This article contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of Severance, “Cold Harbor.”
Severance began as a show about office drones desperate to escape a psychic prison, but in its second season, the severed floor of Lumon Industries has started to feel more like a gilded cage. In response to the attempted jailbreak staged by the workers of Macrodata Refinement at the end of the first season, Lumon, a sprawling global conglomerate with nebulous but undoubtedly sinister aims, introduced a series of workplace reforms aimed at placating their restive employees. But they were mostly either cosmetic—upgraded vending-machine snacks!—or unenforceably vague, and the promises of a more open and human workplace quickly faded away once it became clear that Mark S. (Adam Scott) and his fellow rebels weren’t likely to be bought off with a few insubstantial gestures. The outdoor field trip presented as a team-building perk took place in a frozen, depopulated wasteland, and the long-awaited consummation of Mark’s romance with his fellow refiner Helly (Britt Lower) was marred by the discovery that he’d actually slept with her real-world outie, Helena Eagan, who’d been posing as her severed self in order to spy for the company. Irving B. (John Turturro), the Lumon old-timer whose outie retains enough subconscious knowledge of Lumon’s hidden depths for it to surface in his artwork, saw through Helena’s ruse, and Helly was returned to her rightful place, with no knowledge of what her body had been up to in her absence. But Helena’s night with Mark, the longest and most intimate interaction between an innie and outie in the show’s history, set off a string of philosophical questions. Are the innies truly distinct individuals from the outies? And if they are truly separate people, which ones are we meant to be pulling for?
Long-running TV shows—and Severance has been on the air for three years, even if it’s only managed 19 episodes in that span—inevitably end up deepening their characters, discovering or inventing sides to them we’d never suspected were there. Often, though not always, that means making them more sympathetic. In the show’s second season, we learned that Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), the Lumon zealot who ran the severed floor like a petty tyrant, was once a child laborer in one of the company’s factories, and was exiled to middle management while the company’s CEO, Helena’s father, took credit for her invention of the severance procedure, which might be the company’s most valuable asset. Her replacement, Seth Milchick, was an officious terror in his own right, but in Season 2, the show has delved more explicitly into the tensions inherent in being an ambitious Black employee in a largely white company, navigating aggressions both micro- and macro- while keeping a corporate-approved grin on his face. New villains emerged to take their place as uncomplicated heavies, including the hulking corporate enforcer Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) and the sinister Dr. Mauer (Robby Benson).
The core MDR quartet of Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan (Zach Cherry) have all grown more complicated, too, spurred by Helly’s resistance to the Lumon-dictated status quo. (For most of the first season, she has no idea her outie is the heir apparent to the entire company, but she seems have to retained a vestigial sense that she’s meant for better things.) With no sense of what the outside world was like—after Mark is briefly able to awaken his innie self while aboveground, his co-workers enviously ask him to describe the sky—the innies had nothing better to hope for. But like Eve in the garden, Helly opened up possibilities too tempting to be forgotten. What if the MDR crew, whose job consists of sorting clusters of numbers into boxes on a computer monitor, actually knew what they were doing, rather than just being assured their work is “mysterious and important”? What if they could go outside, live their lives, or even just consciously exist for more than the length of an eight-hour day? What if work wasn’t all there is?
Are the innies truly distinct individuals from the outies, and if they are truly separate people, which ones are we meant to be pulling for?
The more we’ve seen of the outside world, though, the less it seems worth fighting to inhabit it. Mark’s outie is still deep in grieving the death of his wife, Dylan inhabits what seems to be a comfortable but essentially loveless marriage, and Irving lives alone in a dark apartment, possibly suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from a past military deployment. These are lives to escape from, not to. Helena Eagan may be part of the elite, but her life, which we finally got a glimpse of in the second season’s penultimate episode, looks like a high-end version of utter misery: swimming solitary laps and eating a desultory breakfast under the unnervingly watchful eye of her father, who looks and sounds like a lightly reanimated corpse. Even the people who don’t work at Lumon seem to live in an environment suffocated by its influence, a gray, endless winter devoid of joy or fulfillment. (On the Severance podcast, director Ben Stiller proudly noted that the scenes flashing back to Mark’s life with his wife, Gemma, are virtually the only time in the show’s history we’ve seen a tree with leaves on it.) It’s as if the outer world is also cut off from something vital. The severed floor might be, as Helly reminds us in the second-season finale, “hell,” but at least they’ve got snacks. There’s no place like work.
