‘Severance’ Creator on Season 2 Finale and the Show’s Future

This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Severance, which is now streaming on Apple TV+. 

A whole lot happens in the Severance Season Two finale, which we recapped here. Most notably, Innie and Outie Mark did a team-up of sorts to liberate Outie Mark’s wife Gemma from her imprisonment in one of Lumon’s sub-basements. But Innie Mark chose not to follow her out of the severed floor, since he doesn’t want to turn back into Outie Mark and risk ceasing to exist forever. 

It’s a lot to sort through — especially since Apple hasn’t officially ordered a third season yet, even though producer Ben Stiller has said the writers are already at work on one. To discuss how the season got to this point, Rolling Stone spoke with the series’ creator, Dan Erickson, via Zoom last week. 

How much are you interested in the show remaining ambiguous about its mysteries? Not necessarily because you don’t know answers, but because you want it to be purposefully unclear?
That is a tricky balance to hit. Anybody who does a mystery show like this grapples with that. I feel people deserve some modicum of satisfaction, and they deserve some answers in exchange for their time. I try to set up interesting questions that I know we can answer in the short term. But you can really take the fun out of something by over-explaining it too soon. I want to always feel like what we’ve got is this interesting character drama with this big, mysterious, kind of unseen thing in the background. And I don’t want to take the mystery out of that. So the big alpha mysteries of the show, regarding what the company is ultimately up to and and what their agenda is, those are likely to remain mysterious for some time.

Do you expect the audience to come out of this season understanding everything that Cold Harbor is meant to do?
Not everything, no. There was a version of the script where we explained more, and it was a little more overt. We found a great deal of the joy of the show is people being able to debate and discuss things. And also that our audience is very smart. We wanted to leave room for people to discuss and debate what it means. The answer of what Cold Harbor is, even if you understand that pretty overtly, it leads into a bigger question of the company’s ultimate agenda, and that will remain unknown. 

Drummond says in an earlier episode that it will be one of the most important events in the history of the planet. Is this more Eagan self-mythologizing, or could it really be that impactful?
I think that that’s still unclear at the end of that season. The Eagans certainly are grandiose, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not actually trying to do something Earth-changing.

When I watched the Gemma episode, I couldn’t help thinking of a show Dichen Lachman did in the late 2000s called Dollhouse, where she is also playing a character who is programmed with these other personalities. Is that something you had seen before you wrote this?
Yeah. I had seen Dollhouse. But it’s funny: It didn’t really occur to me until we were well into writing the episode that it was a little bit similar in concept. But we knew that Dichen was going to be able to do that very well.

When the first season ended with the innies pulling this rebellion and putting the company in danger, I wondered how in the world would the show justify having them return to work. And you spent a fair amount of time on that over the course of this season. Then by the end of the season, Irving is no longer working there, and Mark has just killed a Lumon executive and foiled their plans for Cold Harbor. In the mechanics of the series, how do you keep coming up with ways in which these characters would still be working in this place?
We like to blow up the formula at the end of each season and see if we could bring it back. I don’t want to speak too much about what Season Three would look like. But I will say that we wanted to do something that blew up the world even more than in the first season. It’s a really valid question that people will be asking: “Can the show continue in the format that we’ve been seeing, or is it going to need to transform into something else?” 

With the choice that Innie Mark makes in the final moments of the season, you set up this dynamic where, on the one hand, Innie Mark and Helly can’t leave the severed floor, otherwise they would cease to exist. Because why in the world would Outie Mark or Helena ever go back down again after what’s happened? I assume that is a thing that you guys are wrestling a lot with as you’re working on Season Three?
In that moment when he’s looking at Gemma and he’s looking at Helly, he’s not just deciding between two women, he’s deciding about existence or non-existence as an innie. He realizes that leaving with Gemma means that his life as he knows it is over. Over the course of the season, he’s reached this point where he is able to value his own existence as an individual independent of his outie. Even though getting Gemma out and helping his outie has been his main goal over the course of the season, when it gets to that moment, he chooses his own life. But I think in that moment, they don’t know what they’re running toward. They may be running toward five more minutes of life, or they may be trying for more. I don’t think they know. 

Was there a version of this season where you thought of having the reintegration work?
We discussed a couple of different versions of it. Yes, we could have taken it further. Ultimately, though, there were interesting things to explore along the way of that process, and we wanted to give that its due time. 

