What now for ‘Severance’ after that electrifying season finale?
Three years is a long time to wait in TV land. Such an extended delay between seasons one and two left Severance facing the difficult task of balancing its narrative ambitions with the feverish expectations of the devoted. Three years for 10 weeks. And just like that, we’re back to the waiting game. Some questions were answered, but most left to be puzzled over thanks to a cliffhanger that somehow outdid the breathless finale of the show’s debut season.
Season two was something of a difficult second album for Severance. It’s to the show’s credit that it managed to recapture its unique atmosphere so quickly, but the difficulty for Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller was managing a notable shift in pace and tone when some of your audience have been desperately waiting for answers, while others may have forgotten you ever existed.
One major concern ahead of season two was that the show may try too hard to remain too elusive. Severance seems to have learned from the legacies of Lost and Westworld – and while some will complain that it returned as a more pensive version of itself, the end result was a richer world where we understand more about the bizarre Eagan clan, the sinister Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and our intrepid quartet of macrodata refiners. The more we know about the wider world above the severed floor, the higher the stakes feel.
How did Severance season two end?
With a bang, in more than one sense (good riddance Drummond and your nightmare performance reviews). It’s clear, in hindsight, that the entire season was a deliberate build to a hilarious, emotional hour-and-a-bit of exceptional TV. We even got the return of Milchick’s (Tramell Tillman) dance moves in a scene that must go down as the weirdest, funniest, creepiest thing Severance has delivered to date.
Mark (Adam Scott) discovers that each file he’s created at MDR is an innie of his wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman). Over his two years working at Lumon, he’s created 24 of them and Cold Harbor is to be the final one. After that, she’ll be killed. Mark, Devon (Jen Tullock) and Harmony hatch a plan to rescue her, but it relies on the co-operation of his innie, Mark S. Mark S isn’t so keen, countering that this will end his existence. In the end, it takes some heart-breaking selflessness from Helly R (Britt Lower) to convince Mark S to go along with the plan.
Cue an outrageous chain of events. Following an awards presentation that makes Anne Hathaway and James Franco look normal, Helly R and Dylan G (Zach Cherry) barricade Milchick in the MDR bathroom (soundtracked by a way-too-intense Lumon marching band) while Mark S races to save Gemma. En route, he encounters Mr Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), who is about to sacrifice a baby goat (hello again, Mammalians Nurturable) to accompany Gemma to the afterlife. A brutal fight ensues, resulting in Mark/Mark S accidentally killing Drummond with a bolt gun.
It’s on the testing floor where we finally discover the whole experiment on Gemma has been to eradicate her ability to experience pain. Innie Gemma #25 is tasked with disassembling the cot intended for her outtie’s baby without feeling any emotion, a task she’s succeeding at until Mark (now his outie) bursts in and rescues her. They’re on the verge of escaping together, when Helly R turns up and Mark (now back to Mark S) chooses to stay behind, leaving a distraught Gemma to escape alone. Mark S and Helly R run off hand-in-hand, to a soundtrack of blaring alarms and Noel Harrison’s ‘Windmills Of Your Mind’.
What comes next for Severance?
Well, let’s ask the obvious question first. Who has Mark S run off with, Helly R or Helena Eagan? All the signs point to the latter. Helena has tricked Mark S before and remember what Irving B said on the ORTBO in episode four: “Helly was never cruel.” Showing up at that moment is cruel and selfish and there’s a momentary smirk that is pure Helena Eagan. Malice in human form.
And what does season three hold for Helly R/Helena? When Jame Eagan visits Helly R on the severed floor, he says that she is the first embodiment of Kier that he’s seen in any of his offspring (of which there are many, from the sounds of things), including his own daughter, who he clearly doesn’t much care for. Will we see Jame move to replace Helena permanently with her innie?
The severed floor that Mark S runs back to is one in chaos. Departments have risen up against management – most notably Choreography and Movement (don’t mess with the band geeks, Milchick) and the totally-not-already-unhinged Mammalians Nurturable. Harmony Cobel has turned on her ex-employers. Cracks are starting to appear in Mr Milchick’s previously imperturbable façade. Drummond is dead. Cold Harbor is in ruins.
Many more questions remain. Childbirth has been a recurring motif across the two seasons, from the senator’s wife in season one to Gemma’s miscarriage and the birthing cabin where Mark and Devon meet Harmony Cobel (that statue of pregnant Kier Eagan is nightmare fuel). There’s an obvious overlap with Lumon’s quest to eradicate pain but to what end? We now know that severance means creating another whole consciousness that only gets to experience endless trauma. And what kind of person do you create when you completely remove pain, trauma and sadness? Is Lumon’s end goal to eventually create a workforce devoid of woe, malice, dread and frolic?
Where is Irving (John Turturro) now and will he have a role to play in the upcoming innie rebellion? What about Burt, Christopher Walken’s cold-hearted hatchet man with traces of a growing conscience? Will he face repercussions when Irving inevitably returns? What does all this spell for Devon and her husband Ricken (Michael Chernus), who’s now in thrall to the potential riches from the innie edition of his book? And then there’s the enigmatic Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), last seen boarding a bus without her beloved ring toss game. It seems impossible that we’ve seen the last of her.
The person (people?) with the most growth over this season is Dylan/Dylan G. Distraught over his wife’s “infidelity” with his innie, Dylan realises that Dylan G is really the vital part of himself that he lost somewhere along the way. He’s the only one who doesn’t seek to control or subdue his innie, instead allowing him his own autonomy, addressing him as an equal. Will Dylan and Dylan G find a way to co-exist and work together or is there something much more tragic at play here?
At the time of writing, Severance has yet to be officially renewed for a third season, but Ben Stiller told The Hollywood Reporter in February that a writers’ room has already started work in LA and recently promised fans that they won’t be waiting three years for the next season. It seems almost a dead cert that an announcement is coming. Any less will result in rebellion of a different kind.
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Mark Grassick
NME