In order to sustain an audience, a television show has to make its central location a pleasant place for its viewers, if not its characters, to spend time in. Lumon’s endless corridors convey a numbing repetition, but they’re a dazzling white, and the retro-modernist design of its office spaces is enthralling in its immaculate specificity. That goes for the characters as well. Because Mark is the show’s central figure, we spend roughly as much time with each of his selves—the second season’s first two episodes replay the same series of events from his outie’s and innie’s perspectives—but his co-workers’ outies are essentially strangers to us, no substitute for the innies we’ve come to know and love. When innies end their employment, either by choice or otherwise, they effectively die; it’s not clear whether their severed selves get permanently deleted or just lie dormant, like a file they’re not allowed to open. Leading into the second-season finale, the show toyed with the idea that both Irving’s and Dylan’s innies might be gone for good: The former, fired for attempting to drown the future head of the company, boards a train heading for points unknown, and the latter, who’s developed unrequited feelings for his outie’s wife, voluntarily resigns in an effort to end his own suffering. These ought, at least in theory, to be moments of triumph—free at last. But as TV viewers, we don’t want change, at least of the kind that deprives of us of more time with our favorite make-believe friends.
The second-season finale, “Cold Harbor,” brings this conflict to a head. Mark’s outie has been hatching a plan to rescue Gemma, who, instead of being dead, has been effectively held prisoner inside Lumon for the past few years. But to do it, he needs his innie’s help. Although Mark has been attempting an experimental reintegration process that would fuse his inner and outer selves, the procedure is still buggy and impermanent, so the only way for the two to communicate is by passing messages back and forth via video camera. Mark’s outie begs his innie to help with the rescue, warning him that completing the file he has been working on will result in her death. But Mark S. quickly realizes that the plan essentially involves killing himself. He’s in love, too, with Helly, but there’s no chance their outies would feel the same way. Mark’s outie tries to act like he sympathizes, but a crucial slip of the tongue—he calls the woman Mark S. loves “Heleny”—reveals how little he knows, and, truthfully, cares, about the inner life of his severed self. As far as Mark’s outie is concerned, his innie isn’t a real person, just a mistake he’s hoping to undo, and for Mark’s innie, that means there isn’t much difference between his original self and the company he works for—except that Lumon, at least for now, still wants him around. And so Mark’s innie makes a devastating but inevitable choice: He frees Gemma and then locks himself back inside, choosing a life of captivity with Helly over the freedom of oblivion.
On the Severance podcast, listeners call in to a weekly advice line where they ask questions as if they’re Lumon employees, frequently signing off with an enthusiastic “Praise Kier.” It’s a little odd to hear them cosplaying as members of the Eagans’ corporate cult, but it also fits the culture that has grown up around the show, where fans and advertisers alike voluntarily insert themselves into its dystopian world. Stiller’s podcast ads pitch project-management software as a less cumbersome alternative to the severance procedure—despite the show’s entry-level POV, its marketing is aimed squarely at management—and Lumon even has its own LinkedIn page. Severance has come to function like a lavish science-fiction version of Dilbert, whose strips about the humiliations of corporate life were pinned inside every cubicle in every office I worked in as an office temp, skewering the mind-numbing repetition and alienation of the characters’ jobs while forging a kind of fatalistic camaraderie: Sure, this is terrible, but at least we’re in it together. Life on the severed floor is degrading and inhumane, but when all your friends are there, it’s better than no life at all.
Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.
