A Big and Climactic Season Two Finale in Severance's "Cold Harbor"

 The premise of Severance inherently carries in it a thorny knot: the very notion of severance is itself horrific, and so much of the Innies' lives are made hellish by the strange cult that is Lumon (and boy do we get more explicit cult stuff in this episode,) but there's a Frankensteinian quality to this story: once you create a person, taking it back isn't really an option.

Throughout the series, Mark's Innie and Outie personas have felt the most in-sync and in-tune with one another. I've really watched the show feeling like both halves of him are a single person, working toward a common purpose.

This episode, in which we get to see Adam Scott acting with himself via a camcorder and some clever editing, proves that the Marks are not actually aligned as much as we might have thought.

Even the process of Re-Integration, as Innie Mark points out, might not actually be the fair an equitable thing that Outie Mark thinks it is - after all, Outie Mark has been alive for decades, while Innie Mark has only been alive for business hours over the past two years. So, if they were to merge into one being, wouldn't Innie Mark only be a small fragment of that whole?

The romantic aspects of this serve to pull all of this into focus: Outie Mark very reasonably wants to rescue his wife from her kidnappers and torturers, but in doing so, if he were to shut down all the bad stuff going on at Lumon, it would mean... well, an end to the Innies' existence. Hellish and surreal though it is, the severed floor is more or less the only world that the Innies have ever known, and it's not driving them all to suicide.

While it's told in vague terms, we start to get a sense of where the whole project is headed when we're finally shown what Cold Harbor is: just a basic, empty room, in which Gemma is dressed like she was when the car accident (or "accident?") happened, and where she is simply told to disassemble a crib. We hear talk of Kier's vision of a "world without pain," and as Gemma's Cold Harbor persona, brand new and a blank slate, seems to carry no sadness or trauma in this act that would be so symbolically painful for her Outie, it seems to be a success.

So, watching a blood-drenched Outie Mark come in and fully contaminate the project by telling Gemma who she is, who he is, and leading her out of there, makes it very satisfying when Jame Eagan (who just seems like the fucking worst) yells "Fuck!" in his tiny viewing room.

Why is Mark drenched with blood?

Well, having served his purpose in completing the Cold Harbor file, it seems the Lumon folk, or at least Drummond, don't really feel they need to protect him anymore, and so as Mark tries to get into the elevator that leads to Gemma, Drummond emerges, a ritual sacrifice of a goat (brought by a distraught Lorne, from Mammalians Nurturable) interrupted as Mark bangs into a door that isn't opening to his keycard.

Drummond full on tries to kill Mark, but he's saved when Lorne comes and joins the fray, in a truly brutal beat-down (Lorne appears to lose a tooth, but with Mark's help, she's able to subdue the brute). With the captive-bolt gun intended for the goat, Mark holds Drummond at gunpoint and uses his keycard to get down to the "Export Floor."

And, look, I saw this coming a mile away, but it didn't make it any less satisfying: because Mark's severance is only keyed to the severed floor, it's his Outie who reasserts control as they go down in the elevator. So, Innie Mark tells Drummond something akin to "Now, my Outie is going to be the one in here when I-" only for the switch-over process to happen, and in his momentary spasm like he always has, he fires the bolt gun into Drummond's throat, spraying blood everywhere as Drummond dies an undignified, horrifying, and truly deserved death.

That's 2/2 on scary security people at Lumon!

Mark rescues Gemma, running back to the severed floor where they revert to Innie Mark and Ms. Casey, before rushing to the exit stairway (where Helly got turned around over and over last season). But as Gemma emerges when she leaves the floor, Mark realizes that he doesn't really feel anything for her, and behind him, Helly, who has led the effort to keep Milchick imprisoned in the bathroom, is there.

Innie Mark, perhaps feeling that he did what was asked of him, decides to rush back to Helly and, as chaos takes over the building and as Gemma calls out for him, finally reunited with her husband after years of imprisonment, we get a very 1970s zoom-in freeze-frame.

    So, what the hell can we expect next?

The show really presents the notion that there's no clear path to a satisfying conclusion - Dylan receives a response from his outie for his resignation request, and his Outie vents some of his frustration, but also seems to recognize his Innie's inherent worth, leaving the decision up to Innie Dylan, and extending an olive branch.

