Tag: Severance

Severance season two finale: My thoughts

In keeping with the style of season two, I will present my thoughts on the Severance finale in a random and disjointed way.  

I loved the conversation between iMark and oMark. Season one never fully delivered on the most fascinating part of its premise—what it means for one person to be two people. Season two did. The Marks trading home videos with each other was such a creative way to make the first innie-outie interaction happen. 

I loved the emotional awareness from oDylan in his letter to iDylan. I think of iDylan as the Hurley of Severance. He sometimes speaks for the audience, and we can relate to his ability to find simple joys in a strange situation. So it hurt to see him so despondent at the end of episode nine. I also didn’t like how they made oDylan seem like such a lout for most of this season. His letter saying he’s comforted knowing his innie is down there was really sweet. But…

I think this storyline (and a few others I’ll mention in a minute) might have been the victim of rumored conflict between Severance creator Dan Erickson and writer Mark Friedman. They apparently couldn’t stand each other in season one and had to grin and bear it to get through the much delayed, heavily re-written season two. Beau Willimon (House of Cards guy) came on to fix the later half of season two and will take on a more prominent role in season three. Good. Pretty much everything after the ORTBO was a mess. Beautifully made, but a mess. 

The love triangle between iDylan, oDylan and his wife might be an example of this. What was this, like six scenes in the entire season? It feels like we saw an abbreviated version of something they meant to explore more deeply. Ricken’s book project with Lumon could easily be another. That had one or two scenes at most? The only one I can remember is the one with Natalie.  

Irv’s season two arc also felt stunted. Why give him a mystery phone conversation in episode one and not resolve it? That seems like a very odd string to leave dangling until season three. They also just kinda aborted his entire season after the dinner at oBurt’s house. Why go through all that—including Burt accidentally (?) revealing he worked at Lumon before being severed—then drop it for two episodes? And then not really address any of it when you put Irv on a train to somewhere Burt can’t know. I can’t help but wonder if that was initially meant to be something much different than what made it to our screens. 

I loved Drummond. He was a good character and one season feels like the right amount of time for him to be part of the story.

And actually what was with having two character-centric episodes in a row? I can’t remember any show I’ve ever watched that took back-to-back detours like that. It took us out of the season’s natural momentum and actually de-emphasized iMark’s completion of Cold Harbor. Mark didn’t go to work from episodes seven through nine. That’s three installments of the show where he made zero progress on what we were told would be the greatest moment in the history of the planet Earth. You couldn’t make it less dramatic if you tried. 

Ms. Huang is another character who seems like she should have been more impactful to season two’s outcome. What was the point of her really? I can come up with two possibilities. She might have been a way to help the writers work Milchick into a simmering rage (more on him shortly). Or she might have been a timely example of the way Lumon exploits children. I’m fine with either. But shouldn’t she have, like, done something tangible? In the end she mattered exactly zero to the four refiners. 

Now let me vent on something I really hated about the season two finale: Milchick. My favourite storyline this season was the way they kept pushing this character closer and closer to his boiling point. Think of all the indignities he endured at the hands of Lumon: Not taking Cobel’s name off his computer, being put in charge of a child intern, a humiliating performance review, those weird paintings with massive racial undertones, being mocked by a puppet and being constantly looked down on by Drummond. That scene of him growling “Grow. Grow.” at himself in the mirror was tremendous. 

So why did they trap him in the bathroom for the most important parts of the finale??? That’s like benching your best player in the fourth quarter, and I think it sucked drama out of Mark’s dash to the testing floor. 

Speaking of that, I think the whole “Gemma is gonna die when Cold Harbor is finished” thing was a little underwhelming, too. I never felt a moment when Gemma’s life was truly in danger. 

Imagine this instead:

There’s no stupid goat sacrifice. Drummond and the dentist watch Mark complete the Cold Harbor file. Drummond leaves the observation room and goes to get the gun and bullet from the gun and bullet dispenser. He starts the long and winding walk to the room where Gemma is taking apart the crib. 

Meanwhile, Mark has broken free of the marching band and makes a mad dash to the elevator…with Milchick on his tail because Milchick is not stupidly trapped in the john. Mark turns a corner and runs smack into Brienne of Tarth taking a goat to…who gives a shit where because the goats are stupid. Oh no! This gave Milchick time to catch him. But have no fear! Brienne kicks the shit out of him so Mark can get away. Another indignity for Seth.

Who will get to Gemma first—Mark to save her or Drummond to end her? Cut between Drummond marching toward Gemma’s doom and Mark frantically trying to find a room that says Cold Harbor. oMark gets there first but wait! He can’t get in. Don’t worry. Sandra Bernhard is there as the nurse we met in Gemma’s episode. She’s low on Lumon’s totem pole but knows who this is and what it means that he’s standing outside this door. He looks at her. She looks at him. A beat. No words are spoken. Will she let him in? 

