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 every 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: a stand-alone piece on the theme of the episode and this exploration of lingering questions as we wait for Season 3.
Before we consider Season 2’s loose ends, settle in for another possibly lengthy break between new episodes, and turn our attention to the next wave of prestige genre dramas, can we take a second to savor the Severance experience?
However you felt about the pacing of the second half of this season, the bleakness of Episode 8, and how much was (or wasn’t) revealed, Severance is a rarity: a high-concept, impeccably produced, popular, original genre story. It’s not part of a franchise (yet!). It’s not a reboot, not even an adaptation of a novel, video game, or podcast. There’s no source material that predates the show. From week to week, no one who watches live has homework, a head start on anyone else, or reason to fear spoilers.
I’m as excited about Andor, The Last of Us, and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms as anyone, but they won’t scratch the same itch as Severance. I’ve seen Rogue One. I’ve played The Last of Us Part II. I’ve read Tales of Dunk and Egg. I’ll still watch, and most likely love, the upcoming seasons of the series based on or spun off from those things, because there’s more to TV than speculating about what will happen next or finding out how the story ends. But when a show combines masterful storytelling, style, and mystery, it provides a precious form of suspense that’s increasingly scarce.
But it doesn’t always provide answers, which is where this article comes in. Here are a dozen questions I’ll be asking myself about Severance until it once again graces our screens:
What is Kier’s grand agendum?
On a plot level, this is the biggie, isn’t it? The “big alpha thing at the end” that creator, writer, and showrunner Dan Erickson has referred to? We now know what refining is, essentially; as Ms. Cobel tells Mark, “The numbers are your wife,” one of the most significant small-screen revelations since “the bones are their money.” And sure, that just raises several other questions, such as: How do the tempers get converted into numbers that convey emotions from afar? Are the members of MDR telepathic? Why was 25 the perfect file count? Why was Mark’s refining, specifically, so essential to “Cold Harbor”? Does proper refining depend on a personal connection to the subject? If so, why can Helly also sense that the last temper Mark refines is “a happy one”?
But I guess we’ve gotten the gist of what refining entails. What we still don’t know is what all that refinement is for. “Tomorrow will be your final day at Lumon,” Cobel tells Mark S. “You will have served your purpose, and so will she.” (She being Gemma’s latest innie.) Which is … what, exactly? To reincarnate (reinKiernate?) Kier, with some sort of assistance from mammalian nurturable’s sacrificial spirit-guide goats? To further Kier’s “eternal war against pain” by proving that it’s possible to make infinite innies—enough for an outie to compartmentalize any number of unpleasant experiences, from dental appointments to turbulence on a flight?
This episode answered a question I didn’t know I had—is “agendum” the singular form of “agenda”?—but didn’t come close to resolving the series’ central mystery. Not that I would want it to, because the series isn’t over.
More From the Severed Floor
What’s next for Mark S. and Helly R.?
The ending of “Cold Harbor” was extremely ’60s cinema coded, from the lens choice to the music cues to the final freeze-frame as Mark and Helly hold hands and run toward the camera. In the moment, they’re euphoric rebels, leaving their old life behind and embarking on a new one. As for the next moment—well, we won’t know what that looks like until Season 3.
That last still image evokes the ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Are Mark and Helly, like Butch and Sundance, heading to a doom we don’t see because the camera stops rolling? The odds appear similarly stacked against them. Are they cruising for a bruising out of Bonnie and Clyde? Personally, I’m getting The Graduate vibes. In The Graduate’s grand finale, Ben Braddock bangs on the glass at the church to get Elaine’s attention, then fights his way to her and elopes with the runaway bride. In “Cold Harbor,” banging on glass isn’t as effective—sorry, Gemma—but Mark and Helly’s flight from the uproar they caused is reminiscent of The Graduate director Mike Nichols’s classic coda. In The Graduate, Nichols keeps filming Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross in the back of a bus long enough for their characters’ second thoughts to start forming.
How long until Mark’s and Helly’s smiles fade as their predicament starts to sink in? “At least you’ll have a chance at living,” Helly told Mark earlier in the episode, as she tried to encourage him to reintegrate. “Yeah,” he said, “but I wanna live with you.” Now they have that chance or, as Helly put it, “more time”—but how much more? “I wanna see my sweet, honey baby,” Bobby Darin sings over the end credits. “I got to break these chains off and run. … But I got me so terrible long to go.”
After the events of “Cold Harbor,” Mark and Helly essentially can’t clock out. If they let their outies in, Mark Scout and Helena Eagan may never relinquish control. But how long can their innies keep them at bay while locked inside Lumon? Is a severed-floor revolution nigh? Will Mark continue to experience symptoms of reintegration if his treatments don’t continue? And if so, will he morph into a third, combined being, Piranesi style?
Also: According to Jame, the “fire of Kier” is in Helly, whatever that means. As Helly asks, “Why did you come here? What do you want from me?” Does Jame intend to recruit Helly to his cause? (Good luck with that.) Is she somehow unwittingly helping him? (In general, there’s an almost suspicious lack of security at Lumon, though considering the severance barrier between the basement and the surface, it’s easy to see why the company complacently considered the testing floor inescapable.) Does he want to make Helly R. into an outie and turn Helena into an innie, a severed swap as high-risk as Seinfeld’s roommate switch? The closing seconds of “Cold Harbor” were far from what Ms. Cobel called a “honeymoon ending.” Maybe it’s enough for now that it wasn’t an ending at all.
What’s next for Gemma?
