'Severance' Finale: What Remains At The End Of The World
Bella Vega on grief, love, and the most effective season finale of television she's ever seen.
Spoilers for the season two finale of 'Severance' ahead
When I think of grief, I think of my sister. An energetic, five-foot-two woman who blasted Mariah Carey unabashedly, dressed to adorn her soul, laughed like every day was her last, and dedicated her life to living with an ephemeral joy that directly contradicted the servitude she dedicated to those she loved. We share a father, last name, face shape, nose, round brown eyes, small stature, and a laugh.
She was pure love, a figure that will never have the sweet fortune of growing old or concreting herself in my memory, an entity I know as pure cosmic energy as opposed to terrestrial flesh. Born from half of me, died with most of me before I was even thought into existence, I tattooed her name on my wrist and cry about her lack of beating heart at least once a week.
It’s because of this chasm lodged deep in me from before I knew how to function that I can understand the choice both versions of Mark Scout (the riveting Adam Scott) makes in the widely-debated Severance season two finale "Cold Harbor"; I, too, feel I would burn half of my world if it meant she could stay alive in the other half. Living with half of me doesn't matter when that half gets all of her.
Severance was introduced to me by an ex-almost-lover turned new friend — you know those people who'll always know how your mind works better than you do, frustrating you in spite of yourself? — and consumed over the course of three days. It was a continuous process I couldn't stop, a constant feeling of motion; I was deeply impressed simultaneously by how languid and lovingly crafted the story felt and how much they could put in a single hour of television. I watched almost continuously as Mark Scout ran far, far away from his grief and, at the same time, stared it right in the face, sometimes literally, every day.
Severance follows Mark on his journey to becoming a whole person while splitting himself in two. Fresh off the grief of losing his wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman, one of the most striking television presences of the year) to a car accident, he begins a job at Lumon, a mysterious pharmaceutical company that lords over his town. It’s here that he takes part in an experimental procedure called "severance," a surgery that splits his brain, leaving the memories of his life limited to those he makes on the Lumon floor where he works to protect corporate data. This inadvertently creates a new person, an “innie” called Mark S. who only exists within the scope of reality of the “severed” floor.
The severing process, to me, feels like escapism — that is, in theory. The result of the show is that we get to know two parallel men: Mark Scout, the man who ugly-sobs in his car until he can’t breathe, and Mark S. (a peppier Scott), the person who only exists as a man learning what it is to be human. This takes apart the usual chronological growth markers and social situations to leave us wondering: what makes a person when stripped of experience? What core components remain?
The show constantly grapples with the question of what part of the human spirit is so naturally inevitable that it could persist in a dimension of consciousness that exists as separate and isolated from the whole. As Severance shows us, that part would be love.
See, while Mark Scout fumbles through life with half a heart — from disastrously pathetic hook-ups and a bachelor fridge of beers and canned goods — Mark S. is head of his department, ever the obedient team player and generally well-liked. Both men lack what the other man excels in: Mark S. desperately longs for Mark Scout’s genuine emotionality, while Mark Scout scours the show's snowy scenes for the sense of “fineness” that Mark S. knows as second nature, setting the scene for a tale of a man learning to become whole again. Grief has that way of splitting us in two.
In season two, we are made to bear witness to the life Mark Scout had with his wife Gemma. "Chikhai Bardo" director Jessica Lee Gagné paints their life together in 16mm shades of a sunlight-bathed home, vintage French music, and all the tender, bittersweet romance of a love in retrospect. Life with her was imperfect, and perhaps he was a bit dismissive of her genuine need for connection (doesn’t all love have moments of lull?), but she was his, and he was hers. The love they shared is palpable in every look, every small bicker that melts away with a quick kiss, every soft, shared moment.
In season two, Mark S. admits to himself that he’s fallen in love with Helly (a magnificently versatile Britt Lower), who is the “innie” of the company’s CEO, Helena Eagan. Lower spends the top of the season as Helena doing some information recovery for her own purposes as she poses as Helly on the severed floor (both these things being unbeknownst to Mark). The love he feels culminates in the two of them having sex in a tent, where we as the audience are witness to their private fire, shades of red (a color used sparingly but purposefully throughout the series) dancing off their apprehensively lustful bodies.
It is so hard to believe that Helena’s motivations for switching places are totally nefarious when, in their quiet pillow talk, she turns to Mark and says, "I didn’t like who I was on the outside," and he kisses her face and tells her it doesn’t matter. There was no need for pretence then, and for once, she felt truly naked. The real Helly and Mark do end up making love later, in a charmingly sterile scene taking place in an abandoned room in the office, the whole experience feeling kind and fumbling with no shortage of love.