Yes! Mark convinces Gemma to follow him. Gemma is saved! Not so fast. Drummond is waiting outside the door. Fack! No worries, nurse Sandra Bernhard needles him in the neck from behind because she hates what Lumon did to Gemma down there. 

I don’t know. Maybe the pacing wouldn’t work. But, geez, there’s got to be a louder ticking clock on Gemma’s life than vague insinuations that she would die if Mark completed the file. 

So here we are at the end, which I mostly loved. iMark stood at the end of the hallway covered in blood (By the way how weird was it to see so much blood on this show? And the color red.) having played his part in freeing Gemma. Now he faced the unfair choice his outie thrust on him: Follow Gemma out the door or turn back to the life he wants with Helly? 

In the moment I saw this going either way. A heroic sacrifice of himself so his outie can reunite with his wife. An entirely justified decision to take control over his life and stay with Helly. His choice to stay divided the fan base. I’m not mad. Agency is one of this show’s core themes. Innies have almost none of it. They can’t even decide when they exist. I’m happy iMark got that choice and won’t argue with his decision. 

We don’t know when season three will land (it’s in development) but we won’t have to wait as long as we did for season two. Hopefully we will get something worth trying to write coherent blog posts about.  

‘Andor’s Beau Willimon Added To ‘Severance’ Season 2 & 3, Amid Reports Of Delays & Production Troubles

Severance season two finale preview: Where is their heads?

Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan used to ask his writers room “Where is Walt’s head?” When they sat down to break an episode. That was his way to make sure they were always grounding themselves in writing stories that truly reflected what Walter White would do. 

Let’s ask the same about the characters on Severance, a show literally about heads, as we await the season two finale. 

Where is Mark’s head?

Mark started this season wanting to find Gemma, and he’s taken increasingly dangerous steps to do it. Burning his eyeballs didn’t work so he tried reintegration* only to pass out on the floor in front of his sister. As Mark sits down for a conversation between himself and his innie**, his head is in a place of growing desperation. But unlike the other two severed employees still left, innie Mark and outie Mark are on the same mission: Find Gemma. I’m excited to see what that causes him—or his protective but weirdly into finding Gemma sister—to do.

Where is Helly’s head?

Helly’s season two arc has been fun tbh. She went from the stage at the end of season one to being held underwater by Irv at the end of the ORTBO episode. Can you imagine? Then she finds out Helena used her to vessel Mark’s innie. Then she decided to vessel him for real. Yowza. She seems to be over all that and back to being the innie rights activist we met in season one. Except for two key things. First, she knows she’s an Eagan. We saw her hold that over Milchick in episode nine. What will that give her the courage to do? Second, she’s alone on the severed floor. Whatever she does for the innies, she’ll have to do without Mark, Dylan and Irv’s help. 

Helena’s head…harder to figure out. I don’t know what to make of the boiled egg scene from last week, and the show hasn’t given us much since Irv blew her cover. I still think she’s pro-Lumon, and honestly don’t care if she’s in the finale or not. 

Where is Dylan’s head?

Innie Dylan has taken it on the chin this season. He was so happy and cheerful in season one, and then even happier to meet his outie’s wife. Losing her completely broke his spirit and now he wants his consciousness to be over.**** We start the finale with his head wanting nothing to do with any of this anymore. I don’t expect his outie to accept his resignation, so how will Dylan react to whatever Helly asks him to do if he’s still on the severed floor? 

Where is Cobel’s head?

I’ve thought about this since the Cobel-centric episode two weeks ago. Does the revelation that she invented the severance chip change the fact that she wants to see Mark’s innie complete Cold Harbor? If we are to believe her cryptic statement in episode nine that Gemma would already be dead if Cold Harbor is over, then why is she seemingly helping Mark? His goal is for Gemma to not be dead. Or is she trying to prevent Cold Harbor because completing it would be Lumon’s greatest day and she’s mad at being fired? I don’t understand.***** 

These are, in my view, the only four characters that matter in the finale. I’ll check back this weekend to see where their heads are at when it’s over. 

*btw is his reintegration just over now? If the innie-outie conversation happens there’s no need for him to reintegrate in order to find her. One of the many confusing developments this season.

**Something not really made clear until the commentary after episode nine. 

***We’re done with Irv for the season, right? I don’t know how they bring him back from a train ride to the unknown. But hella fucking frustrating either way for a character who started the season placing a mysterious phone call. 

****I debated writing “his life to be over”. That’s one of my favourite philosophical questions about this show. Is life your physical body or your consciousness? 

*****Just like I was upset with the Gemma-centric episode for not being more concrete, I didn’t like Severance not giving us this kind of clarity in Cobel’s episode. 

Let’s not get Lost in Severance

“The most important part of your life was the time that you spent with these people.”

How many of us were so caught up in the mystery and minutiae of The End that we barely registered Christian Shepard’s words to his son, Jack? My mind was racing thru what mind-blowing reveal might yet come in the few minutes we had left. I wasn’t in the right headspace to realize Lost had just laid its meaning bare after six mind-bending seasons.

