The second season of Severance ends as it began: with Mark S (Adam Scott) running through the endless white corridors of the severed floor, without quite knowing where he is going. In those closing moments, though, he’s running for a different reason, and in a different way – strangely, perhaps hysterically, hopeful – than he was 10 episodes earlier. And this time, he is no longer running alone.
I’m being vague about this to avoid spoilers, in case you intend to watch that final episode, Cold Harbor, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. More details later; if you don’t want to know what happens but keep reading, that’s on you. First, let’s talk about what that ending didn’t do.
Speculative fiction, even more than other types of story, invites us to ask questions. Some of these will be what one might term in-universe (What is this character’s real agenda? What is the true meaning of the prophecy?); others are more allegorical (What is it saying about our world?). The latter are far more satisfying, and more than one franchise has struggled after it disappeared up its own mythology.
With this finale, Severance has made clear it is absolutely not doing that. We do, sort of, find out the answers to some much-asked questions like what the sinister numbers mean, or what those goats are for. But those answers are breezed past, and there’s a high chance you’d already guessed. We still don’t know what Lumon wants, beyond being a sinister corporation whose employees worship it like a cult. And we have no idea why the world outside seems always to be blanketed in snow. Perhaps we’ll find out the answers to those questions in a future season.
But I suspect we won’t, and that their purpose is less the mystery than the vibes. The constant snow is not a sign of climate catastrophe, but of a world where, to coin a phrase, it’s always winter but never Christmas. In the same way, what Lumon wants doesn’t really matter. It’s an evil corporation; that’s enough. The conflict that matters now is anyway not between our heroes and Lumon: the story now is of the war between our heroes and themselves.
Here’s where the real spoilers start.
Early in the episode, thanks to a handheld video camera and the severed birthing cabin, Mark’s innie and outie finally get to talk. The original, grief-broken Mark asks for his work persona’s help in freeing “Miss Casey”: the innie version of his wife Gemma, whose apparent death led him to become severed in the first place in an attempt to hide from his pain, but who, it turns out, was actually alive and well and being experimented upon by his employer.
To this point, although we’ve had extensive evidence that severing essentially creates a whole new person, the two Marks have seemed to be one, with one set of interests, and this year’s subplot about reintegration seemed to suggest that they’d remain so. Faced with this request to free Gemma and run, though, innie Mark realises that he’s being asked to sacrifice himself for his other self’s happiness, and he’s furious. In the event, he does get Gemma out; but then, on the threshold of the real world, he turns back to see Helly – the woman he, rather than his outie, loves – watching. And after a pause that seems to go on forever, the two innies unite, and run, while Gemma – herself again at last – screams for her husband to come back.
If none of this made sense to you, then it’s a bit late now and frankly I’m surprised you’re still reading. And this is, on the surface, a sci-fi plot with no real-world analogue. We can’t split ourselves into two equally valid halves. People do not, outwith the most gothic of fiction, return from the grave to complicate matters once their partner has moved on.
But it resonates, nonetheless, because of a piece of advice I’ve sometimes given to friends when fired or dumped, and which I’ve sometimes found helpful myself: to try to keep in mind that there will come a day when you find you are glad the bad thing happened, because it led to something new and wonderful you would not now give up. That, though, is a vastly more complicated thing to deal with when the bad thing was a death. How do you live with the knowledge that you would not have met a partner, or had a child, that you love with all your heart, had not someone else you loved with all your heart first died? The contradictory desires exist simultaneously. The paradox is unresolvable.
Severance is hardly the first TV episode to so powerfully portray the experience of bereavement. The 2001 Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode The Body hauntingly depicted the emptiness and unreality and sheer ordinariness of the moments after the world implodes. In 2015’s Heaven Sent, Doctor Who dramatised the incapability of grief, the way all the clever tricks you use to make it through the day cease to work, and you find you have to let yourself feel it. And you know, as you do so, that you’ll have to do this again, and again, and again – and even as you do, she still won’t be there.
Cold Harbor is another entry in this canon, of hours of television which use big, fantastical ideas to convey the scale and the impossibility of loss, the way it transports you to another place you never asked to be but where you must somehow build a life. Mark wants to be with Helly; Mark still wants Gemma back. The paradox is unresolvable. And all he can do is run.
[See also: Severance knows the self is an illusion]
Content from our partners
