Severance: Season Two
Analysis & Review: MAJOR SPOILER ALERT
When I watched Season One of Apple TV’s hit show Severance, I was intrigued primarily by the psychological implications of the premise—the idea that a person voluntarily is “severed” in order to be split into two realities. I was also struck by the idea of different worker archetypes. Essentially, in the Severance world, there is an “innie” consciousness and an “outie” consciousness and they do not interact with each other. Thus, the identity of Mark Scout (played by Adam Scott) is, after the “severance procedure,” split into outside-world (outie) Mark Scout and the but on the inside-Lumon (innie) Mark S. Mark Scout checks in at the Lumon Industries building, rides an elevator, has his memories erased, and then Mark S. blinks into existence on the severed floor. We learn in the course of Season One that his wife Gemma’s death motivated his decision to be severed. (All severed employees apparently do so voluntarily.) While Mark Scout could focus on his personal grief, Mark S. went to work everyday without the burden of Mark Scout’s memories and sense of loss. The outie enters an elevator where the eyes are dilated and the mind is erased, the doors open, and the innie awakens; this ritual is on daily repeat, and the reverse happens when the employee departs the building, the “innie” therefore going to sleep as the “outie” awakens. From the corporate perspective, there is a supposed advantage of increased productivity. The employee becomes wholly devoted to the corporate mission, no distractions. The outie then doesn’t have the burden of the job that follows him home, plaguing his mind. In practice, of course, as the show reveals, it is more complicated.
My experience of Season Two is totally different from Season One experience. I’m not only engrossed in the psychological implications; I’m noticing more photography and the symbolism of emphasized props, like the little head figures in the glass boxes in the cubicles, the paintings, the analog clock, the door signs, the doors themselves. (The head, as the compartment of the brain, and doors, as the gateway to different experiences, are major symbolic references throughout the series.) I am also noticing the physical spaces: the white hallways, the green floors, green furniture, dated computer terminals. It is mysterious work that the main characters do in their division, called Macrodata Refinement, or MDR. It is a clinical and secretive environment with fluorescent lighting and important work that the employees take very seriously without quite knowing what it’s about. They know it’s part of the mission and that the mission is important. Religiosity pervades the innies’ culture. The 19th century founder of the company, Kier Eagan, is god-like, eternal, his legacy evident in the entire structure of Lumon with its nine core principles—Vision, Verve, Wit, Cheer, Humility, Benevolence, Nimbleness, Probity, and Wiles—all proudly memorized and upheld by model employees like Irving Bailiff, who is portrayed by John Turturro. Irving and Mark both work in MDR, refining macrodata, whatever that means. But as Season Two opens, Mark S. is surprised to find himself still employed, still severed even? He runs through the hallways, giving us more glimpses of the surreal environment, familiar yet strange. Is he looking for something to be the same or is he looking for differences—like that one room that has purple furniture and carpet instead of green? He is looking, perhaps, for the familiar faces who could validate his experience. The person watching him who disappears as soon as Mark S. turns in awareness of being looked at conveys a feeling that Mark S. is certainly not alone. There is a bigger plan for Mark S. this season. He is the character on whom the company has pinned the fate of its final project, the ominous “Cold Harbor” mission. (“Cold Harbor” is the title of the season finale.) Mark S. plugs the numbers in the computer for the Cold Harbor file without a clue that he is the essential element in its implementation. The first episode gives us this vital piece of the puzzle by having the company board drastically alter its plans to accommodate his demand for his original team. Mark S. will not return to work unless he can work with his friends. He doesn’t know how much power he has. He doesn’t know how much the company needs him.