Jame confronts Helly, saying he sees in her the "fire of Kier" that he no longer senses in her Outie (while she's truly villainous, I do feel bad for Helena). I don't know if there's any redemption in store for Helena, or what the hell it is that Jame is seeing in the version of his daughter he was never able to ruin, but I think we've got to keep an eye on this.

Really, there's a big question of just what the hell is going to happen next season. This season began with Lumon doing their best to placate the MDR team (and Mark specifically) and to sweep the whole Overtime Contingency thing under the rug, but with a major Lumon employee dead and all the chaos that has happened, I really don't think we could see something quite so clean this time.

Anyway, I hope we don't have to wait another three years before we see the next season.

Set-Ups for Pay-Offs in Severance's "The After Hours"

 Serialized storytelling sometimes requires an episode that is less about resolving things than preparing for a resolution. This can mean resolving side-storylines before the main ones can be addressed, but it can also mean throwing in the new elements before we can get to that proper conclusion.

These sorts of episodes often don't get a lot of love, but to an extent, they're really the meat of storytelling. Climaxes and finales are always important, and they're kind of the make-or-break of a story, but they can only exist if we've been taken along with these kinds of episodes.

So, what happens here?

Well, we can sort of go character-by-character.

Dylan's wife, Gretchen, confesses to his outie, her husband, that she kissed his innie. Dylan clearly holds the view that he and his innie are completely separate people, and considers this a betrayal, threatening to quit the job just to end Innie Dylan's existence unless Gretchen agrees to stop seeing him. It's utterly heartbreaking for Innie Dylan, who has only, through these visits with Gretchen, begun to understand the potential of what life has to offer. Desperately proposing to the woman he's already technically married to, he must face her rejection, and decides, in an act tantamount to suicide, to request a resignation. Granted, his outie must approve such a request, but Dylan decides that, having glimpsed the other side, the personalized erasers and finger-traps are just not enough to motivate his existence anymore.

Irving comes home to discover, rather disturbingly, that Burt is there, waiting for him. Burt insists that he and Irv go for a ride, and on this ride, he explains that he didn't ever hurt anyone working for Lumon, but he drove people places and pointedly didn't ask what was done to them when they got there. His choice to undergo severance was, it seems, an opportunity to escape that guilt. Unwilling to harm Irving, he instead buys him a train ticket to the end of the line, and tells Irving (who has his dog Radar with him) to get off at a random stop so that Burt won't know where he is. Even in their brief time together, the outies share a moment of potential tenderness that their innies knew, but it's just not right. Star-crossed lovers part, and Irving heads off into the sunset.

Now, it's a very strange thing, because Milchick is, in most scenarios, a villain on this show (we see him unceremoniously transferring Ms. Huang to fucking Svalbard as a premature completion of her fellowship,) but in a confrontation with Drummond, who is on his ass because Mark hasn't been coming into work, Milchick stands up to him, suggesting to his superior that, as he is the manager of the severed floor, Mark's absence is not his responsibility, and furthermore, that he can use all the fancy words he wants, suggesting that Drummond "devour feculence," (i.e., Eat Shit). Milchick might not actually be a good guy, but seeing him stand up to the dehumanizing Lumon enforcer was profoundly cathartic and satisfying. (Especially as someone who also enjoys playing with unconventional vocabulary choices.)

We get a brief scene with Helena as she prepares to go to work, eating a hard-boiled egg on the most bizarre decorative plate (I know that eating eggs is not in any way unusual, but as someone who finds them disgusting unless fully mixed into some kind of dough or batter, this scene added a certain visceral disgust for me, especially when her father, Jame, suggests that he would prefer she eat them raw... which is so, so much nastier, and just the idea of a father caring that much about how his adult daughter eats her breakfast is... look, there's never been anything about Jame Eagan that hasn't skeeved me the fuck out). Even as Helena manages to disappoint her father just by eating her eggs cooked, Helly, now aware of her status on the outside, tries to leverage it with Milchick. Ultimately, while Dylan has faltered in his mission to follow Irving instructions to find the Export Corridor, Helly has taken it up, but as she attempts to memorize the directions so that if she's caught, she won't be holding onto them, Jame shows up on the severed floor.