So that leads into the question of pacing. On the one hand, you had the Helena-Helly mystery, which some people were wondering about as early as the end of the season premiere. Other shows might have strung that out over the whole season, but you answered it by the end of the fourth episode, before the audience got impatient. On the other hand, Mark begins the reintegration process at the end of the third episode, and it still hasn’t worked by the time of the finale. How do you balance pacing these various arcs over the course of a season?
It’s just case by case. With the Helly reveal, there was a version where we revealed it by Episode Two, and there was a period where the audience knew it was Helena and the characters did not. The fact that the audience and the discourse that the audience has is such a big part of the show — we were very aware of that. We wanted people to be able to talk about what it means. With Mark, we leave him in this place now, where he’s having these flashes between his innie and outie life, he’s not fully reintegrated, but he’s getting these glimpses, and that makes him different from any other severed person on the show. We ultimately want to just live in that world for a while, and that wasn’t was something we decided not to resolve this season.

When you get ready to write something like the scene where Helly and Mark meet the goat people, or come up with the idea that there is a severed marching band, how much do you feel you need to work out the explanation for it, even if it’s never explained on the show itself?
We oftentimes lead with crazy. We’ll put something in there because it tickles us and makes us excited. Something that would throw us off if we were watching the show. But that is immediately followed up with, “OK, can we justify it within this show?” This is a company that can produce a whole stop-motion short animation over the course of a weekend, so they’re not without resources. But, yeah, you have to justify it in what they’re able to do, but also in the philosophy of the company, going back to Kier Egan. Why do they feel these things are important? And again, a lot of it will remain behind the scenes, but we have to have answers to it, just so there’s an internal logic for us. 

So you understand why there is value in the company having an entire severed marching band on salary, that only has to come out and perform on special occasions?
Correct.

The episode where Harmony goes back to her hometown establishes that Lumon openly uses child labor. As you say, there’s a lot of discourse about the show. One of the things people speculate about all the time is, how much does the world actually know about what Lumon does, and how is Lumon able to get away with all of it? How do you figure out how much you want the audience to know, beyond what is specifically happening in and around that one office building?
It’s tricky. It’s easy to justify crazy things happening on the severed floor, because no information can get in or out. But as we were writing the show, we were researching different companies, and cults, and organizations that really do manage to get away with horrific or unethical things that oftentimes are hidden in plain sight, or surrounded by an unofficial code of silence, or there’s enough loyalty to the group that these things that you think would be impossible not to come out instead wind up in an insular space. It’s severing without severance, you know? We wanted to explore that, too. I think the town of Salt’s Neck is a place where there was probably massive loyalty and gratitude to the company, so there’s a sense of turning a blind eye to certain things. Sometimes, you can get away with child labor by calling it something else. These things are real. These aren’t things I feel like we have to exaggerate that much.

Harmony is in every scene of that episode, but she’s not in much of the season. Why did you decide to write Patricia out of the show for such a long stretch?
Because she seemed so much like Lumon incarnate in the first episode, I was really fascinated to see what it would be like to cast her out of that world and put her somewhere where she was uncomfortable and where she had to contend with this question of who might she have been had she not been raised in this company, and had her identity of Harmony Cobel not been so meticulously crafted by her place in the company. We didn’t necessarily in the beginning set out to make that a bottle episode. It was something that we came to over time. But ultimately, the show is so much about isolation, people are isolated in different places, it just felt right to tell that story in one go, and not have it interspersed in other stories. We wanted her to feel totally alone, and so placing her literally alone in her own episode felt right.

One of the interesting threads from the season is that Milchick is given these paintings that are meant to make him feel closer to the company, and instead it seems to be the first real chink in the armor he’s built around himself regarding his feelings about Lumon, because it reminds him he is a Black man in this white supremacist company. Later on, Drummond’s complaints about Milchick’s vocabulary are clearly tied to Drummond’s preconceived notions about race. Where did the idea for that come from? And how far do you feel you can go with it in the context of a show where so many other things are happening?
I had had a lot of conversations with Tramell [Tillman, who plays Milchick] and with others on the show. In Season One, we really didn’t acknowledge Milchick’s race or the specific experience he would have in a company like Lumon. But over time, that started to feel necessary, especially because there were so many parallels between Lumon and so many real-world companies where whiteness is such a presence and institution. The more I talked to people of color who had come up in an organization like that, and the really weird and specific types of racism — which were often dressed up as acceptance — it just became a part of the story that we felt we had to tell. I wanted to do it in a way that was still in the tone of the show, and felt like it was still within the weird humor of the show. 

