This review contains spoilers for the finale of Season 2 of ‘Severance.’
When the credits rolled after the finale of “Severance,” I was furious with Mark’s innie.
All right…let me back up.
After a 10-week run, the second season of “Severance” on Apple TV+ finally concluded last Friday, March 21, with a 76-minute finale, “Cold Harbor,” that ended with a gut-wrenching twist. (For a recap of the show’s basic premise, former America O’Hare Fellow Christopher Parker’s review of Season 1 has you covered.) Main protagonist Mark Scout (Adam Scott) is an employee at the sinister biotechnology corporation Lumon Industries. Mark has undergone Lumon’s “severance” procedure: The insertion of a surgical chip into his brain has “severed” his memories of his work life and outside life, essentially splitting his consciousness into two selves.
Early in the second season, Mark learns that his wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman), who had been presumed dead in a car accident, is in fact alive and being held captive on his company’s purgatorial “testing floor” for a mysterious experiment. Mark’s outside self (his “outie”) and work self (his “innie”) spend the season working to free her. Just as pivotal to the plot as the conflict between Mark and Lumon is the divergence of interests between Mark’s outie and his innie, the latter of whom has found a love interest of his own: Helly, who we discover to be the innie of Lumon executive Helena Eagan (Britt Lower).
Got that?
Much of the appeal of “Severance”—mirroring the severed characters themselves—lies in its multiple dimensions: It is a workplace satire, a science-fiction drama, a searing critique of faceless corporations and mad-scientist plutocrats made all the more chilling by the real-world rise of Elon Musk. It is also a classic mystery-box show, one of the cleverest and most elaborate on the small screen today, meeting each reveal with three or four new questions. My main contentions with Season 2 concern the many mysteries that remain loose ends—Who was the ominous shadow lurking behind Mark in the hallway? Who was severed worker Irving Bailiff’s outie (John Turturro) calling from that phone booth? What was the experimentation on Gemma really for?—although the news that Apple has greenlit a third season provides hope that more answers will be forthcoming.
The show’s real power, though, is in the philosophical and moral questions it poses about the nature of personhood. Does severance simply give one person periodic amnesia, or does the division in consciousness create another person entirely? Most importantly, do innies have legitimate claims to happiness and personal fulfillment on their own terms, independent of their outies’ aspirations and loves? The dilemma comes to a head in the finale, as Mark’s two selves find their interests diametrically opposed, with impossibly high stakes.
It is a quandary bound to intrigue Catholics, with our interest in the nature of the human person. Although we have yet to see a real Catholic presence in the world of “Severance,” the second season does at one point nod to Christianity. After his innie is fired from Lumon, Irving finds himself at dinner with Burt Goodman (Christopher Walken), another former employee with whom he had been in a relationship on the severed floor. We learn that Burt’s Lutheran pastor convinced him to take a severed job. His innie, the pastor suggested, would be a blank moral slate, innocent of the outie’s sins and worthy to ascend to heaven in the outie’s place after death.
Severance, in this through-the-looking-glass take on Christian teaching, becomes an escape hatch for salvation. Rather than taking on the hard work of repentance and conversion himself, Burt is promised that he can outsource it to an alternate version of himself. (Similarly, for those who see the innie and outie as one person, Helly might represent the potential for redemption buried within the villainous Helena; in Catholic terms, Helly could be a Helena who’s made a good confession.)
While Burt’s Christianity isn’t a major plot point, the charge of creating new people—new souls—to exploit for their convenience is leveled against the outies throughout the season, largely by their own innies.
At the finale’s close, “Severance” gives the innies the upper hand. Mark succeeds in rescuing Gemma from the testing floor, and his outie enjoys a fleeting reunion with her, but he transitions back into innie form as they pass through the severed floor on their way out. Mark’s innie guides her to an emergency exit stairwell, only to leave her and run back into the hallways of Lumon with Helly as Gemma, in an arresting performance by Ms. Lachman, pounds the exit door from the outside and desperately begs him to leave with her.
When being briefed on the plan to rescue Gemma, one that requires his cooperation yet implies that his outie will retake control at the end and escape with Gemma permanently, Mark’s innie asks: “You want me to give my life, the lives of everyone down there, just to save one person you happen to care about?” Mark eventually follows through on the deal in its strictest sense: He gets Gemma out of the Lumon building. But in a heartbreaking twist, the show’s previous status quo is reversed: Now she is free while Mark’s outie is trapped on the severed floor, this time by his own alter ego rather than Lumon’s villains.
In choosing to stay at Lumon with Helly rather than leaving with Gemma, Mark’s innie is showing us how he sees himself: He is not Mark Scout with amnesia, nor Mark Scout minus his sins. He isn’t just choosing Helly over “his” wife; he’s claiming independent humanity. A few minutes before, we hear Helly exclaim “They give us half a life and think we won’t fight for it!” In those final moments, Mark’s innie fights for the only life he knows, in a way sure to unsettle those who, viewing the innie and outie as a single person, see Mark and Gemma Scout’s relationship as the show’s most important storyline.
Many fans are staunchly pro-innie (at least if the “Severance” subreddit is anything to go by), but as Season 2 progressed, I came to favor Gemma in the tug-of-war between the love stories of Mark’s two personalities—particularly after the writers raised the emotional stakes of Mark and Gemma’s relationship with the devastating episode “Chikhai Bardo,” chronicling their romance and Gemma’s imprisonment. I’m still grappling with the meaning of my preference: Is it a failure of empathy for the innies’ sense of self? Or a sensible distaste for the entire enterprise of severance?
Some fans argue that the pro-Mark-and-Gemma side echoes Lumon’s dehumanization of its workers by valuing the outies’ lives over those of the innies. But the existence of the innies and their love interests is only possible because Lumon played God with human consciousness. Perhaps it’s my Catholic view asserting itself: Mark and Gemma are married!
Yet my sadness at Mark’s innie’s abandonment of Gemma should not be taken for disappointment with the show itself. The scene is a dramatic masterstroke. The intensity of my emotions is a testament to the brilliance of Dan Erickson’s writing, Ben Stiller’s directing and Mr. Scott’s, Ms. Lachman’s and Ms. Lower’s gripping acting. “Severance” wants us to wrestle with the impossible choices it gives its characters, to experience the final tragedy in all its complexity and to contend with the philosophical question of personhood at the heart of the action.
So as much as I struggled with Mark and Gemma’s situation at the season’s close, I remain a fan. May “Severance” win all the Emmys, and praise Kier for the promise of Season 3.
