Rest easy: we don’t have another Lost on our hands. As beloved as that classic mystery box show was, it was equally frustrating for the way it teased big secrets with answers that either underwhelmed or never came. With the mysteries in Severance piling up since its first season, viewers have had every right to be worried they were in for something similar.
But show’s season 2 finale didn’t just show that all of its mysteries, no matter how small or weird, meant something. It did so in an elegant way — neatly connecting disparate storylines together, while also leaving just enough unclear to make for yet another great cliffhanger. And it was all while being weird and terrifying in a very specifically Severance way.
This story contains spoilers for the season 2 finale of Severance.
Let’s recap some of those lingering mysteries. There was the completion of the Cold Harbor file that Mark S. (Adam Scott) had been working on and that Lumon Industries was eagerly awaiting, calling it “mysterious and important.” There was Gemma / Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), who had been undergoing a series of tortuous experiments deep in Lumon’s basement, for unclear reasons. There was the ominous elevator hidden down a deep, dark hallway. On a larger scale, there was the question of just what Lumon was doing this for, anyway. Oh, and there was the goat farm housed inside a space normally reserved for office cubicles.
The finale, appropriately called “Cold Harbor,” was focused primarily on the innie and outie versions of Mark attempting to work together to rescue Gemma. To make it work, both Marks had to coordinate, which involved talking to each other for the first time through recorded video messages. Like most things in Severance, it starts out funny and playful before taking a dark turn, as innie Mark realized that saving Gemma and taking down Lumon would mean not only the end of his existence, but also the end of every innie on the severed floor, including his own love interest Helly R. (Britt Lower).
Image: Apple
Eventually, they reach a solution of sorts, an infiltration of Lumon that’s filled with reveals. It turns out that the “scary” numbers Mark had been finding in his files were connected to Gemma’s tests; each file he completed created a new innie for her, which allowed for a new kind of procedure. In the two years that Mark had been working at Lumon, he had created a whopping 24 Gemma variants, and Cold Harbor was to be the last and most important. Because, it seems, Lumon’s ultimate goal is a “war against pain,” and the company was attempting to strip Gemma down into an unfeeling husk through those tests and innies. (How this benefits a megacorporation remains to be seen.)
Oh, and the goats? Sacrificial offerings before big moments in Lumon’s progress toward this goal.
The reveals were satisfying, but what was great about the finale is that it didn’t feel like Severance’s creators were simply checking off boxes of things that needed to be addressed. Each answer felt like an organic part of the rescue mission. It was tense, bloody, and filled with the surreal mix of humor and unease that makes Severance so distinct. Amid the heartfelt reunion between Mark and Gemma, as well as Helly’s rousing speech to the other innies, was Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) awkwardly bantering with a wax statue of Lumon’s founder, complete with canned laughter in the background, and the realization that the company has an entire department dedicated to “choreography and merriment.”
More than anything, the finale built on what the show has established over the past two seasons. What started as an unsettling workplace horror story has morphed into something both more elaborate and even creepier. If the first season was about setting up the rules and parameters of this world, the second season is a sharp, incisive, and brutal exploration of how those rules actually impact the characters in often horrifying ways, pushing further and further on the concept of severance as a tool for controlling people both physically and emotionally. Even something as mundane as a marching band takes on a sinister tone in Lumon’s basement.
And despite cleverly weaving together its various plot threads, the finale wasn’t exactly neat and tidy. We got answers, but there’s a lot that remains unknown. Perhaps the biggest revelation is just how clear it is now that Mark’s innie and outie are very different people, each fighting for their own very different lives. Those differences are in direct conflict with each other. That detail turned what could have been a happy ending into something more complicated — but also a story with a clear path in front of it ahead of the newly confirmed third season.