I feel like there is so much conflict and contrast in the series. The characters act in contradictory ways that somehow, by repetition, acquire something like consistency. Milchick, for example, the managerial character portrayed by Tramell Tillman, seems to struggle between corporate loyalty and empathy for the severed. Of all the managerial characters, Milchick has the most interaction with the severed characters. Milchick is basically a middle man, a go-between for the severed workers and the Lumon board. After the Season One finale and the downfall of Milchick’s immediate boss, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), Milchick moves into Season Two as the new Cobel. I find it interesting to watch Milchick, who is always intense, tense, and in tension. It’s as if there is a battle raging inside him, one side pulling on his instinct as an ambitious professional, the other side nudging at his conscience. He has grown up to be a dedicated Lumon disciple and he knows everything that Lumon is doing. He knows every protocol. He knows all the secrets. While he assumes an outward deference to duty, there is nonetheless an inner question—subtly but clearly conveyed by the actor—as to the ethics of his part in the Lumon experiment. His one-on-one interactions with Miss Huang (Sarah Bock) are a fascinating look into the dynamics between a conflicted mentor and his wide-eyed apprentice. She is a child with a bright future in the Lumon hierarchy. It is easy to see her rising quickly into a Harmony Cobel role. Milchick, perhaps, might see a younger version of himself in Miss Huang’s faithful outlook, but now that he is in turmoil, he is uncertain as to the rightness of guiding another along the same path.
Episode 6, “Attila,” is among my favorite episodes in the series. The episode title refers to the king Attila the Hun and is applied directly in the dialogue when Fields (John Noble) greets Burt (Christopher Walken) as Attila. The legend of the fierce Germanic warrior is evoked to draw an analogy to Burt’s past, of which he is ashamed. This episode seems to be the major climatic point of Season Two. It is also, in my opinion, the most intriguing episode, maybe even my favorite of both seasons. “Attila” uncovers many of the characters’ vulnerabilities. It explores the emotional dynamics and trigger points. It is not just the personality that is exposed; it’s the personal as well as the interpersonal. For the first time, we really see the humanity of both Dylans (Zach Cherry). We his innie’s loneliness and yearning for intimacy. We see the struggle of his outie to find his footing in the world. I think the story of the two Dylans is very interesting because here is a person who agreed to be severed so that he could actually do two jobs, but the outie has not been able to find a job and it seems to have created somewhat of an estrangement with his wife. They speak to each other and obviously still yearn for each other, but there is a disconnect. Meanwhile, the wife (played by Merritt Wever) gets to know the innie Dylan—through a curious means orchestrated by Milchick—she initially conceals it from the outie version of her husband, feeling the guilt of a woman having an extramarital emotional affair. This tension reveals one person (Dylan) split into two personalities, occupying two separate spaces, and being in love with the same woman.
If you want to hear more about the curious dilemma of the “innie” and the “outie” in particular as it relates to Episode 6, I highly recommend the February 21 episode of the Severance podcast. Ben Stiller, the series producer and director of most episodes, and Adam Scott, “Mark” on the show, delve into the psychology at work on this dilemma and the effect it has on the characters’ romantic relationships. Be warned, the podcast does contain spoilers, so it is recommended that you don’t listen to their analysis until you have watched up through the episode being discussed. The February 21 podcast episode is also a great one to listen to for its interview between Ben Stiller and Christopher Walken, who plays Burt in the series. In his discussion with Ben, Walken takes on the deeper meanings of the series by noticing what it exposes about human duality.