This occurred to me early in the second season of Severance on AppleTV+. People are saying it’s the most engrossed they’ve been since Lost, and I believe it. Last week on Threads there was a whole trend of people breaking down the elevator dings for each character. If that doesn’t remind you of fans obsessing over Lost’s blast door map, I don’t know what will.

They’re even coming up with some, um, theories:

  • Mark’s outie is actually the severed one and everyone in his life is a Lumon plant;
  • Cobel is Mark’s mom;
  • Ms. Huong is Mark and Gemma’s child;
  • Cobel is a robot (or should I say, an ORTBO);
  • The pineapple is a trigger that makes outies more compliant;
  • Dylan and the door factory manager look alike for a reason;
  • They all drive old cars because the show takes place in an alternate timeline;
  • They’re Mormons;
  • Kier Egan is going to be reincarnated into Mark’s body; and
  • This is all a ruse to trick Christopher Walken into saying he needs more Cobel.

I have theories, too, and I’ll talk about them shortly. But I watch Severance in a world in which Lost existed. I don’t want to miss what this show is really about because I’m so focused on what it’s not. Goats? Not even a little bit interested. But I do care about Helena and Helly reckoning with their shared autonomy over one body and how Dylan G is accidentally ruining his outie’s marriage. 

And, of course, I care about Mark S. Every great story is about the obstacles between its characters and what they want the most. We entered Mark’s life two years after he decided he wanted to be free of grief—for eight hours a day—by undergoing the severance procedure. That was going okay for him until the characters around him instigated a series of events that gave him the opportunity to want something more: Gemma back. He was so motivated to pursue this want that he was willing to fry his retinas and scramble his brain for the chance to see his wife again (no, of knowing he was seeing his wife again). 

But again it’s not a great story unless something stands between Mark and what he wants. This is my theory about Cold Harbor. I believe macrodata refinement tunes the severance chips to block specific emotions from their recipients like how a programmer trains an algorithm to accomplish a task. The emotion in Mark’s case is grief. As we near the end of season two, his innie is 96 percent done with the Cold Harbor file, which will give Lumon a way to permanently remove grief from the human experience (without severing the rest of their memory). That’s the kind of lofty achievement that merits saying it “will be remembered as one of the greatest moments in the history of this planet.” 

And there we find drama: Mark’s innie is unknowingly about to give Mark’s outie his freedom from “choking on Gemma’s ghost”, but Mark’s outie is unknowingly screwing that up by pursuing a risky reintegration treatment that will render Cold Harbor ineffective. Dammit! Great storytellers absolutely torture their characters, and what could be more torturous for Mark to know that he could have been free from the grief of losing Gemma if he hadn’t tried to reintegrate? Bad for Mark, compelling for us! 

I think Lumon even suspects Mark is working with Reghabi, the mad scientist behind reintegration who already fatally experimented with another severed Lumon macrodata refiner. That’s why Helena happened into the same Chinese restaurant Mark did after a recent procedure. Calling Gemma by the wrong name was a test (Mark’s innie wouldn’t know her name) and Britt Lower giving her Helly face straight to the camera a clue to viewers that Helena was, once again, not being honest with us. 

This is also what made the most recent episode “Chikhai Bardo” so frustrating. The show had to tell us Mark and Gemma’s story and what happened when Gemma/Ms. Casey was sent back to the testing floor in season one. But with only 10 episodes, the show doesn’t have time to take scenic detours unless they lead somewhere concrete. And this one didn’t. All we really got was 1) a very vague look at what Gemma’s life on the testing floor and 2) that Mark didn’t die from his stroke at the end of the previous episode. Instead it just threw more unanswered questions at us: Did Gemma go to Lumon willingly? If so, why? What is the purpose of the experiments Ms. Casey is forced to undergo? We got some hints, including our first look at the team supervising the refiners, but it was told in such riddles that even Gemma got fed up with it. By the end of the episode, so was I. 

*This episode was visually stunning—especially considering it was directed by Jessica Lee Gagné, the show’s cinematographer, in her first time behind the camera. Shower her with awards.

To go back to my original point, you’re not reading my thoughts about where Lumon is located or if its board is a disembodied consciousness. Or those damn goats. I don’t even really care if  Burt worked at Lumon for 12 years like he believes, or 20 like his “husband” insisted during their dinner with Irv’s outie. 

If you’re a viewer caught up in things like that I encourage you to listen to the official podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scott. They aren’t talking about clues to unraveling mysteries. They’re talking about the actors’ performances—what their characters are thinking and feeling as they move through this cryptic world. 

That’s what this show is really about, and what I’m trying to care about. Mark wants a break from grief. Dylan wants a piece of the happiness he believes his outie has. Helly wants the free will her outie refuses to believe severed people deserve. Being obsessed with anything else is a fruitless exercise, just like it was during Lost.