Severance S2 Finale

Who’s right? Who’s wrong?

So, last night I watched the season 2 finale of Apple TV’s Severance and girl, I am pissed off.

Not because it wasn’t good, it was, it was so good. A big concern that has been voiced this season is that viewers were afraid they wouldn’t be able to tie up any loose ends by the end. I didn’t share this concern because I felt that something that Severance excels at is putting the pieces together slowly and then showing you a fantastic finished product. It’s entertaining because even when you think you know what’s going on — you don’t. And it’s still better than what you were theorizing.

When I think about other shows that have a mystery at the center that go on for seasons, they always seem very reluctant to answer any of the real questions that the audience has because they won’t have any story left. Severance answered our big questions but still left us with new questions to be asked. Along with leaving us divided about what we’re willing to let slide in favor of what we want as viewers and what we want for the characters.

This is your official warning for spoilers. (Duh!)

By the end of the episode, Mark S. and his outie Mark Scout, band together to save Gemma. Mark S. helps her escape to the stairwell but stops in his tracks when he hears Helly behind him. After some back and forth, he makes the decision to run away with Helly leaving my girl Gemma screaming for him to come back.

Girl. I can’t even.

I’ll put my feelings to the side for the sake of the newsletter but if you follow me on twitter you know I’m calling for the death of Mark S.

There’s (obviously) a lot of discourse happening right now about who’s in the right and who’s in the wrong in this situation. Is Mark S. wrong for making a decision to choose himself and his love life after the outies have shown him all season long that they think they’re more important? (Yes! Just kidding. Hold on.)

Or is Mark Scout wrong for getting severed in the first place, creating a whole other person just to escape his own grief and then disregarding the quality of his life afterwards?

Severance tackles a lot of themes but the one that sticks out to me is how far people will go to have the opportunity to escape from their pain. The severance procedure was birthed out of grief through Harmony Cobel drawing up the plans while being groomed as a child to be a soldier for Lumon while her mother was dying.

Every single severed employee that sought out the procedure was trying to escape something that was causing them pain in their lives— death of a loved one, depression and inferiority, PTSD, etc. This idea that they can cut their agony short for a few hours and create a brand new person that’s pure, innocent, and happy and then one day feeling that happiness for themselves... it’s almost perfect.

And how can you hate on someone for wanting some relief from their suffering?

“You said since she died every day feels like a year. That you felt like you were choking on her ghost. Do you still feel that way, Mr. Scout?” — Mr. Milchick, Season 2 Episode 2.

But in separating yourself from that grief, you have created a brand new person. A part of you that not only still feels what you feel but also has their own life, their own wants, and their own desires.

I believe that Lumon’s goal is to make the severance procedure marketable so that they can sell the chip to anyone who wants to separate themselves from anything they don’t want to do or experience. One of the rooms they had Gemma in was just writing thank you notes — nothing seemingly traumatic, but an inconvenience. And that’s where it gets scary.

While I don’t believe that anyone necessarily deserves to have bad things happen to them, it’s not untrue that an experience can shape you to be a better or different person. Sometimes you will not understand someone’s perspective until you’re in a similar situation yourself, which can expand someone’s empathy and help them understand when interacting with other people in the future. If there’s a way to separate yourself from all pain, all different things that are uncomfortable, all things that you simply don’t want to do— what kind of people do we become? If you can have a procedure that makes you create a person (or multiple people) that wake up everyday in pain, how do you live with yourself? At what point do you become evil?

Something that I think a lot of people don’t think about is that Mark was very content with his job. While his life was not sustainable, because Lumon was using him for a very specific purpose, if Petey had never gotten reintegrated and started questioning Lumon there would be no reason for Mark to get radicalized. Which means one day, he would stop existing, and it wouldn’t feel like death — because nobody would tell him.

So, in his mind, all of the sudden —his life is being dictated by someone who brought him into existence without asking and also the other outies who seemingly do whatever they want without punishment.

Mark S. and Mark Scout’s conversation in the finale is so interesting to me because I can’t pick a side. Mark Scout has been living in agony for 2 years just to find out his wife is alive and being tortured right below him everyday at work. If Gemma had never died, he would’ve never gotten severed. He would never have lost his job. He wouldn’t have spent every single day for 2 years in unbearable pain. He and Gemma probably would have a baby by now. His life was stolen from him and he’s desperate to get it back by any means necessary.