The whole notion of a severed YOU, with one consciousness at home and another consciousness in the workplace, the two parts staying in their realms and never interacting or having any memories in common, naturally points to the reality that in the real world a human really takes on multiple personalities—for example, the parent, the friend, the worker, the churchgoer, the customer, the student or the teacher, etc. We carry the memories of each function, however. We carry all of it. The interesting question in the show is, how would we be relieved or further burdened by a Severance-like experiment? Would it help to have only one personality, or role to perform, or would we long for something else to do, to be, to feel? Would we feel that something is missing? In the case of Christopher Walken’s character, we see a man who is very multifaceted: he is a gay man, married, a complex man with some things in his past he seems ashamed of, and he is a highly educated and cultured man. He is certainly more than his employee role at Lumon, and yet in severing himself, he leaves an innie who still hungers for something more. In “Attila,” there is a discussion among Fields, Irving, and Burt about the innie having a soul in its own right, not merely as a part of the soul of the outie. Implied in the conversation is the idea that the innie can actually have a life of its own, even if that life is confined within the walls of the Lumon building—a life that includes relationships and the buildup of memories totally separate from the memories and the relationships of the outie. What the innie does, the outie knows nothing about, and vice versa. There is jealousy in this scene; it hangs unmistakably in the air among the three men. Almost like, but not really like the case of the two Dylans and Dylan’s wife, we have a kind of “throuple,” a threesome, with a buildup of tension among the parties. Although no one spells it out, Fields and Irving are keenly aware of their own relationship with Burt and are, of course, jealous of what the other one has with him. In a way, it’s sort of a cheap trick, doing a “throuple” on a show premised on split personalities. The way it’s carried out, however, is anything but cheap. The tension in the relationships is not melodramatic at all; it’s believable, relatable, and as real as it gets. There is a real question, without right or wrong answer, as to whether Adam Scott’s character, Mark, can love both innie Helly and her outie, Helen. (She’s one of only two main characters whose innie and outie don’t share the same name.) Outie Mark certainly has chemistry with Helen, as seen in their conversation in the Chinese restaurant, when they tease each other and easily get the rhythm of each other’s jokes in an eerie resemblance of the banter between innie Mark and Helly. In Episode 5, “Trojan’s Horse,” there is a crossover between the innie and outie worlds that complicates the innie Mark’s relationship with Helly/Helen—a relationship that was already complicated by something else.
Outie Mark is introduced to us in Season One as a grieving widower. The supposed dead wife is portrayed by Dichen Lachman; we know her as outie Mark’s wife Gemma and as the innie Ms. Casey. For me, the curious case of Ms. Casey being alive on the inside but her outie, Gemma, being supposed dead on the outside raises the question of how the existential realities differ between innie and outie experiences. For an innie, death is quite simple: a fired employee is dead, even if they really just reintegrated into the outie world, because the innie isn’t aware of the fired worker’s continued existence. The case of Gemma/Ms. Casey is totally unique, however, because it’s actually her outie husband who is unaware of the continued existence of her innie; her innie husband became aware of her innie existence, and of his outie’s relationship to her, in Season One, and the search for what happened to her is a central plotline in Season Two.
Episode 7 and 8 are remarkable for photography and character study. In the former, we learn more about Gemma/Ms. Casey than ever before. For this episode, the series director of photography, Jessica Lee Gagné, put on the hat of (big-D) Director for the first time. Her mastery of the art of the image made the episode, titled “Chikhai Bardo,” extremely powerful. When I googled the term, Chikhai Bardo, and found its Buddhist meaning, it was immediately clear why it became the title of this episode. The episode is about Mark and Gemma, both of whom are in a precarious state, their lives hanging in the balance. Mark is trying to reintegrate with his innie. Gemma is a Lumon captive, forced to live out controlled routines and exercises under the gaze of a medical team. Her innie, severance-floor Ms. Casey, doesn’t know who she is; her outie, Gemma, is trapped on the testing floor and wears a succession of costumes for the experience of 24 different rooms leading up the 25th and final room, Cold Harbor. Heavy on flashbacks, shot using film instead of digital photography, this episode shows us how Gemma and Mark met. He found her reading Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Metaphor alert: Ivan Ilyich was “dying” for a long time, stuck in a false life and dreading death. Only as he learned to live authentically did he become free.
The false life comes up again in Episode 8, “Sweet Vitriol,” where we see Harmony Cobel returning to her hometown in search of the proof that she had invented several of Lumon’s technologies. Harmony confronts her aunt Sissy, a Lumon religious fanatic, about her mother’s lonely death in the bedroom preserved in its deathbed state. Aunt Sissy (Jane Alexander) clung to a false life (the religion of Kier Eagon that drives the Lumon vision) and Harmony herself was groomed in this religion, a child laborer in the local Lumon factory and star apprentice in the fellowship that propelled her to corporate success. As Harmony searches her childhood home and reconnects with an old friend, she becomes increasingly disillusioned with Lumon dogma, and this disillusionment propels her forward in the mission to save Mark and Gemma.
