Innie Through the Out Door

This post contains spoilers for the Severance Season Two finale, “Cold Harbor,” which is now streaming on Apple TV+.

“Whatever this life is, it’s all we have. And we don’t want it to end. Can you understand that?”

This is Innie Mark, having a conversation of sorts with his outie — via videotaped messages they make for one another as they move in and out of the birthing cabin Harmony and Devon took them to at the end of last week’s episode. Their physical situations remain the same as usual — Innie Mark manifests only inside the cabin, Outie Mark only outside on the balcony — but their emotional positions have evolved a bit over the course of this season. 

Innie Mark began the year sprinting through the halls of the severed floor, trying to find Wellness and Ms. Casey, desperate to help his outie get his wife back. Similarly, reuniting with Gemma was all that Outie Mark cared about, to the point where he was willing to risk his own life in the hopes that reintegration would work. By this finale — a welcome shot of adrenaline after a back half of the season that felt wobblier than the opening chapters — things have grown more complicated. The reintegration hasn’t worked yet (which is among the more frustrating aspects of a season that’s struggled with several pacing issues that we’ll get to in a bit), so Outie Mark has had to resort to trying to negotiate with his innie, which in turn requires him to try to think like Innie Mark without having any of his memories. And in finally embracing his feelings for Helly, and pursuing the closest to a real relationship with her that it’s possible to have on the severed floor, Innie Mark has found something he cares far more about than helping his outie, and that he’s not willing to risk for this other side of himself. 

The debate between the two Marks isn’t the most viscerally exciting part of “Cold Harbor,” but that’s only because it’s hard to top Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones brawling with Iceland from Somebody Somewhere — not to mention the shocking payoff to that sequence, where Innie Mark shifts to Outie Mark in the elevator, inadvertently killing Mr. Drummond in the process. (It’s a brilliant piece of dark comedy, very much in the vein of Vincent accidentally shooting Marvin in the face in Pulp Fiction.) But it’s the most important sequence of the hour, and arguably the most important of all of Severance to date. Because ultimately, the series isn’t really about the mythology of the Eagan family, about the weird rituals of the severed floor, about ORTBOs or paintings or goats or street addresses or any of the other details it becomes easy to fixate on. It is about the question of what undergoing severance does to a person, and the impossible, completely unfair situation it creates for the half of that person who didn’t have a say in the process to begin with. 

We know enough about Outie Mark to understand that he does genuinely want to help his innie, even if that comes in a distant second to saving Gemma. But we also understand why Innie Mark wouldn’t trust the man who created him, especially not in the wake of recent events. If the woman he loves could have an outie who is so different, and so reprehensible, how can this Mark possibly put his trust in that Mark? And even if Outie Mark means everything he says, Innie Mark asks a very reasonable question: given the enormous gap in their respective lifespans, wouldn’t a reintegrated Mark be dominated by Outie Mark’s memories and desires? Innie Mark wants Helly, and Outie Mark wants Gemma; wouldn’t Reintegrated Mark’s scales be weighted wildly in favor of the latter desire? 

Because these two men are sharing the same body, there’s no way to present them literally speaking to one another at the same time. But the camcorder workaround creates the illusion of a traditional dialogue, and allows Adam Scott to really dig down into the nuances between the two versions he’s been playing. It’s almost an inverse of the two Marks we met at the beginning of the series, where Outie Mark was burdened with grief and generally puzzled by the world around him, while Innie Mark was an easygoing guy who felt entirely at peace in MDR until Helly dropped into his life and made him question everything about it. Now, it’s Outie Mark who is at least playacting at being upbeat, trying to create a sense of teamwork with his innie, and it’s Innie Mark who is pained and suspicious, ready to jump on every mistake Outie Mark makes as a reason not to trust him. 

It’s a riveting sequence, and one that sets up something of an inverse of the magnificent Season One finale. Now, instead of the innie versions of Mark, Helly, and Irving getting to visit the outside world, it’s Outie Mark who has to come into the Lumon sublevels. The twist is that it’s a team-up between the two Marks this time. Only Innie Mark can exist on the severed floor, and only Outie Mark can exist below or above it. So Innie Mark has to be the one to get to the export elevator to get down to the testing floor, where Outie Mark will then have to rescue Gemma and get her back up the elevator to the severed floor, where Innie Mark will resume control and get Gemma to the exit door(*) and home safely. 

(*) Obviously, this turns out to be a million-to-one confluence of circumstances. But it still seems like the height of arrogance for Lumon to have designed the severed floor with an unlocked exit that their slaves can use at any time — even if, as demonstrated with Helly back in the series premiere, it just turns them back into their outies.  

What follows isn’t quite as tense as the events of “The We We Are,” because it would be difficult for any series to achieve that level of exquisite agony more than once. But there’s a lot of fantastic, vivid, extremely on-brand weirdness here. 

