There’s only one episode left in this season of Severance. Isn’t that a pip? Of the nine episodes that have aired so far, fully four of them broke the mold of the show entirely: The cast is on an outdoor excursion, or Harmony Cobel travels to her hometown, or we get lost in Gemma and Mark’s memories, or we pretend Bob Balaban and Alia Shawkat are on the show now for an hour. All of this has been varying degrees of fun.
But it might have been more fun than it was wise. This week’s penultimate episode of Season 2 really makes you realize just how much you haven’t learned about what’s actually going on, and how much you haven’t seen the core cast interact, and how much it isn’t like the first season that brought the audience of Apple TV+’s most buzzworthy show to the dance. I’m not sure it’s a tradeoff I’d have made, is what I’m saying.
Take the first scene, in which Helena Eagan goes for a swim and then sort of has breakfast with her freakish father Jame prior to her big day at work on the severed floor — the day when Mark S. is projected to finish the Cold Harbor file and thus…well, I don’t know, exactly. Do you? Oh, you may have your guesses, your theories, your Reddit posts — the four number bins correspond to the Four Tempers that Kier Eagan defeated, similar “DON’T FORGET TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE” clue hunts of this nature — but you don’t know, because the show is studiously avoiding telling you.
Even when it has the chance to, even when Mark’s outie and his sister Devon have Harmony Cobel right in front of them and can ask whatever they want about Gemma and the severed floors and what they’re really doing, they don’t. It’s been two seasons of this now. Surely, surely the people whose wives’ lives depend on getting these answers are even more sick of the runaround bullshit that I am sitting on my couch at home watching them!
For crying out loud, I had to consult a wiki before I learned even why Jame was being so weird about the meticulous way Helena consumed her breakfast of precisely one egg. (Company progenitor Kier Eagan liked his eggs raw.) So in essence, the entire first scene was just some big shoulder shrug, some vague gesture in the direction of answers that may or may not come and information not important enough to actually pay attention to unless you’re compiling wiki entries. It’s fair to wonder if a show would improve if you knew what the scenes you were watching were, you know, about. It might have made their last scene together, when he enters the severed floor to confront her innie persona, feel more emotionally engaging instead of merely surprising.
At other times, while the meaning of the scene is clear enough, the internal logic is an absolute mess. Elsewhere in the outside world. Mark and Devon ride to a rendezvous point in the wilderness where they’re due to meet Ms. Cobel. The idea is that only she can sneak them into the Lumon birthing cabin that can trigger the severance chip, so that they can talk to Mark’s innie.
Now, maybe here you’re thinking what I’m thinking? Didn’t they say Mark was reintegrated last week? Yes, they did! Devon said “Mark has been reintegrated” during her phone call to Cobel at the end of episode! So why do they need to go to the birthing cabin and activate Mark’s innie? Aren’t they the same freaking guy now? If they weren’t gonna be, shouldn’t that have been made clear to the audience at some point prior to this episode, when it’s confusing as hell?
What’s more, I’m with Mark — reintegrated or otherwise — when he repeatedly, insistently tells Devon that calling Ms. Cobel is an absolutely terrible idea. It is! So terrible it makes no sense. Literally all that Devon actually knows about Cobel is that she’s a liar, capable of maintaining false fronts for months or even years at a time on Lumon’s orders, willing to get between a mother and her infant to pursue her goals. Definitely not someone I’d trust with the future of my beloved brother’s brain and the survival of his abducted wife, I have to say! From the initial decision to make it seem as though Mark had been fully reintegrated only to immediately back, through Devon’s cockamamie insistence on calling Cobel, to now, this whole storyline — the centerpiece for the series! — has been a mess this season.
Fortunately, the other members of our core quartet fare better. Both Dylan G. and his outie are wrung through the ringer by Gretchen’s revelation that she’s been cheating on the latter with the former, or at least did so one time. The news absolutely wrecks Dylan the outie, who realizes that as long as he works at Lumon he can’t be sure if the affair — using his own body to cheat on him, as he puts it with revulsion — is continuing or not, so he may have to quit. When Gretchen breaks up with Dylan the innie over this, Dylan puts in a resignation request, which amounts to an application for euthanasia. When he leaves at the end of the episode, it’s unclear if he’ll ever return.
Irving is in a similar bind. Early in the episode he’s confronted by Bert, who sneaks into his house and flips through his notebook, discovering that at one point at least Irving believed Bert had once worked as a Lumon enforcer. Turns out this is true, but Bert’s mission that night is not to whisk Irving away to an undisclosed location where his body can be dumped in a ditch. Quite the opposite: He’s there to help him escape Lumon’s clutches before they act on the knowledge that Irving’s been working to try and expose the severance program in his outie life.
But this means Irving can never return home (he brings only his dog with him), and that he can never see Bert again. In a heartwrenching scene beautifully acted by John Turturro and Christopher Walken, Irving reveals he’s never been in a real loving relationship before — he would have had to be closeted during the bulk of his military career if my dates line up right — and now that he’s had a taste via the lives of his and Bert’s innies, he’s ready for it at long last. Bert can only repeat that they can’t, whether because of his husband or whether because he needs Irving to flee and thus live on instead of stay and die is unclear. Of course, why not both?
The final piece of the puzzle this week is Milchick, the show’s one truly mesmerizing enigma. We watch him bully Miss Huang out the door as she concludes her Wintertide Fellowship, the same prestigious training program that Cobel went through long ago; he forces her to crush her little hand-held water ring toss game the way he appears to have crushed most of his personality and dreams.
Which explains why he’s so weird, I suspect. In an angry confrontation with Mr. Drummond, the hulking higher-up, Milchick is forced to pare down his flowery vocabulary, which Drummond feels obfuscates the true meaning of his words. (Fair, tbh.) But it now feels like all of Milchick’s weird mannerisms — the SAT words, the precise diction, the throwback styling, the bizarre ideas for office parties — are like the stale toothpaste of what might have been an interesting personality, forced out through the sides of the tube by the oppressive wait of Lumon’s corporate cult. Maybe in some other life, Seth Milchick is a normal guy with a less ostentatious mustache who says “eat shit” rather than “devour feculence.” But we’ll never know that Seth, unless of course he severs himself.
But again, there’s only one episode to go now, and unless Dan Erickson plans on kicking half a dozen cans down the road into the next season, that airtime’s gonna be at a premium. Is there room for the stuff you want to happen to actually happen? Is there a light at the end of the Black Hallway?
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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