Finally, Mark and Devon meet with Cobel, and while Mark hesitates, he ultimately agrees to follow Cobel's instructions. While he initially tries to call in sick, he ultimately tells Milchick instead that he's just taking a personal day, presenting to his boss the notion that "work is just work," which is kind of a glorious counter to the entire Lumon vibe. Cobel tells him it's crucial that they rescue Gemma before Cold Harbor is completed, at which point she will effectively be dead. What it actually is remains a big question mark. Cobel sneaks Mark into the Birthing Lodges in the back of her truck, claiming Devon is one of "Jame's," and thus is off-the-books (guess Helena might have a bunch of half-siblings running around). Innie Mark wakes up inside one of the cabins, and the work begins.

I don't know what this means in the long-run. Irving's story could just be over, and Dylan is at least moving toward the exit. I hope they aren't leaving the show, though - the MDR Crew is this show's central "found family," after all. But we've got some big balls up in the air, building toward what I hope will be some serious meeting of both Marks.

It's sad to think that we've only got one more episode this season. I'm hoping that we'll get another season, and hopefully one that we don't have to wait quite as long for. But we've got that finale to come, which is sure to have some big reveals, but also probably a lot of big questions raised.

Frozen Shores, Frozen Hearts, and Stolen Genius in Severance's "Sweet Vitriol"

 Prior to this episode, there have been two episodes of Severance's second season that have felt "big," as a sort of departure from the typical structure and style. This week's, following right after another episode that foregrounded a previously back-burner character and revealed a ton about the past of our central character and, specifically, the person whom he lost and hope to one day regain, is itself centered on a character we actually haven't seen for quite some time.

Yes, it's Harmony Cobel time, and boy, isn't it interesting to see her take an episode as protagonist.

Not a ton happens in Sweet Vitriol, but there is some pretty important exposition that is revealed.

The bulk of the episode is showing just how much Lumon has made a ruin out of an entire community. Somewhere up north and by the ocean (they shot it in Newfoundland, so this could be Canada or possibly Maine) is the town of Salt's Neck, and it is there that Harmony Cobel grew up. The town is built around a Lumon factory (likely an Ether Mill, whether or not that's a real thing - but it was in such a factory that Eagen lore says Kier met his wife) but that factory was shuttered. And, evidently, all the bright young minds of the town were brought from the town in the same Wintertide Fellowship that Ms. Huang is participating in, including a young Harmony Cobel.

What is left of the town is bleak - Cobel's old friend runs a coffee shop and deals ether (a decidedly idiosyncratic drug - my primary association with it is Michael Caine's character from The Cider House Rules, though it was also used as an anesthetic back in the day) and the entire place looks dilapidated depressing. The town built up around that factory, and in its absence, it is just slowly rotting away.

Cobel wasn't there when her mother died - she had been brought up in a house with her aunt and mother, the former of whom seems to be a true believer, while her mother was never converted to the Lumon/Eagan faith. And it really is treated like a religion - Harmony's Aunt Sissy (short for Celestine) both worked for Lumon and seems to think that Harmony's mother would have been better off if she had believed, so that she could rest in Kier's breast in the afterlife.

Harmony, of course, is on the outs with Lumon after a lifetime of service, but she has something that she feels she needs, and much of the episode has us guessing what that is. She needs to properly mourn her mother, having never come home after her mother died while she was away. It's heartbreaking and humanizing to a character who has always been so cold and sinister.

But then we get the real massive reveal:

According to Lumon and the general public's understanding, it's Helena's father, Jame Eagan was the inventor of Severance. But as Harmony searches not just the cramped old home in which she grew up, but also the cellar/bunker/storage under a nearby hillock, she finds, hidden in a bust of Kier, her own rolled up notebook that holds within it her original designs - she invented Severance, and Lumon has been using her invention all along. No wonder she was in charge of the Severed floor.

But, we get some forward movement at the end - after receiving countless calls from Devon, Harmony finally picks up, and when Devon tells her that Mark is reintegrating, Harmony tells him to tell her everything - perhaps she will be able to safely guide him through this process where Reghabi was struggling to.

It does seem that Cobel is now being set up as a potentially crucial ally in Mark's efforts, but what she hopes to actually get out of this remains unclear. Still, as Lumon tries to track her down, narrowly missing her at Sissy's house, they clearly need to have control over her - which at this point might mean just ensuring she's dead (though in fairness, we have never actually seen Lumon kill anyone, barring "firing" Innies).

Still, it goes to show you to degree to which these powerful corporations and powerful corporate companies work to consolidate and concentrate not just power and wealth, but even credit for genius inventions (and the severance procedure is a work of genius, whether it's a good thing or not).