Unfortunately, “any means necessary” for Mark S. is his life. He won’t die traditionally, he won’t feel pain, but the idea that after all of this he’ll never see Helly R. again, his Gemma, the woman that he’s in love with, that is unbearable.

It’s like after all of the pleading and begging, Mark Scout can’t see that he’s essentially asking to transfer his grief to his innie and then kill him off.

I’ve been saying the whole time that the only way out is reintegration, but Mark S. raised a point that I didn’t consider. If Mark’s been alive for 30+ years and his innie has only been alive for 2, what does blending into that one person look like? What happens to my life, my personality, my relationship? And because we don’t know what a completed process of reintegration looks like, we can’t answer that question. So how can we ask for him to give it all up for an “I don’t know” ?

Season 2 has done a good job on expanding on how the innies have no rights to their own bodies. They’re vessels for Lumon and the outies to do whatever they want and the innies are starting to feel violated. Because they are being violated. Helena coming down to the severed floor and infiltrating all of Helly’s relationships and then leaving her to put the pieces back together and regain their trust, Dylan losing his opportunity to feel real love because his outie is threatening to kill him, and Mark S. being used as a punching bag because his outie feels that his life is more important and deserves to be saved.

Alternatively, the outies are starting to feel similarly. These people that they created for solace are getting what they can’t have on the outside even after being promised that they would. Dylan’s wife falling in love with a version of him that is worth a damn, Helena watching her own body feel love and acceptance— something she can’t even replicate, Mark having access to Gemma (even if she is Ms. Casey).

And then whose relationship is more valuable? Mark Scout’s marriage and life with Gemma or Mark S.’s relationship with Helly that never stops? He steps off that elevator everyday in love, with no breaks in between. Does that make it stronger?

Outie Mark’s desperation to save Gemma and valuing her life over his innie’s life is more than understandable and I don’t really like how he’s being villainized for it. It’s a complicated issue from either side. Yes, he is being selfish, but in his mind — why doesn’t he deserve to be? There would be no other person to answer to if Lumon didn’t steal his wife from him and then make him work on a file that was going to kill her.

In his conversation with his innie, you can see him fighting the urge to tell him to suck it up and do what he asks. And it’s not a malicious thing, but he’s almost at the finish line and has his innie telling him that he wants to live down there working on a computer (that’s killing his wife!) so that he can be with the woman who’s outie put Gemma there in the first place.

His relationship with “Heleny” isn’t sustainable, so why should that matter more than the life that was stolen from outie Mark?

In a true moral and ethical way, everyone is doomed. There’s no normal life to be had after this, even through reintegration, where do Mark’s feelings for Helly go? What happens when she’s Helena?

When Helly and Mark get finished running, what happens when they clock out at 5?

As a viewer, it’s heartbreaking because you can’t root for a side without the other side suffering. Can you be a MarkHelly shipper and be content with Mark S. leaving Gemma behind after she’s spent 2 years trying to crawl her way back to her husband?

Can you want for Outie Mark to be with Gemma and leave Mark S. and his love behind? Even though Mark knows what it feels like to lose out on love when you didn’t have to?

And it may be easier to choose the outies because neither Mark or Helly will feel pain when they die, they will just stop existing. But the way they feel will not stop existing and they do suffer, they suffered in those last moments thinking they would have to say goodbye to each other.

“You carry the hurt with you. You feel it down there too. You just don’t know what it is.” — Petey Kilmer, Severance Season 1 Episode 3.

The way the innies feel will make it back up to the outies but it’ll be more pain…. omg I’m really sick to my stomach.

There’s no winners here. Even in the destruction of Lumon, someone has to lose. There’s no possible way that everyone gets what they want, there has to be a sacrificial lamb in order to free everyone else. But how do we decide who will be who? And why?

"The freedom to fall in love is maybe the most radical act that they've allowed themselves to really dive into, and that's where you start really defining what it is that you want, what it is you want to protect and what you think the world should be." - Adam Scott, USA Today

Okay, now that I’ve finished being objective and fair.

Are you ready to die, Mark S. ?