At last, the mystery box has been opened — Cold Harbor ahoy! The final episode of Severance’s second season does what the show probably should have done some time ago and tells you, you know, what Severance has been about all this time. In general, I find this to be useful information when watching a television show. Don’t you?
So here’s the deal. The numbers that the Macro Data Refinement team have been sorting based on vibes all this time represent Kier Eagan’s Four Tempers, Woe, Frolic, Malice, and Dread. When 100% sorted, each file they work on becomes a persona that can be used as someone’s innie. Mark S. has completed 24 such personas for his wife, Gemma, each one triggered by entering the room with the corresponding label down in the forbidden basement. Cold Harbor, the 25th and final file required for Lumon’s project, represents Gemma’s persona itself, apparently, reconstructed without any memories, not even of her and Mark’s traumatic struggle to have a baby. It’s the fulfillment of Kier Eagan’s quest to take away the world’s pain, presumably by creating an army of Lumon-controlled pod people. (I dunno, that part’s probably clearer to someone who reads the show’s wiki a lot than it is to me.)
And here’s where that leaves Mark, his sister Devon, and their unlikely ally, Ms. Cobel. Using a video camera so that the two(ish) men can converse with one another with their recorded messages, they have Mark S. step in and out of the birthing cabin with the severance barrier. Outside, Mark makes his best case for rescuing Gemma, and promises to safeguard Mark S. via the reintegration procedure rather than abandoning him. Inside, Mark S. worries his outie and Cobel might be lying to him, that if he agrees to reintegrations his portion of their shared life will be much smaller and thus he won’t be as real, that if he goes through with reintegration he’ll never see his beloved Helly R. again since her outie would never do such a thing, and that if he exposes Lumon’s wrongdoing it means the mass murder of all the innies. (This show takes place in an alternate reality where exposing the wrongdoing of billionaires leads to consequences. Lol. Lmao.)
In other words, it’s unclear what Mark S. will decide to do, until he does it. He goes ahead and completes Cold Harbor, triggering another one of Mr. Milchick’s bizarre dance dance celebrations. This time around, he does a weird comedy routine with an audioanimatronic, possibly artificially intellgient Kier Eagan wax statue, complete with audience laugh track. Then he brings in the heretofore unseen Choreography and Merriment department, which is a literal marching band, to play celebratory music as he boogies on down. (Dance is clearly Milchick’s real calling; you wonder how he’d have wound up if he hadn’t fallen under the Lumon spell at some point.) In the resulting chaos — there’s a whole-ass marching band down there, keep in mind — Mark makes a break for it while Helly and a late-arriving Dylan G. (fresh from receiving a surprisingly warm and encouraging letter from his outie encouraging him to stay alive down there) seal Milchick in the restroom.
Mark S.’s attempt to open the door to the infamous black hallway nearly takes a turn for the fatal when it alerts the nearby Mr. Drummond. The mountainous Lumon exec is across the hall in a secret chamber where baby goats from the goat department, run by Gwendoline Christie’s character, Lorne. This leads to an all-out throwdown which, appropriately given Christie’s resume, feels like something out of Game of Thrones. Lorne and Mark S. finally defeat Drummond and force him into the black hallway, where he unlocks the down elevator.
Unfortunately, Mark S. hadn’t quite planned for how being restored to his outie persona when the elevator reaches the basement would effect the physiology of his trigger finger. Upon resurfacing, outie Mark accidentally shoots Drummond in the neck, gorily killing him. When he fails to intimidate Cecily, Sandra Bernhard’s character, into letting him into the Cold Harbor room, he uses Drummond’s blood on his tie to unlock the biometrically sealed door.
And inside he finds Gemma taking apart a crib, the final test of just how erased her memories have been. Jame Eagan, on site for the big day, and Dr. Mauer watch in horror as Mark convinces this poor blank slate of a person to step back outside the room with him, which she does despite the fact that he’s drenched in blood like a pro wrestler after a Texas Death Match. (She probably doesn’t have any memory of Texas Death Matches, to be fair.) Once outside, she regains all her memories, sees her husband, and has the reunion the show’s been building to since Season 1.
Now it’s outie Mark’s turn to be unprepared for what happens when his alter ego takes back over. Arriving at the refiners’ floor restores Mark to Mark S. mode, and turns Gemma into a very confused Ms. Casey. As red lights flash and sirens blare, he rushes Ms. Casey to the exit stairway; she goes along with him willingly, presumably because the alarms tip her off that he’s trying to get her out of danger. But when she steps through the door, becomes Gemma, and turns to call to her husband to join her, she instead watches screaming as Mark S. backs away and chooses Helly R. instead. With Milchick trapped by an alliance of Dylan G. and the now-mutinous marching band, our happy (?) couple runs down the hall into an uncertain future. Fade to red.
I’m not a Severance superfan, so I couldn’t tell you where such people will come down on this episode. From where I’m sitting, there’s still an awful lot going on here that feels like creator-writer Dan Erickson handwaving away behavioral and logical inconsistencies with his characters. When Jame Eagan comes to visit Helly R. early in the episode, for example, she yells after him “Why did you come here? What do you want from me?” as he leaves, but makes no effort to follow him. Normally, people in Helly’s position might be expected to get up and keep asking. (Or beat him up, which seems like something she’d do.)
