Spoiler alert: This story contains details from “Cold Harbor,” the Season 2 finale of “Severance.”
“Severance” has ended another mind-bending season, answering some questions ― will Mark rescue his wife, Gemma? ― while posing others.
The 10-episode second season, starring Adam Scott, Britt Lower and Patricia Arquette, is “super weird,” agrees Scott, previously better known for comedic turns on “Parks and Recreation” and “Party Down.”
The severed personalities of the “innie” Lumon employees and their “outie” away-from-work selves, who had no awareness of each other, started to blend, and as escapes from the confines of the mysterious company were plotted, “there was a lot of running” down those stark white hallways, Scott says.
The actor, along with director and executive producer Ben Stiller, break down the ending in separate interviews.
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What happens in ‘Severance’ Season 2 finale?
The episode begins with a lengthy conversation between Mark Scout’s (Scott) severed halves: the “outie” away from work at the mysterious Lumon Industries and the “innie” employee. “I created you as a prisoner, and it’s a mistake,” his outie says into a camcorder. “You’ve been living a nightmare for two years. Part of why I’m here is to make it right, and I hope that with all we have in common, you’ll give me that chance.”
His goal, to rescue his wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman), whose death inspired him to get the severance procedure in the first place, is for the two halves to finally “recouple memories so we could be one person,” he promises.
What did the macrodata numbers really mean?
The seemingly pointless work of the Macrodata Refinement team (Mark S., Helly R., Dylan G. and – until recently – Irving B.), under the supervision of Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman), served a purpose, explains Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) in the finale. A loyal Lumon manager who created the severance procedure, only to see Lumon use it for malevolent purposes, Harmony is now rebelling against her former employer.
The numbers from his macrodata console, she explains to Mark, represent “a doorway into the mind of your outie’s wife, Gemma Scout,” and its clusters are “the building blocks of her mind.”
“What am I building?” he asks.
“Every file you’ve completed…is a new consciousness, a new innie.”
Once he completes Cold Harbor, the 25th and final file, his outie will die: “You will have served your purpose; so has she,” Cobel says. “There’ll be no honeymoon ending for you and Helly R. She’s an Eagan.” (Helly’s outie is Helena Eagan, the daughter of Jamie, the company’s CEO, and she severed as a promotional ploy.) “You’re nothing to them, nothing to her. They’re using you.”
But Helly questions Harmony’s motives: “How can we ever trust anything Cobel says? All she’s ever done is lie.”
Choreography, merriment and a goat in ‘Severance’ season finale
Once the file is completed, a celebration is in order. Milchick summons a marching band for “choreography and merriment,” but Helly uses it as a distraction to steal Milchick’s walkie-talkie and barricade him in the bathroom while she and Mark plot their escape. Mark searches frantically for Gemma, but stumbles upon enforcer Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), and they engage in a bloody fight just as Drummond is about to sacrifice Emil, a goat from that outdoor farm last seen in Episode 3. Turns out the animals are meant to honor founder Kier Eagan, Lumon’s founder. Drummond ends up dead, Mark uses his tie, stained with Drummond’s blood, to gain access to the room where Gemma has been ordered to disassemble a baby’s crib, and the couple has a tearful reunion and head for the exits.
What about that final ‘Severance’ Season 2 scene?
Mark and Gemma race through
those hallways toward an exit, but in a crushing turn of events, innie Mark pushes Gemma out the door, hesitates and then decides to stay behind. As Gemma pleads with him from outside the door, he turns around and spots Helly at the other end of the hall; he turns, embraces Helly and they run once more down those endless white hallways, holding hands. The season ends in a freeze frame as “The Windmills of Your Mind” plays on the soundtrack.
“We knew that was going to be the ending for a while,” Stiller says. “We sort of played with the idea of ending on Mark looking between the two, but it felt clear, after having this cliffhanger ending in Season 1, I didn’t want to do that to the audience. It always felt this was the natural way that Mark’s innie would go. And what we wanted to do in the second season was set up in (the Gemma-focused) Episode 7 enough of a reason that you would feel some heartbreak and you would feel torn, and part of the audience would be going, ‘Yeah, I’m with him; go with her,’ and part would go ‘I can’t believe he’s doing that.’ “
Scott approves of the decision not to torture viewers with more uncertainty. “It would be cruel and unusual to end it on something like that. I’m so glad that we ended where we did, because I love the sequence of Mark and Helly running through the hall and the music; it’s really fun.”
Why would Mark do that in the ‘Severance’ finale?
“He’s finally 100% breaking free of this servitude, first to Lumon and to Kier,” Scott says.
And if “innie” Mark is truly the main character in the show, “his goal is to stay alive,” Stiller explains. “At the end of the day, he knows what that choice is to go out that door for his friends and for him, and he doesn’t necessarily trust what outie Mark says.”
The innies “are starting to mature. In Season 1, they’re kind of kids and in Season 2 (they’re) more like these rebellious adolescents who are coming into their own,” Stiller says. “Are they going to revolt against Milchick, who’s having his own crisis of conscience in his relationship to the company? There are a lot of unanswered questions. It doesn’t feel like it was the happy ending. I don’t think a severed person is a natural state, and what we’re looking at in Mark is a person who is split. The idea has always been about Mark becoming whole, accepting his grief, until something like that happens.”
When will ‘Severance’ Season 3 be released?
Apple recently touted the show as its most-watched yet, surpassing “Ted Lasso,” so more “Severance” is a given. (Stiller has a multiple-season endpoint in mind, but declines to be specific.) The ending, he says, sets up even more questions and theories for a show already filled with them.
“Where’s it going? What is their fate? What’s going to happen in the next moment? That’s an intriguing way to end it,” he says.