Even before the plan is fully put into motion, for instance, we get an utterly lovely conversation between Innie Mark and Helly as he prepares to complete Cold Harbor. They know they are running out of time to be together, or perhaps even to exist at all. Harmony has already told Innie Mark that Lumon will have no need of his services after Cold Harbor is done; Innie Mark assumes his Outie will never want to come back down here once Gemma is freed; and Helena has zero interest in ever being down there again if she can avoid it. So whether the plan succeeds or fails, this feels like it’s the end of the road for the two of them. Rather than make grand pronouncements about their love for one another, their philosophies on life, or anything else, they simply retreat to the conversational space in which their love first blossomed: banter. Helly laments that she doesn’t remember enough names of places from the outside world, and the two of them brainstorm on whatever information has survived the severance process. Helly knows the word “equator,” but neither has any clue what it is, leading them to joke that perhaps it’s a building that got so big, it began to think it was a continent. And when it’s finally time for them to separate, likely forever, so Mark can rescue Gemma, he whispers to her, “See you at the equator.” 

Meanwhile, there is a marching band. Because of course there is. 

You can look at the presence of the marching band — and, more specifically, to the eventual revelation that this is a severed marching band(*) — as the series shamelessly chasing Season One’s most memed moment, Milchick dancing to defiant jazz during Helly’s Music Dance Experience. But it also speaks to the Eagans’ fundamental need to celebrate themselves at every turn. If Cold Harbor really is going to be — to quote Mr. Drummond (RIP) — one of the great moments in the history of the planet, then its completion must be, pardon the pun, properly marked. A dot matrix banner or a waffle party won’t do it. This calls for a little song, a little dance, and — via Milchick’s awkward awards show-style banter with an animatronic statue of Kier Eagan(**) — a little seltzer down the pants. And even if it were just a transparent attempt to get Tramell Tillman to break out some more slick dance moves, don’t we deserve nice things even in these trying times?     

(*) There are many ways in which it’s best to not think too deeply about the mechanics of severance, but I have endless questions about this idea. What does it cost to keep an entire marching band — which presumably doesn’t perform that often — on salary? Do the members of the band just hang out elsewhere on the severed floor every day, or are they only brought in on days when they’re going to play? Is this some kind of weird scholarship program? And can someone (say, a young woman on a Lumon fellowship) somehow play a theremin while on the march?

(**) Milchick’s rising anger over the insults being delivered at his expense — a literal dead man (or, at least, his image performed by a Lumon employee in another room) scoring points off of him  — and his decision to return verbal fire, continues the season-long trend of him realizing in what low esteem the Eagans hold him. He still tries to do their bidding here in his attempt to stop Mark, but it wouldn’t be the least bit shocking if, at some point in a third season, he wound up reteaming with Harmony as a fellow bitter ex-employee.   

While Milchick is in mid-groove, Mark sprints away(*), and the action gets bifurcated from there. In MDR, Helly has to keep Milchick from pursuing Mark, eventually getting help from Dylan(**) and even from the band members, who are swayed by the notion of innie solidarity. (Helly warns them that they could all be turned off like machines at any moment, then roars, “They give us half a life and think we won’t fight for it!”) And Mark has to make it through a physical and emotional gauntlet, first in pitched battle with the superhuman bulk of Drummond, then in a quieter moment with Gemma. 

(*) It’s an episode with a lot of running, including the unexpected, hilarious moment where Milchick dashes off midway through his conversation with Dylan — because, we realize later, he had to do a costume change before the big show could begin. 

(**) Unsurprisingly, for a show that should have no reason to want to say goodbye to Zach Cherry, Outie Dylan refuses to accept Innie Dylan’s resignation — or, at least, offers him a chance to reconsider the idea. After continuing to stew over his unfair lot in life, and his envy of his outie’s relationship with Gretchen, Dylan finally decides that his friends are worth fighting for, and he uses a vending machine as a barricade to slow Milchick’s escape.

The brawl offers thrills a-plenty. As Drummond, Darri Ólafsson cuts such an opposing figure — especially opposite a performer as physically slight as Adam Scott — that it feels like death could be coming for Mark at any second. But as usual, Lumon’s own arrogance proves its undoing. Because Drummond can’t be bothered to get his own hands dirty in order to complete the ritual sacrifice of the goat, he has just placed a deadly weapon into the hands of a woman who loves goats far more than she cares about people, who has clearly had to suffer through too many prior sacrifices, and who is a towering statue in her own right. Season Two didn’t exactly get full use out of casting of Gwendoline Christie as Lorne, relying mostly on viewers’ prior knowledge of her as Brienne to prepare us for the moment when she steps in to save Mark. But if Milchick’s dancing can be both shameless and entertaining, so can this indoor recreation of Brienne vs. the Hound in miniature, especially because it’s followed by the incredible, sick punchline of Innie Mark arguing to spare Drummond’s life, just before Outie Mark accidentally shoots the smug oaf right in the jugular(*).

(*) There’s also a great light moment a few beats before, where Lorne tells Mark that the goat is named Emil, and he — stunned by the recent violence and also at a loss for how to respond to this detail — stammers, “Oh! Okay!” No matter the context, Scott is a superb comedian.  

