has failed to grasp how profoundly reintegration would change him, and b) suspicious that the outie actually intends to go through with it now that prospect of living happily ever after with Gemma has presented itself. Also, given the choice Mark’s innie made at the end of the finale, I’m anticipating a civil war of Mark against Mark in Season 3.
Read more: How Realistic Is the Severance Procedure? Brain Surgeons Have Some Thoughts
Any early predictions for Season 3?
ED: I think, and hope, that Gemma does actually escape and becomes a pivotal character in the crusade against Lumon. I would love to see her actively determine her own fate rather than suffer (from infertility, at the hands of Lumon’s scientists, as a wife cruelly cast aside by her husband’s innie).
MM: I somehow feel like MDR and the other innies will end up taking control of the severed floor for a while now that they’ve taken out Mr. Drummond and have Mr. Milchick backed into a corner. Otherwise, I don’t really see how the show would plausibly explain Lumon allowing all these innies-in-revolt to keep existing.
JB: The innies definitely have an advantage going into Season 3—but then, they had one going into this season, too, and for Lumon, regaining the upper hand was as easy as incorporating MDR’s rebellion into company lore and making a few superficial changes. That being said, for me, all signs point to a war of innies vs. outies. Mark, Helly, Dylan—they’ve all literally become their own worst enemies. I also suspect Gemma will go straight to Devon after she escapes, and that reunion could finally lead to a more substantial exploration of Ricken’s whole deal.
ED: Is there a version of this show where the innies simply refuse to leave the severed floor—or try to make the overtime contingency permanent? I agree that an innie vs. outie war is brewing, and the outies have zero motivation to allow their innies to continue to exist. If any of the innies enter that elevator, they all but guarantee their own demise. This also would ensure we see our original MDR characters (minus Irving, unless the writers perform some plot gymnastics) back together again, a dynamic I’ve been sorely missing this season.
JB: I can see that scenario playing out! But the rub for the innies would be that a life confined to the severed floor would never be enough to satisfy them (or anyone). When we see Mark and Helly talking dreamily about the equator—despite the touching fact that they have no idea what it actually is—that, I think, is a hint about their restlessness.