When Cobel tells Mark S. that the four bins into which the refiners sort their mysterious numbers correspond to Kier Eagan’s Four Tempers of Woe, Frolic, Malice, and Dread, this comes as a huge surprise to him. After two years of the numbers making him feel four distinct feelings, mostly negative but occasionally nice, while he’s simultaneously bombarded with cult propaganda about the Tempers, it strains credulity that he’d never put this together before.
Speaking of cult propaganda, Cobel shakes off a lifetime of it in order to help Devon and Mark destroy Lumon by freeing Gemma, a decision I understand no better than Mark does. Meanwhile, despite knowing this is the most important day in human history, at least according to his employer, Milchick takes time out of his busy schedule to give Dylan G. his outie’s resignation response notice several hundred hallways away, instead of making sure Mark S. completes the file. The severed marching band Milchick brings in for the celebration outnumbers the all-important MDR team by about ten to one, raising questions about Lumon’s hiring priorities. At the end of their performance they hold up those picture cards that form a slogan or a logo at football games for the crowd to see when they look down, even though all that’s above them is a tile ceiling. You get the picture.
Some of these points are pretty minor, some less so, but either way it’d normally feel a bit churlish to hold a work of science fiction to an “absolutely no plot holes” standard. If everything on the show were perfectly plausible, it would be science fact, after all. But human behavior is human behavior, whether you’re Harrison Ford in Blade Runner or Harrison Ford in Star Wars, and in those cases these gaps are harder to ignore. Moreover, Severance’s entire plot — now more than ever! — hinges on understanding the minutiae of each character’s outie and innie lives, so that the similarities and differences stand out in starker relief. If you’re fudging stuff as basic as “Why doesn’t the fearless character who knows her outie is an Eagan try harder to get answers out of her own dad?”, it’s noticeable, because the show normally rewards you for noticing things.
But I still had a lot of fun with this finale, because that’s what it seems designed to deliver. If this episode had a Temper, it would be Frolic.
It’s fun to watch Mark and Mark S. have a conversation a few sentences at a time, passing both their camera and their consciousness back and forth like a relay race baton. It’s fun that the Dylan/Dylan G./Gretchen love triangle got a nice little payoff in the form of Dylan’s good-hearted refusal to pull the plug on his innie’s life. (He humorously notes that “given our shared physiology,” it’s not like he can blame Dylan G. for falling for his wife.)
It’s fun watching Brienne of Tarth have a Daredevil hallway fight with a guy the size of the Mountain. It’s fun that there’s some splatstick gore comedy in this for no real reason. It’s fun to watch Jame Eagan profanely freak out when Mark rescues the mind-wiped Gemma from the Room 101–style psychological torture chamber she doesn’t even realizes she’s in. It’s fun to watch Milchick’s King of Comedy routine and fancy footwork, then watch him turn feral when he’s captured, then watch his face when he sees that Helly and Dylan turned the whole marching band against him. It’s fun that this is filmed with 1970s New Hollywood snap-zoom flair.
It’s fun that the show denies us the catharsis we’ve been hoping for all this time by having Mark S. free Gemma but choose life with Helly R. instead, forcing us to reckon with whether we’ve been unconsciously rooting for the outies despite the cost to the innies, just like Mark S. alleges. It’s fun that the final shot is of Mark S. and Helly R. running down the flashing hallway in slow motion, leading to a freeze frame that enlarges and fades to red — again, very New Hollywood.
And very final, in a way. Despite being Apple TV+’s most talked-about show, Severance has not been renewed for a third season, and this second outing was dogged with rumors of behind-the-scenes disputes and difficulties during its multiple-year production. So let’s say Erickson set out to do what many showrunners have done before him, and crafted a season finale that could make a pretty solid series finale if need be. Frankly, I’m not sure he could have done any better. We got the answer to the show’s biggest question, and payoffs for its two central romances that were exciting and unpredictable. We got a sweet resolution to Dylan’s romance storyline too, just as we did with Bert and Irving an episode or two back. We got to watch Milchick dance and then get overthrown. We got to watch an Eagan act weird and then yell the word “fuck” a couple times.
We got a Helly and Dylan–led revolution premised on the idea that just because the lives they let us lead are short and shitty doesn’t mean we won’t fight for them. (Fingers crossed on that one!) We got implied and averted animal sacrifice, an end-of-Taxi-Driver-level gunshot wound, and a Gwendoline Christie battle scene. We got some tremendous work out of Tramell Tillman, the actor who is the show’s great gift to the television viewing public. We got an open ending that actually felt open rather than merely incomplete.
It all felt integrated, to borrow a term. Whether you watched for the plot or the emotions or the themes or the performances or the visuals or the overall tone, you got something good. Good is good! You don’t need to be a mindblowing masterpiece for the ages to be worth watching.
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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