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.
No comments:
Post a Comment