The music dance experience is officially canceled—but a marching band may have been even better. After three long years, the macrodata refinement crew returned to our screens, and 10 episodes later, their work is complete (for now). You followed along each week as we broke down each episode of Severance Season 2 and tried to piece together what the heck has been going on at Lumon Industries. For the finale, we’re severing our recap into two parts: this piece on the theme of the episode and a subsequent list of lingering questions.
“They’re using you,” Harmony Cobel warns Mark S. during their tête-à-tête at the birthing retreat in the Severance Season 2 finale, “Cold Harbor.” “Then they’ll discard you like a skin husk.”
“They,” in this case, is Lumon, the super-sinister, mega-creepy corporation/cult that our heroes—and by that I mean both halves of Mark Scout’s split psyche—have been struggling against for the duration of the series. Neither Mark has much reason to trust Mrs. Selvig/Ms. Cobel; as Helly R. observes to innie Mark, “All she’s ever done is lie.” Yet while Cobel’s motivations may be murky, she’s telling the truth this time. By the end of the episode, Lumon heavy Mr. Drummond has (extremely unsuccessfully) attempted to murder Mark S., whom Kier Eagan’s wax statue had proclaimed “one of the most important people in history” mere minutes before. Mark may have been vital to the Lumon masterminds’ plans while he was refining—vital enough to merit a marching band send-off—but with that work complete, he’s figuratively, and almost literally, dead to them.
“Cold Harbor,” a propulsive, suspenseful, provocative finale, doesn’t feature a “twist,” per se, like the Season 1 finale’s revelation that Helly R.’s outie is Helena Eagan. But it does feature a reframing of the series we’ve been watching all along—a perspective shift of the sort Severance excels at. Lumon may still be the baddies, but this episode suggests that they aren’t the only ones: Two of the series’ central protagonists suddenly aren’t so sympathetic. The “they” who are using innie Mark could just as easily refer to Cobel’s companions, who are ostensibly on Mark S.’s side: his outie and Devon. “Cold Harbor” makes more evident than ever that the innies are on their own. Their only hope of happiness and survival, it seems, is severed solidarity.
When Mark S. regains consciousness in the birthing cabin, Cobel and Devon brief him on their plan to free Gemma/Ms. Casey. Innie Mark will access the testing floor, outie Mark will find Gemma and escort her to the severed floor, and innie Mark will take Ms. Casey to the stairwell, which outie Mark and his wife will use to escape and sound the alarm about Lumon. “If we can prove that she is alive, if we can prove that they fucking kidnapped her, it will end them,” Devon says.
As with Cobel’s “they,” though, Devon’s “them” is ambiguous: Ending Lumon may mean ending the innies as well.
“Well, what happens to us?” Mark S. asks.
“What do you mean?” Devon replies.
“Well, if Lumon ends, then what happens to every innie on the severed floor?”
Devon stammers in response.
“You want me to give my life?” Mark asks. “The lives of everyone down there? … Just to save one person you happen to care about?”
Devon says it’s not that simple, but, basically, it is. What galls Mark the most isn’t that Devon is asking him to make an existential sacrifice; it’s that how his story ends clearly hasn’t crossed her mind.
At a diplomatic impasse, Devon tags in another negotiator: outie Mark. Who better to reason with a reluctant innie than the most familiar face? Yet the first Mark-on-Mark meeting, conducted via camcorder recordings, only deepens the divide.
The meeting of … mind? ... starts out auspiciously, as innie and outie are tickled to talk to each other. But outie Mark soon steps in it even more messily than Devon did. Although innie Mark appreciates his counterpart’s apology for subjecting him to the severed floor, he objects to his outie’s assertion that Mark S. has “been living a nightmare for two years”—a phrasing that reflects outie Mark’s inability to put himself in his innie’s identical shoes.