In conclusion, there is so much about the final two episodes that struck a chord with me that it’s hard to know where to begin. Without rehashing the episodes, I have to say that it is the innie-outie connection that underscores everything. The two Marks communicating by way of a camcorder in the final episode, innie Dylan reading a letter from outie Dylan, and Helly’s plea for the innie’s right to life, even if it’s only half a life, all serve to stress the point that once you awaken a consciousness it must fight for itself. There is another point where the fight for life comes up, a different kind of fight, a maternal fight for a baby goat she has nurtured. The Severance fandom finally got an answer to the question of what the goats are all about in the final episode. The head of the Mammalians Nuturable department, Lorne, is portrayed by Gwendoline Christie. Her task was to select the goat who exemplified the nine Lumon core principles and bring him to Mr. Drummond (Darri Ólafsson) for sacrifice to Kier, the aforementioned Lumon deity. It seems that Lorne is prepared to go along with the barbaric ritual until it is interrupted by innie Mark. The bloody fight scene between Drummond and Mark awakens something in Lorne—two instincts, one, her own rights as an innie which she shares with Mark, and two, her protective instincts as the “mother” of the goats. She helps Mark fight Drummond until the latter can’t fight anymore. It was not the first instance of a sort of innie revolution against Lumon Industries. In the third episode of the season, we saw Helly make an impassioned speech on behalf of innie rights to the Mammalian Nuturable department, a plea for their help in her and Mark’s search for Ms. Casey, whose disappearance she said meant that Lumon could disappear any of them at any time for any reason. That speech made a strong impact on the whole department as well as Lorne at the time and, certainly, Lorne must have recalled it when she saw Mark now being beaten by Mr. Drummond. The innies have very little autonomy. Even if they resign, their resignation request has to be approved by their outie. We saw this at work when innie Dylan puts in the request in his devastation over his outie’s wife, Gretchen, breaking up with him. Outie Dylan sends him a letter through official channels, explaining his reason for rejecting the request to reintegrate. The outie is jealous of the innie’s superior assuredness. He tells his innie that he hopes Gretchen will someday see in him what she already sees in the innie. The truth is that innie Dylan has no control over his fate. He has to make the most of circumstances shaped by other people, and he does so very successfully. He is in a position that makes self-assurance the inevitable result of his necessary self-reliance. The innie longs for the outie’s freedom. The outie longs for the innie’s purpose.
Helly’s speech to the marching band spells out the core through-line of the series: Lumon technology gives life to the innies. The company thinks it has the right to control what the innies do. But, like teenagers, the innies eventually develop their own wills and desires. She says, the company thinks that just because the innie life is only a “half-life” the innies won’t fight for it. The company is wrong. Innie Mark and Helly definitely put up a strong fight for their autonomy. Innie Mark even argues with his outie (in the camcorder scene) about why his relationship with Helly is just as important as outie Mark’s marriage with Gemma. There are many heartbreaking moments in the series, but the last scene where we see innie Mark torn between following Gemma (driven by his already tenuous ability to trust his outie) and remaining inside Lumon with Helly. He had convinced himself to go along with his outie’s plan because he believed it could lead to Lumon’s downfall. In the end, however, the man would not abandon his lover. It is no different than how outie Mark would always act with regard to Gemma. It is hard, though, to see Gemma’s devastation at Mark’s choice.
Finally, I must say a few words about the music that plays over the final scene. It’s the song “Windmill of Your Mind.” The lyrics of this song evoke the whole meaning of this series. It is the circle of life, yes life and death, and life again, but more than that, the life that is lived on “a carousel that’s turning rings around the moon,” “like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own.” Picture the endless hallways in the Lumon building, and Mark and Helly running through them. Where are they going? Forward, the only way, right? Even in a circle, it’s the easiest way to walk. The past has too much resistance. I think the core lesson here is that consciousness can only expand. Is contraction or reintegration possible after the “younger” consciousness has found its wings, so to speak?
My review of Season One: https://www.heavycrownpress.com/p/the-severance-package