Outie Mark’s appeal to Gemma — who has been placed in a scenario designed to figure out just how much separation there is her real, grief-stricken self and the fake personality Innie Mark just created for her — is deliberately smaller, and well-played by Scott and Dichen Lachman. But it’s undercut at least somewhat by the show’s vagueness about the full details of Cold Harbor. The season’s seventh episode gave us a rough outline of what it does, in going several steps beyond severance to reprogram people’s minds with custom-built personalities. We just don’t know exactly how it’s meant to be applied, what would happen to Gemma and Mark upon its completion, nor even why it’s so bad for Mark to release Gemma back out into the world. It’s not even clear whether any of the real Gemma bled into the latest personality, or if the scenario — dismantling a baby crib — was so inherently sad that any stranger offering a similar plea would have coaxed her out of the room and back into her true self. It seems like Mark is getting through to some version of his wife, especially given how upset Jame Eagan and Dr. Mauer(*) are by Mark’s mere presence. But the show is ambiguous enough about all of this that it doesn’t hit as hard as it’s meant to.

(*) When Mark is liberating Gemma, Dr. Mauer screams that he’ll “kill them all!” Presumably, he means that Gemma’s various programmed innies will cease to exist if she gets out of the building. Which raises the question of whether these personalities qualify as people in the same way that, say, Innie Mark or Helly do. Dr. Mauer certainly seems to think of them that way.

It’s one of a number of fuzzy ideas from this season that have rendered it less effective overall compared to the first. Though Innie Mark tells Helly that he knows why Lumon is doing all of this, it doesn’t seem as if Harmony has told him — or us — enough  to truly understand. There were also various issues with pacing and character in the episodes that came after “Woe’s Hollow.” The show didn’t seem to know what to do with Mark’s response to being assaulted by Helena, so it downplayed it altogether and focused only on Helly’s anguish. (Which is an important detail, too; there just should have been room for both.) The Irving and Dylan subplots both wound up underfed because so much time was being devoted to other issues, including two episodes late in the season where neither character appeared at all. We still know nothing about what Outie Irving was up to, with whom he was working, how (or if) Innie Irving knew about any of it, and it feels like the show skipped multiple steps in dramatizing whatever the relationship is between Outie Irving and Outie Burt. Even the idea introduced in the finale that Jame Eagan has come to prefer his daughter’s innie to her outie feels like we needed another beat or two between him and Helena earlier in the year. 

Yet “Cold Harbor” is so full of energy, so full of Severance-specific ideas and conflicts, that it covers up a lot of those prior missteps, even as it creates big questions about what would happen in a third season. (Apple hasn’t officially ordered one, but Ben Stiller has said the writers are already at work on it.) The prison break is an improbable success, sort of. Gemma reverts to Ms. Casey when she gets to the severed floor, but Innie Mark is there to guide her to the exit, where she becomes herself again and assumes he will quickly follow her. Instead, he looks behind him, sees Helly, and decides that he would rather continue to exist, with her, for as long as he possibly can, rather than risk Outie Mark taking his wife and running far, far away from this place, never to think of his innie again. 

It’s in many ways a futile gesture, even a self-destructive one. What is the best possible outcome for Mark and Helly in this circumstance? Do they just keep hiding out in various rooms on this enormous but not infinite level? Are there enough snacks down there for them to subsist on for years? (And what happens if Lumon security stakes out all the bathrooms?) More than likely, they are caught, Helly is forced to go upstairs to turn back into Helena, and either Mark is murdered for doing such damage to Lumon’s plan (and for killing a Lumon executive), or Innie Mark essentially dies when Lumon also forces him to go upstairs. Maybe the two of them are held prisoner down there for a while, being tortured by Milchick (or whomever is brought in to replace him after two separate catastrophes have happened under his watch). But if they’re going down, they want to go down together, so the season concludes with a freeze-frame of them on the move as Mel Torme’s version of “The Windmills of Your Mind” (a song famous for its use in the original Steve McQueen/Faye Dunaway version of The Thomas Crown Affair) plays. 

Of course, Season One ended at a moment where it seemed like it would be difficult for the show to walk back. Yet by the end of this season’s premiere, Mark, Helly, Dylan, and Irving were all back at work in MDR, at least for a little while. Whatever issues this season had, stepping back from the ledge on which the entire premise seemed to be finding itself at the conclusion of last season isn’t the root cause. 

I spoke with Severance creator Dan Erickson about this season, and about this precarious spot in which it ends. He expressed some concern that “the discourse” about the show can often trend much more towards Easter eggs and pieces of Lumon backstory and away from what he feels is the heart of the series: the terrible thing that’s been done to these characters, and how they have to deal with it. Season Two didn’t always help itself in that regard, devoting entire installments to Cold Harbor and to the origin of the severance process itself. But it ended in a place that leans into the best and most important parts of the series, and that reckons with its core ideas in exciting, surprising, funny, and moving ways. If we somehow have to wait another three years for a new season, those parts feel more likely to stick with both my innie and outie viewers than the material that felt frustrating earlier in the year.