Britt Lower, Severance
Apple TV+
[The following contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of Severance, “Cold Harbor.”]
Season 2 of Severance ends with a choice. In a blockbuster finale, the innie Mark S. (Adam Scott) teams up with his outie to free his outie’s wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman), from her horrific imprisonment at Lumon. But on the last step of the plan, innie Mark rebels; rather than leave the company so his outie can be with Gemma, Mark S. runs off with Helly R. (Britt Lower), the woman he loves, and they spiral through Lumon’s hallways like they’re descending the circles of hell. This is, depending on your perspective, either a romantic victory or a brutal loss. Technically, it’s both: a revolutionary declaration of personhood for the innies and a harsh betrayal for the long-suffering Gemma. Above all, Mark’s decision is the kind of swerve that provokes a strong reaction in an audience. But even though it plays like a surprise, the episode has already telegraphed its ending. Earlier, Helly unites the other innies with a rallying cry: “They give us half a life and think we won’t fight for it.” Helly is telling the audience who she is. So why are some viewers convinced that she’s someone else?
In the aftermath of the season finale, a debate has picked up steam: Is that really Helly, or is it secretly her outie, Lumon heiress Helena Eagan, who posed as Helly to infiltrate the Macrodata Refinement team in the season’s first four episodes? Is she luring Mark away from a life outside that could involve blowing the whistle on Lumon? Lower has already shot down this theory, telling the Los Angeles Times, “That’s Helly R. in the final episode.” But not everyone is convinced; apparently, after Helena’s last scheme, people are primed to trust no one.
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That kind of reflexive paranoia points to a larger issue with how certain fans watch TV; especially online, fan culture can be more interested in solving stories than it is in engaging with them. Beneath the desire to outsmart every show, there’s a fear of being outsmarted. But one of the most refreshing things about Severance is that even though the show welcomes theorizing, it doesn’t bow down to it. Fans clamor for answers, but that doesn’t mean the series is going to treat the answers like the point. With its weekly release schedule, its attention to episodic storytelling, and an office plot that, especially in the first season, sometimes evokes the repetition of a workplace sitcom, Severance forces its audience to slow down — to enjoy each element of the show equally, as Gemma’s innie Ms. Casey would say.
The show is also deceptively straightforward. Despite how much Severance withholds, Season 2 explained a lot, and the most convoluted predictions never turned out to be the right ones. The show’s biggest reveals were hiding in plain sight, because they were rooted in the emotional clarity of the story and its characters. After Ms. Casey turned out to be Mark’s presumed-dead wife, some viewers wondered if the version of Gemma being held captive at Lumon wasn’t fully Gemma, speculating that she was a clone or a reanimated husk of her former self. This season’s lyrical, devastating seventh episode, “Chikhai Bardo,” confirmed a simpler and much sadder truth: Gemma is herself, a living woman being tortured to keep the company afloat. Cold Harbor, the mysterious room waiting for Gemma’s last innie, is just an empty room with an empty crib, testing the strength of the severance barrier with a memento from the worst chapter of Gemma’s life. The goats at Lumon are just sacrificial lambs. Even the severance procedure has a plain motive behind it: the human desire to avoid pain and the cruelty that makes people dump their pain on others.
When this season’s eerie fourth episode, “Woe’s Hollow,” ended with the revelation that “Helly” was Helena in disguise, that wasn’t a cheap trick either. Helena’s spy games opened up debates about identity, blurring the line between Helly and her outie. As the internet spent weeks arguing about whether Helly was Helena, Severance was effectively weaponizing its fans’ theorizing to make a point: To some extent, she is. Everything Helena did could have been done by Helly through a different lens, and vice versa. Helena was playing pretend, while the show was putting on a performance to reveal a deeper truth. “I didn’t like who I was on the outside,” Helena-as-Helly told innie Mark in a moment of honesty, a confession that worked no matter who was saying it. Mark’s response — that he didn’t care who she was out there, only who she was with him — hung over the rest of the season. Maybe finding out that he was speaking to Helena Eagan changed Mark’s meaning, but there was also the incendiary possibility that it didn’t.