“Nightmare is the wrong word, actually,” Mark S. explains. “’Cause we find ways to make it work, to feel whole, which is why what you’re asking scares me. Because whatever this life is, it’s all we have, and we don’t want it to end. Can you understand that?”
“Of course I can,” outie Mark says insincerely. “It’s such a good point.” However, he has good news, or so he thinks: “Lumon doesn’t have to be your whole life.”
Outie Mark explains the concept of reintegration, as best he can, but like Devon, he hasn’t thought things through. “I started this because I see now how unfair this all is to you,” he claims, adding, “This life, our life, belongs to both of us. And I want to share it with you.” He flashes a smile, which slips as soon as he stops recording.
Innie Mark didn’t ask to be integrated with his outie, any more than he asked to exist. Once again, his outie is making life-or-death decisions for him without considering the consequences. “You’ve been alive for, what, 20 times longer, so whoever this new hybrid person is, it seems like he’d be way more you than me,” Mark S. points out.
“I just don’t think that’s how it works,” his outie answers, echoing Devon’s insistence that the situation isn’t as simple as Mark S. makes it seem. And again, we wonder: Where’s the lie?
As far as Mark S. is concerned, reintegration itself could be a lie. The conversation quickly deteriorates after outie Mark brings up his innie’s love life and makes Mark S.’s mutual, meaningful, romantic connection with “Heleny” sound like a schoolboy crush.
“Honestly, I love that you had that experience,” outie Mark says, using the past tense to refer to a relationship that his innie wants to last a lifetime. (Nothing makes a person sound more honest than starting a sentence with “honestly.”) “So now, you could imagine, like, what you and Heleny have, but multiply, like, thousands of days of, like, joy and arguments and passion, then you can see why I have to get my wife back. I have to have her back.” For outie Mark, Mark S.’s most cherished relationship is merely a tool he can use to try to persuade his innie that his outie’s relationship takes precedence.
Everything ‘Severance’
For Mark S., the fact that he hasn’t had as much time with Helly as Mark had with Gemma is all the more reason he deserves to keep his love alive. “It’s Helly, actually,” he corrects Mark Scout. “Helly. It’s the person I’m in love with. Which you’d know if you’d ever taken an interest in my life before tonight, when you need something. She’s the person I’ll lose if I do what you say.”
Helly R., of course, can’t reintegrate with her Eagan outie—assuming reintegration is real, which Mark S. questions, now that he’s unsure about whether anything his outie tells him is true. “I think the second you get your wife back, you forget I ever existed,” innie Mark alleges. “I think that I disappear along with every innie down there.”
Outie Mark protests, “What do you want from me? We are in this together.” Physically, they may be, but their goals couldn’t be less aligned. So when outie Mark pleads, “Can’t you just trust me?,” his innie answers, very reasonably, “No.” Mark is a stranger to himself.
One can understand Mark Scout’s frustration: He’s on the verge of a reunion with his long-lost wife, and the solution he desperately sought to numb his grief is now keeping him from healing. But when Mark decided to sever, he accepted—or should have accepted—responsibility for the resulting sentient being. His seniority doesn’t give him greater worth, and the fact that he created Mark S. doesn’t give him the right to destroy him. “He’s a fucking child,” outie Mark complains. “He won’t listen.” But being 2 years old doesn’t make Mark S. a child. And outie Mark is the one who sounds like a petulant toddler who can’t have his way.
In fairness to outie Mark, he isn’t a total liar, as Mark S. speculates to Helly. Reintegration is real. But Mark Scout is certainly lying when he says he started the process for his innie’s benefit. For Mark’s outie, reintegration has always been a means to the end of rescuing Gemma. And Mark S. has been at best an afterthought and at worst a patsy who could become collateral damage.
