The Severance Twist I Can't Forgive
This article contains spoilers through the finale of Severance Season 2.
The world of Severance is so unfailingly cold, so sterile, that the seventh episode of Season 2, 'Chikhai Bardo,' came as a palpable shock. Flashback scenes detailing the love story and marriage of Gemma (Dichen Lachman) and Mark (Adam Scott) were stylistically totally different; they featured dappled natural light and ambient noise, and were shot on film—a production choice that gave both characters a grainy, imperfect aura. Directed by the cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné, the episode explained what happened to Gemma after her supposed death in a car crash—her severance into multiple consciousnesses, each one set up to endure a different kind of torment, and her captivity on a hidden floor of Lumon that she never gets to leave. But it also drew a sharp distinction between the corporation's frigid absurdity, with its history of ether-huffing children and creepy animatronic hall of founders, and the naturalistic humanity of the world beyond it. 'Who are you?' Mark asks Gemma when they first meet, donating blood via ominously Lumon-branded equipment. This is, I should note, exactly the same question he asks Helly R. (Britt Lower) in the opening seconds of the series. Unlike Helly, though, Gemma has no trouble responding.
Season 2 made Gemma fully human, after first introducing her as Lumon's robotic, apparently lobotomized 'wellness counselor,' Ms. Casey. Unsevered, the show revealed, Gemma was funny, sharp, fully in love with Mark, and devastated by her inability to have a child with him. Lumon has always been sinister in a buffoonish way, but its treatment of Gemma in 'Chikhai Bardo' was horrifically evil: preying on her pain at a reproductive clinic, faking her death, confining her to windowless quarters, lying to her about Mark's new life, and experimenting on her like a lab rat, making her suffer through staged dentist appointments and airplane disasters over and over and over again. All of this is in service of a mission that, after the Season 2 finale, 'Cold Harbor,' remains blurry but seems to entail sacrificing Gemma in a goat-attended ritual in order to revive the consciousness of Lumon's founder, Kier Eagan. (And, yes, I feel high even typing these words.)
[Read: Severance cannot save you]
Season 1 of Severance spent enough time outside of Lumon to fully underscore how weird the company was, with its cultlike devotion to Kier, its obsession with round foods (eggs, melons, waffles), its bizarrely hostile leadership. The people who fleshed out the show's world beyond the company—a Lumon-protesting punk band; Mark's sister, Devon (Jen Tullock); and even depressed Mark himself—were mostly recognizably normal. Its inner acolytes came across, by contrast, as uncannily contrived kooks. Season 2, though, has confined itself more closely to the Lumon realm, which made 'Chikhai Bardo' and its depiction of pre-severed Mark and Gemma stand out. And, to me, the season's cramped, airless Lumon setting also made the finale's closing scenes crueler, as outie Mark rescued Gemma from the company's netherworld, only for innie Mark to abandon her on the other side of the door, screaming, while he ran back toward Helly.
At a theoretical level, the final twist makes sense. Innies and outies, Severance has emphasized throughout Season 2, are essentially different people with distinct personalities, needs, desires, and moral compasses. Innie Mark, emotionally innocent and as impulsive as an adolescent, might indeed choose Helly, even if the two are now trapped together with no conceivable way out. The ending sets up a third season of Severance that remains relatively stable, with the Lumon CEO Jame Eagan likely still intent on completing Kier's 'grand addendum,' even if it means ignoring yet another messy employee uprising. And Lower's double-edged work this season toggling between her innie, the lovely, irreverent Helly, and her outie, the icy, manipulative Helena, has been astonishing, more than justifying the ending by emphasizing the show's philosophical questions about nature versus nurture and whether love can transcend severance. So why is what happened to Gemma still so hard to swallow?
Maybe because, on the show, Gemma has only ever experienced suffering: before Lumon, during Lumon, and now after. Even in her escape, she's losing something yet again. (Lachman's bewildered, 'Mark S? What's taking place?' as she found herself kissing him in the elevator, having switched into the severed mode of Ms. Casey, was pitch-perfect.) Otherwise, 'Cold Harbor' did everything it needed to plot-wise, while throwing a spectacularly nervy marching-band set piece and a teeth-grindingly stressful escape sequence into the mix. There were revelations. (Mark has indeed been coding different souls for Gemma this whole time, as part of a momentous project to possibly bring back Kier—which does, though, urge the question of whom the other innies have been refining.) There were suggestions. (Is Kier Eagan actually alive in digital form, imprisoned in the animatronic form of himself?) There were hugely gratifying insurrections—Dylan and the marching band against Seth Milchick, the manager of the severed floor; Milchick against a roboticized Kier; the mysterious goat lady against the Lumon manager Mr. Drummond. (Emil thanks you.)
[Read: What are the puzzles of Severance about?]
There were also eggs. So many eggs! (Presumably, with the show's rumored $20 million an episode budget, the show can afford them.) We spent so much time this season pondering the meaning of the goats when the eggs were there all along: raw eggs, egg bars, eggs cut neatly into six different segments, served on the most menacing plate a prop master ever thrifted. From its opening scenes, Severance has presented the procedure the show is named for as a kind of birth, the spawning of a new, immature being. With 'Cold Harbor,' we finally got a sense of the full life cycle. The childlike innies have become more akin to teenagers, discovering sexuality and falling in love. Next, it's presumed, comes adulthood, and then death, and then resurrection via blobs of data with four tempers.
And apparently, with death come sacrificial scapegoats. A show as rich in symbols, details, and Easter eggs as this one is always going to be thrilling to decode, with Reddit threads and screenshots trying to make sense of the mysteries. The challenge for the finale was offering just enough to keep hard-core Severance-heads engaged without alienating the less committed viewer or relinquishing the qualities that make for satisfying television. And, for the most part, 'Cold Harbor' succeeded. The rest of the season, though, had more than a few bugs in its system. Is Mark, after undergoing a process designed to reintegrate his two minds, still severed or not? Who actually is Reghabi, the ex-Lumon employee doing brain surgery on Mark in his basement? Is Ricken, Mark's offbeat brother-in-law, anything more than comic relief? The revelation that so many of Lumon's core characters, including Harmony Cobel, have been damaged by both trauma and repetitive exposure to ether as children might help explain their sheer strangeness. But the show's focus on expanding the historical lore of Lumon this season left it less time to devote to its characters, the verbose and truly fascinating Milchick among them. (Severance: The Lexington Letter, a fictional e-book released to accompany the series, hints that Milchick is related to a newspaper editor, which perhaps explains his love of words.)
Last week, The Guardian posited that Severance has become the smash it has because it offers different things to different tastes (or even different tempers): puzzle-box mythology, workplace comedy, allusions to cultlike organizations and the heartlessness of corporate America, an overarching sense of dread. But for me, what makes the show so captivating is its humanity: the riveting, fleeting moments when the characters feel real, despite the eggy, etherized monstrousness of the world they're trapped in. Should Severance return for a third season (which it seems fated to—praise Kier), all the pieces seem set up for more ambitious, absurd storytelling. But I'll still be craving justice for Gemma.
Article originally published at The Atlantic
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