Adam Scott and Britt Lower, Severance
Apple TV+
Severance hasn’t nailed down its stance on whether innies and outies are fundamentally different people or fundamentally the same, but it’s an unanswerable philosophical question, and uncertainty is more interesting. What’s clear in any case is that severed people are at war with themselves. The season finale pits Mark against Mark in a tense conversation (with the help of a camcorder) that falls apart as innie Mark loses patience with his outie’s arrogance. Only Helly can convince Mark to give his outie the benefit of the doubt, and only by accepting her own outie. “I’m her,” she tells Mark.
It’s a complex moment. Helly is pushing Mark away, putting herself permanently under Lumon’s thumb, which is also her thumb, and, at the same time, liberating herself. After spending most of the season resisting the idea that she has anything in common with her oppressor, Helly has learned how to wield some of Helena’s power. Lower, speaking to W, called it an “organic reintegration” — unlike Mark’s invasive and so far unsuccessful scientific reintegration — spurred by Helly’s glimpse at Helena’s life in the Season 1 finale and Helena’s time on the Severed Floor. The innie and the outie must overlap somewhere if even Mark couldn’t tell the difference. This isn’t a passive realization; in Helly’s case, embracing her inner Helena also means embracing her own selfishness.
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As Mark and Helly turn from his outie’s wife to run deeper into Lumon’s halls, Helly fixes her eyes on Gemma. The theory that in this moment she must actually be Helena comes down to the guiding principle that the real Helly is “never cruel,” as Irving (John Turturro) put it. Setting aside the pity in Helly’s gaze — and setting aside the fact that the choice is ultimately Mark’s — the argument that Helly is never allowed to do anything resembling cruelty is exactly what Lumon would say. Whether the expectation is that she should let Mark leave to be with Gemma or to bring down the company, it implies that she should accept both innie Mark’s death and her own without a fight. It asks Helly to be as selfless and docile as Lumon created her to be.
Helly and Helena can’t be neatly severed into the good twin and the evil twin — Severance is not a soap opera, and the act of severance is not clean. A person who exists for the sake of emotional convenience will eventually become an inconvenience. The end of “Cold Harbor” makes this literal: The version of Mark who was created to avoid confronting his grief runs away from the woman his outie has been grieving. If the innies’ behavior in this scene is difficult or prickly, it’s because the show is insisting that they are as alive as anyone.
In this schism between innies and outies, everyone has to be who Severance says they are or the meaning of Mark S.’s choice falls apart. Think of the urgency this season earned when it confirmed that Gemma was still Gemma in her captivity. Of course Helly is really Helly here, for the same reason. It raises the stakes. Season 2 has been building toward a complete breakdown in Mark’s innie-outie relations, with their failed reintegration and incompatible love interests. In the season’s final moment, each Mark has something critical to lose.
Severance doesn’t give its characters or its audience an easy way out. Helly, Mark S., and Gemma have all been treated as slaves at Lumon, but there’s no way for everyone in this scenario to walk out the same door together. This is supposed to hurt. Dichen Lachman is agonizing as Gemma screams for her husband from behind the glass, and after her vivid introduction in “Chikhai Bardo,” Gemma’s torment is at the top of fans’ minds. (The good news: Being denied her happy ending with Mark sets her up for a more active storyline in Season 3.) And yet Helly and Mark’s getaway is a triumphant rebellion, filmed and lit with swoony deliriousness, paying off the innies’ two-season arc toward prioritizing their own desires. Severance wants you torn. The show about the folly of rejecting discomfort wants its audience to feel it all equally — Gemma’s anguished loneliness, Mark and Helly’s brief but eternal freedom — and to know that the sweetness of one is built on the wailing of the other. But the series must realize that even viewers who appreciate it all will be pulled in whichever direction they prefer; there’s no way to split feelings tidily down the middle. Emotions aren’t governable like that. People can be selfish, even Helly.
Season 2 of Severance is now streaming on Apple TV+.
