That ‘Severance’ Finale Was a Heartbreaker

“Mark, we gotta go home!” Those words are going to haunt me for days. Not just because of the delivered tone of fear wrapped around a nucleus of hope (oh, Dichen Lachman, the performer you are) but because the season was never going to end any other way, despite how thoroughly I had fooled myself into thinking otherwise.

Before we can talk about an ending, we must, of course, discuss a beginning. For the events that transpired over the finale’s hefty 75 minutes, that beginning occurs during the ‘Mark and Mark’ talk. What starts as essentially a meeting of two strangers evolves into a negotiation. But the moment Outie Mark referred to “Heleny,” I knew things were about to disintegrate. Severance covers a lot of ground, thematically speaking—some better than others (more on that shortly)—but what it’s managed to excel at is asking what it means to exist, what constitutes a life, and just how expendable it is based on its function.

“They give us half a life and think we won’t fight for it!” It’s not just a rallying cry for the benefit of the newly introduced Choreography and Merriment department; it’s the entire underlying motif beneath the thriller’s corporate satire veneer. Like Orpheus looking back at Eurydice, Outie Mark’s fatal error, his belief that innies are merely tortured souls awaiting the relief of nonexistence, has cost him Gemma. Planning the big rescue mission is one thing—and even that was mainly the work of Harmony Cobel, whose motivation for assisting Mark is still hard to pin down, since there are much easier ways to take down Lumon if she were so inclined—but what he failed to realize was that Innie Mark was going to be doing most of the heavy lifting (not to mention taking the licks; were it not for one severely disgruntled Mammalians Nurturable employee, that fight with Mr. Drummond would have gone in a very different direction), which also means he’s the one calling the shots.

Ultimately, Innie Mark did do the right thing by saving Gemma or, as he thinks of her, Ms. Casey, the polite woman who works down the hall. What she was being saved from exactly is still not entirely clear, like most of the inner workings of Lumon; out of my mainly incorrect guesses over what might happen during the finale—Innie Dylan did come through in the end, as far as one of my educated guesses panning out (“F*ck you, Mr. Milchick”)—the one thing I should have recognized was that in the world of Severance there’s little interest in making any of numerous facts regarding the Eagan corpo-religion have any real bearing on the show’s many outcomes. What was the ultimate aim of subjecting Gemma to years of torture? No idea, only that the bad guys were really mad when the mysterious grand plan was foiled. But if it means getting to watch Trammell Tillman be a corporate soldier even while gritting his teeth against his overlords, so be it—between the unsettlingly abrupt run from Innie Dylan’s potentially “embarrassing emotional response” and the vexed slow head turn to the Kier animatronic, just give that man the Emmy.

Success rarely hinges on conspiracy theories anyway. It comes down to how you stick the landing, and this slightly disjointed second season came to a rousingly successful conclusion, even if it meant my heart shattering to little pieces as Gemma watched her husband slowly turn away from her toward another woman instead. From her vantage point, he didn’t simply choose another, he chose a life with her in a fluorescent prison over freedom with his wife. But for Helly and Innie Mark, that choice is steeped in triumph. That is, until one remembers the ultimate tragedy, which is that their love is going to be heart-wrenchingly short-lived. Looking forward, the possibility of reintegration can only be anticipated with dread knowing that Mark, no longer just one man or the other, will be forced to recall the agony of losing love two times over.

Kaleena Rivera is the TV Editor for Pajiba. She can be found at Bluesky here.