When the innies arrive at Woe’s Hollow and Milchick says that this is the tallest waterfall on the planet, why does he say that?
I think he can’t help himself. I love it, because it’s such an unnecessary little lie. It helps no one, it achieves nothing. And yet he just has to claim it. It’s the grandiosity of Lumon. They have the best melon and the best waffle parties, and of course their national forest that they own has the tallest waterfall on the planet. It’s a kind of weird forced grandiosity that seems to be prevalent in politics right now. It felt true to our times. 

You talked before about being aware of the discourse around the show. There are all these theories about why the cars and most of the technology are from the Nineties or earlier, whether the outie world is set in a post-climate-apocalypse world, etc. As the person who created the show and is writing so much of it, how do you feel about that being the focus of at least some of the audience?
I feel honored that people are putting that much energy into it, and that people are interested in it enough to engage their own creativity. I also feel a little anxious about it, because I think that the more people get an idea in their head of what specifically they think is going on, the more likely they are to be disappointed if that’s not the case, and to possibly feel like a promise was made and not fulfilled. I don’t want anyone to feel that way. So, I do worry a little bit that we’re not going to be able to please everybody at the end of the day. What we have planned for where it all goes is extremely exciting. But at the end of the day, I wish we could make a million versions of this show that fulfill what everybody wants it to be. But I can only hope that what we end up coming up with is satisfying to people. 

Were you a fan of Lost?
Yes. 

So you may recall that toward the end of that show, the showrunners spent a lot of time in public saying that the audience was not necessarily going to get answers to everything, and that they were focusing more on the characters than the mystery. And yet there was some portion of the audience that was upset they didn’t learn more about the numbers, the statue, or the other mythology. How do you try to reconcile that? And how important do you feel the mythology of Lumon is versus this specific story of what’s happening to these four people?
Lost was, of course, a pioneering show in this kind of genre and world. You always try to learn from what came before. I was more satisfied by Lost than a lot of other people were, specifically because I was happy with where the characters ended up. But it’s something that I’m very aware of. People come up to me and say, “Hey, you’re not going to leave us hanging the way Lost did, are you?” I try really hard not to point at mysteries that I know I’m not going to answer. There are things, of course, that are happening on the show that are there to build out and enrich the world, and we’re not going to go through and explain the genesis of all those things and take the fun out. But in terms of the mysteries that we are specifically pointing at, I like to think that people will be satisfied by the answers.

We’ve seen enough of the outie versions of Mark, Dylan, and Irving to know that they are roughly the same people as their innies. But Helly and Helena seem extremely different. Is there something in the severance process that was different for her? Or is perhaps the version of Helena that we see out in the world not necessarily like who she really is, versus who she is presenting to her family?
Of all the outie characters, Helena is the one who is the most masked. I think that she was raised with a very specific purpose, which is to be the best Lumon leader that she can be. I like to think that when she was young, there was a lot more Helly in her. And a lot of that got stamped out. So she’s walking around, playing this character, without even realizing it, that she has been forced to craft. So I think that if Helly seems really different from her, that’s why. 

There were three years between seasons. A lot of that was out of your control. But given how long you wound up being away, was there any internal concern over the fact that a lot of the season would depend on characters and ideas that appeared only briefly in Season One, like Reghabi or the cabin?
I know that a lot of people rewatched the first season before going into the second. We also have done a lot of work with Apple on the recaps, which are very strategically made to remind people of certain things. But yeah, it’s something we had to think about. 

Are there any things you learned from making this season that you can apply to a third season?
Just the fact that we know people are going to be extremely analytical about the show, and they are going to read into every detail. That’s something to be wary of, and also something we can use to our advantage. 

Finally, how long do you see this story continuing for?
We’ve talked about it, and we’re pretty sure that we know how long it’s going. We’re keeping that close to the chest still at this point, but we have a pretty good sense of it.