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The second season of “Severance” just wrapped up with its longest episode yet. We have thoughts. Spoilers abound.
There are endings that give you what you want. There are endings that don’t give you what you want. There are endings that give you what you don’t want. Then there are endings that make you wonder what exactly you should want, which was what the “Severance” Season 2 finale did.
The first season of “Severance” gave us some clear rooting interests. We wanted Mark Scout to find his not-dead-yet wife, Gemma. And we wanted Mark S. and the rest of his innie colleagues to find freedom, self-determination and love. But the finale hit a realization that the season had been building to: these two wants might not be compatible, at least not easily.
The two Marks having the world’s weirdest Zoom conversation at the birthing cabin laid the conflict out. The series has shown them to date as twin protagonists wronged by the mighty Lumon corporation. But there’s a power dynamic between the two of them as well, as innie Mark says with growing frustration.
Outie Mark has more agency, more legitimacy under the law, more life on earth. And as the conversation goes on, we see him through the eyes of his innie. The sweet, sad, grief-stricken man we’d come to know begins to look … a little smug? A little cagey? He tries to say the right thing, but there’s a bit of a lip-service vibe, like he wants to make restitution without actually sacrificing anything. It’s like he’s making a land acknowledgment for his own brain.
We know outie Mark has a heart. But can you blame innie Mark for wondering if he’s just giving a kinder, gentler version of Helena Eagan’s dismissal to Helly from Season 1: “You are not a person”?
Maybe there’s a win-win solution; maybe reintegration will really work; maybe both can share joint tenancy of one body. Or maybe outie Mark is blown smoke! The finale doesn’t resolve this — or much else — but it does force us to wonder, push comes to shove, whose happy ending we want.
Innie Mark chooses himself, and Helly R., escaping through the klaxon-blaring chaos of the Lumon halls as the episode ends, à la “The Graduate,” with the elation on the lovers’ faces shifting to seeming anxiety. There is no certain future for them inside Lumon, after all. But sometimes you can’t help getting in your own way.
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