We can’t say for sure whether Mark’s outie would proceed with reintegration if he had Gemma by his side, but we know he had no interest in undergoing the procedure until he was convinced it could help him find his wife. And toward the end of the episode, he demonstrates how much he values innie autonomy. In order to save Gemma, he has to lure her latest innie—as innocent as Emile the baby goat—to her doom. And he does so, seemingly without qualms. As innie number 25 deconstructs the crib that represents the child Mark and Gemma couldn’t have, her own fledgling existence is about to be snuffed out. “We had a life together,” Mark tells her. “And if you come with me, right now, we can get it back.” But the innie in “Cold Harbor” had no life with Mark. And leaving with him ensures that she won’t have one at all. He discards her like a skin husk.
I’m not here to “both sides” Lumon: The company is uncaring, twisted, sadistic, deceitful. In the hierarchy of innie enemies, though, the outies may pose an even more imminent threat. “You’ll kill them all!” Dr. Mauer yells as Mark and Gemma flee from the testing floor. Mauer may be among the worst people on Severance, but he has a point. No wonder Reghabi told Devon, “I can’t be a part of this” in Episode 7. She may regret the part she played in making the innies, but she isn’t out to erase them.
On paper, perhaps, Mark’s reunion with Gemma should be an emotional payoff two seasons in the making. Instead, it’s an ethical quagmire. And as spectators, it’s hard to care as much about a marriage we saw in a single episode’s flashbacks as a tender intra-office romance we’ve been following for much longer. Mark S. and Helly R. are still this series’ one true pairing, which we’ve always known. Now Gemma, who stares aghast as the innies sever her link to the husband she hasn’t seen for years, is well aware of it too.
“I just wish we had more time,” Helly tells Mark. Severance viewers could say the same about this season. As the series leaves our screens—hopefully for a shorter hiatus than last time—it’s the innies against the world; if Mark and Helly are going to escape their prison and have the “honeymoon ending” that Cobel claims is impossible, then they can rely on only each other, and perhaps their fellow inmates on the severed floor.
Speaking of whom: Dylan G., who has spent much of the season envying his outie and keeping secrets from his friends, returns to MDR just in time to keep Mr. Milchick penned in the bathroom like a bull in a bucking chute. (“Point one: Fuck you,” Dylan’s outie writes in response to his innie’s resignation request—though at least the former still gives the latter the option to leave.) The head of mammalians nurturable, Lorne, turns on Drummond just in time to save Mark. And choreography and merriment teams up with Helly and Dylan just in time to prevent Milchick from leaving, thanks to a Dead Poets Society desk speech by Helly. “Love, Mr. Milchick,” is how Seth signed his letter to Mark, but there’s no love lost between the team and its supervisor.
Narratively speaking, the C&M alliance falls fairly flat because we have no history with the band. “They’re gonna turn us off like fucking machines,” Helly tells them. “You’ve seen them do it.” Maybe, but we haven’t seen them see it, so they’re more of a plot device than a source of inspiration or pathos. But they’re also a symbol of what the innies can accomplish when they work together, defying Lumon’s campaign to keep them apart. Lorne’s Vader-vs.-the-Emperor revolt resonates much more, both because of our time with her in Episode 3 and because baby goat. And let’s not forget Felicia in O&D, who told Irving’s innie how to find the elevator to the testing floor.
“They give us half a life and think we won’t fight for it,” Helly says. Once again, “they” might mean Lumon, or it might mean Mark and Co. But maybe, like reintegration, it’s not a “top-bottom situation.” Both can be bad for the innies, and “Cold Harbor” proves it. “I’m her, Mark,” Helly R. tells Mark S. “I’m her.” But Helly is neither Helena nor “Heleny.” And Mark S. is no Mark Scout. There’s no honor among Eagans, and the league of Lumon villains is just as at war with itself as Mark: Jame Eagan vs. Helena; Mr. Milchick vs. his bosses; Cobel vs. the family that exploited her designs (which in turn made her exploit Mark). Two seasons into Severance, painful fractures are forming, and so are strong bonds. A Mark Scout divided cannot stand. And Lumon can’t stand a united severed floor.