We still don’t know what makes Gemma, specifically, so special: Could anyone who had gone through trials like a miscarriage and failed fertility treatments have served the same purpose, or did Lumon need her? We also don’t know how she got to Lumon; was she kidnapped, or did she go willingly—under false pretenses, perhaps—and get trapped? But at least we know how she got out. Or, at least, got to the stairwell, where she could get out if she’s willing to leave Mark. (Sidenote: Gemma doesn’t know Mark is severed, which must make his decision to stay with Helly more painful. For Gemma’s sake, let’s hope his hot-and-cold act on the testing floor and the severed floor helps her put two and two together.)
Let’s say Gemma leaves Lumon. What then? Will she rendezvous with Devon and Cobel and blow up Lumon’s spot? With the marital roles reversed and Mark Scout sequestered inside Lumon, will she feel pressured to stay quiet while she works to free her husband from the prison that once held her? Plus, her brain/soul now comprises a plural system consisting of 25 innies. Even if the severance barriers were holding last we heard, will they continue to once Gemma is free? And can her newest innie still fulfill Lumon’s plan for her, in theory, or will the Eagans have to scrap all that scheming and testing and start from scratch?
What does Cobel want?
“Wait, why are you telling me this?” Mark asks Cobel. “What are you doing here, really?” (Hey, Helly and Mark: I’m asking the questions here.) Is Cobel just a disgruntled former employee who wants to see Lumon suffer for indoctrinating her, stealing her severance IP, and dismissing her from her floor? Or does she have some other aim, such as strengthening her hand so that Lumon will come crawling back to her—or even staging a corporate coup and taking control of the still-unseen board herself?
Will Mr. Milchick break good?
Thus far, we’ve seen Seth talk back to Mr. Drummond (the bigger they are …) and give some guff to comedian Kier instead of receiving all of his barbs with gratitude. What we haven’t seen is any real revolt, let alone any tangible actions to aid the innies. All season, Severance teased the possibility that Milchick might snap and switch sides, but thus far, he’s proved to be a loyal soldier, albeit one with low morale. As Dylan said so eloquently: “Fuck you, Mr. Milchick.” But maybe the Milchick redemption arc is coming, eventually.
Where is Reghabi?
Reghabi, who’s good for at least one disappearance per season, peaced out of Mark Scout’s house in Episode 7, saying that she couldn’t “be a part of this.” Was she worried about being caught or worried about being culpable for atrocities done to innies? (Or both?) Can she reverse Mark’s reintegration? (Would we call that de-reintegration?) Or will Mark S. ask her to complete the process so that he—or some hybrid Mark with his memories—can leave Lumon?
What about Irving?
Irving appeared in only one of Season 2’s final four episodes and was absent from the finale. His innie has been memory-holed, and his outie was last seen boarding a train to parts unknown. Thus, it’s hard to say what part he’ll play in the next season of Severance. But Irving is the only MDR outie who hasn’t behaved badly toward his innie, and there has to be some explanation for his sleuthing and painting. And you know he can’t quit Burt. So he’s not going to go the way of MDR replacements Gwendolyn Y., Mark W., and Dario R.
Who performs Kier’s voice?
An actor named Marc Geller in our universe, yes, but what about in the universe of Severance? Whoever Kier’s voice actor is, does he write his own material or have his lines fed to him by a Lumon writers room? Or is Kier a glorified chatbot? OK, this isn’t the most pressing question, so I’ll throw in a bonus. Whither Miss Huang? Will she continue on her Cobelian trajectory, or is there still time for her to find a less evil line of work?
How big is the severed floor?
In “Cold Harbor,” we met a new department—a loud department, no less. Choreography and merriment (the party planning committee of Lumon) must have to rehearse sometimes—practice makes perfect renditions of “The Ballad of Ambrose and Gunnel”—and evidently, it does so far enough away from MDR that we’ve never heard the sound of a drum line and sizable brass section. Perhaps there’s a soundproof part of the facility? Even so, the severed floor must be pretty well populated if there’s enough demand for celebrations to keep this many musicians employed. (How often does a refiner complete a 25th file?) If some sort of severed uprising lies ahead, Mark and Helly will have to get the full lay of the land and enlist as many employees/prisoners as possible.
Who, or what, were the shadow characters?
What do we make of the shadowy look-alikes who appeared to the innies during their ORTBO, one of whom (shadow Mark) was portrayed by the same actor who played the mysterious man in the hallway in the season premiere? Was the wilderness retreat some sort of simulation? Were the shadows Lumon-induced hallucinations? Members of the security team? Some sinister, unsuspected horror? “Cold Harbor” stayed silent on this subject.
Nature or nurture?
An age-old question, but one that Severance is well positioned to probe. “I’ve never been an impressive person,” Dylan’s outie says to his innie, “so when Gretch told me that you’re, like, this self-assured badass, I don’t know. It stung.” As the outie notes in his letter, he and his innie have a “shared physiology.” Yet they differ fundamentally in ways that make the outie envy his innie’s character—much as the innie envies the outie’s family life. “I hope someday she sees in me what she sees in you,” Dylan’s outie tells him. Do those qualities flow from physiology? Or do they stem solely from experience?
Speaking of Dylan: How will he fare as the last MDR member who hasn’t flown the coop? Especially now that he’s been stripped of both his access to Gretchen and his professional purpose?
How much more Severance is there?
Apple TV+ unsurprisingly announced on Friday morning that Severance will be back for a third season. How many more will there be beyond that? Those in the know probably don’t care to share, but in January, Erickson said, “There is an endpoint for the series as a whole, and we know more or less how many seasons we are going to do, although that’s not totally solidified.” Erickson has assured the series’ spectators that it will offer answers—and Season 2 backed up his talk about learning from Lost by providing definitive explanations, even as more mysteries arose. Is the scope of Severance limited by its premise? (Both physically and narratively, the severed floor can be confining.) Is this story already closing in on its conclusion? Or does the series still have plenty of room and time to grow along with its swelling audience? We’ll find out next season. Someday.