The tandem work of two men in love with different women and yet somehow still making up the same whole sets the scene for the most effective season finale of television I’ve ever seen.
Severance has two parallel, doomed love stories, but neither feels in competition with the other. It's a testament to the respect the show has for each version of these people, innie or outie, as a particular character. When Mark S. and Mark Scout are trading increasingly frustrated camcorder videos in the final episode — this being their only line of cross-consciousness communication — each of their autonomies feels vital and conflicting for the viewer, each of their viewpoints simple: I'm in love and I need her. Not just need, but I want her. And can't you understand what a big thing it is, for *me* to *want*?
Looking ahead to the end of the episode, Gemma is tearing apart a crib in a final test of her severed consciousness, this undeath and half-life that so haunts the narrative of the show. The fact that she, who suffered a miscarriage, can break apart a triggering object with numb ease indicates that she is completely separated from her former identity.
So when a bloodied man walks in, claiming to be her husband, with an expression of joy so emphatic that it seems the whole world stops and starts with her, her tentative hand reaching forward is an instinct, something deep in her multi-fractured brain telling her, "Go." Gemma Scout and Mark Scout are inevitable.
Inevitable is the same feeling I had when thinking about Mark S. and Helly R. It's the same feeling I got when, in the season one finale, Helly reaches out and pulls him in, kissing him once even if it's the last action she'll take, just in case she never feels anything again. It's especially the feeling I got when they have sex in Helly’s cabin and he reassures her with, "I don't care who you are out there. I care who you are with me. That's all." Though we later learn that Helly was not, in fact, Helly but Helena Eagan, I ask myself: how could such rawness be forced? How could I ignore the expression on Helena's face when she rewound the tape over and over, watching her body in her severed form kiss Mark S. with such polite, tender passion, her mask slowly shifting from surprise to envy, curiosity, about this love. The Helena who can't help herself but watch Mark Scout from afar as he leaves for work and who even follows him to a shitty Chinese restaurant, making awkward comments that feel like they do more harm than good in the productivity sense. Is all of this, too, not just her reaching out her hand to see if he'd take it, if some part of his consciousness will feel what she feels? Is all of this not inevitable to you, too?
It's why, I think — before I even realized what was happening — I broke down. I just watched.
As my friend reminded me when I sent them stream-of-consciousness texts whenever a new thought popped up: Severance is a story of creation. Innies were created without their own consent as fully formed humans and thrust into a world that exists to abuse and take advantage of them. There is a repeated idea of children being spared from the sins of their parents, of these innies being innocent of the actions of their outies, including their own creation. The anger in Helly’s season one suicide attempt and the dissociation of Irving’s (John Turturro) final days at the company work in tandem to illustrate the existential misery of existing only within the scope of a company’s grip, existing only for the other half of you’s mindless leisure and Lumon's sick exploitation. Scrub away the ideology, and the only thing you really own is your body, though even that is split part-time. You are an individual who is, unfortunately, inherently a half of a whole, created by a “dominating” force that dictates some terrifyingly core part of you.
So, how could you blame yourself for doing as you do?
How can I sit on my bed, hunched over my TV like I'm breathing in the technicolor, and feel anything but narrative fulfillment and understanding when, despite Gemma's begging screams, a bloody and bruised Mark S. turns around to see the love of his half-life and runs away from what he's expected to do — grabs Helly’s hand, and just runs?
Both halves of Mark make the same decision for their frame of reality: relinquish what the other half wants them to do for love, the axis of their life. This fact felt so immediately understandable and poignant that I couldn't bring myself to choose a side. Both men make the same choice. Both men got what they wanted in the end, a solution to their gaping emptiness: love.
Let me put it to you this way — no matter how many times you split my consciousness and render me extractable from the whole of me, there will always be a me that remains. Even if I'm reborn, carbon-copied, doused in corporate idolatry — I say this beyond a shadow of a doubt — I'd choose my sister at the end of any hallway. Despite whatever nagging sense of duty or logic to a higher version of myself existed behind that door, if any part of my fractured perspective knew she was there, I'd run to her, blood-soaked and exhausted, and grab her hand and run away to the edge of infinity with her. Because who even fucking cares about anything, when just a sliver of me has a chance to get to feel whole with her?