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The second season of \u201cSeverance\u201d just wrapped up with its longest episode yet. We have thoughts. Spoilers abound.<\/em><\/p>\n There are endings that give you what you want. There are endings that don\u2019t give you what you want. There are endings that give you what you don\u2019t want.<\/p>\n Then there are endings that make you wonder what exactly you should want, which was what the \u201cSeverance\u201d Season 2 finale<\/a> did.<\/p>\n The first season of \u201cSeverance\u201d gave us some clear rooting interests. We wanted Mark Scout to find his not-dead-yet wife, Gemma. And we wanted Mark S. and the rest of his innie colleagues to find freedom, self-determination and love. But the finale hit a realization that the season had been building to: These two wants might not be compatible, at least not easily.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The two Marks having the world\u2019s weirdest Zoom conversation at the birthing cabin laid the conflict out. The series has shown them to date as twin protagonists wronged by the mighty Lumon corporation. But there\u2019s a power dynamic between the two of them as well, as innie Mark says with growing frustration.<\/p>\n Outie Mark has more agency, more legitimacy under the law, more life on earth. And as the conversation goes on, we see him through the eyes of his innie. The sweet, sad, grief-stricken man we\u2019d come to know begins to look \u2026 a little smug? A little cagey? He tries to say the right thing, but there\u2019s a bit of a lip-service vibe, like he wants to make restitution without actually sacrificing anything. It\u2019s like he\u2019s making a land acknowledgment for his own brain.<\/p>\n We know outie Mark has a heart. But can you blame innie Mark for wondering if he\u2019s just giving a kinder, gentler version of Helena Eagan\u2019s dismissal to Helly from Season 1: \u201cYou are not a person\u201d?<\/p>\n Maybe there\u2019s a win-win solution; maybe reintegration will really work; maybe both can share joint tenancy of one body. Or maybe outie Mark is blowing smoke! The finale doesn\u2019t resolve this \u2014 or much else \u2014 but it does force us to wonder, push comes to shove, whose happy ending we want. (Not to mention whose happy endings matter: Gemma makes it out, but what about the dozens of innies nurtured in her brain? Are they any less real than Mark S. and Helly R., simply because we spent less time watching them on TV?)<\/p>\n Innie Mark chooses himself, and Helly R., escaping through the klaxon-blaring chaos of the Lumon halls as the episode ends, \u00e0 la \u201cThe Graduate,\u201d with the elation on the lovers\u2019 faces shifting to seeming anxiety. There is no certain future for them inside Lumon, after all. But sometimes you can\u2019t help getting in your own way.<\/p>\n \u2014James Poniewozik<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The second season of \u201cSeverance\u201d ended with multiple innies dramatically taking charge of their half-lives.<\/p>\n They include Mark S. and Helly R., who, in the closing moments of the chaotic finale, forsook Mark\u2019s wife and embraced an uncertain future of running through hallways together. Dylan G. seemingly dropped his resignation plan and recommitted to Team Macrodata Refinement. Even Lorne the melancholy goat queen decided she\u2019d had enough and beat the ghoulish Mr. Drummond into submission. (Here\u2019s hoping we see Lorne\u2019s outie in Season 3 \u2014 she must have lots of questions.)<\/p>\n But let\u2019s also spare a thought for the man who was charged with maintaining order and utterly failed: Mr. Milchick, last seen facing a defiant Dylan and an angry marching band. (This show is so nutty.) Milchick\u2019s dejected reflection in the bathroom mirror, as the red alert blared and he realized it had all gone wrong, was as poignant as anything else in the episode.<\/p>\n I was moved partly in solidarity with a fellow middle manager but mostly because Tramell Tillman<\/a> has been the show\u2019s M.V.P. all season. Consider a small sample of what \u201cSeverance\u201d has asked him to do: tell a bonkers campfire story in one scene and extinguish an innie in the next; endure loaded critiques of his vocabulary and maintain a chilly professional relationship with a child; and, in the finale, co-host a laugh-tracked tribute show with an animatronic statue and flaunt halftime-worthy drum major moves with the marching band.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Tillman has managed to make all of this and more work while delivering the show\u2019s best lines \u2014 \u201cI feel the theremin works best in moderation\u201d \u2014 and transmitting the bottled fury of a man who has given all of himself and been rewarded with disrespect and racist microaggressions from his Lumon superiors, including the statue. (Again, nutty.)<\/p>\n Midway through the finale, Milchick gives Dylan his outie\u2019s reply to his resignation request. \u201cAs it may yield an embarrassing emotional response in you, and as I\u2019m duly swamped,\u201d he says, \u201cI shall leave you to read it in solitude.\u201d I too am swamped. But if Milchick is involved, I\u2019m here for it.<\/p>\n \u2014Jeremy Egner<\/p>\n \u201cSeverance\u201d gets my brains working, which can be a problem.<\/p>\n My TV brain \u2014 call it my innie \u2014 understands that Mark S. stays in the offices of Lumon Industries at the end of the Season 2 finale because that is the only place he is alive, and the only place he can be with Helly R., the woman he loves. It understands that this makes sense, and is heartbreaking, within the parameters of the show.<\/p>\n But my real-world brain \u2014 that nagging outie \u2014 sees Mark\u2019s wife, Gemma, standing outside, thinks that his decision makes no real-world sense and loses any sympathy it had for him. Unfortunately, unlike Mark, I can\u2019t turn that one off.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n I have been on board from the beginning for the show\u2019s startling premise, and for the muted uncanniness of its execution. Mark and Helly\u2019s season-ending dash through the corridors of Lumon, like rats in a maze or romantics in the Louvre in a Godard film, was exhilarating.<\/p>\n An emphasis on novelty and style can come at a cost, though, and the bill came due as Season 2 went along. The element of ritualistic cultlike weirdness in the workings of Lumon felt more artificial and frivolous than ever after the finale\u2019s marching-band performance and aborted goat sacrifice. The ultimate answers to what Lumon is up to \u2014 mind control? digitization of consciousness? \u2014 felt less interesting. What seem to me to be the holes in the ingenious premise (why would anyone sign up for separation knowing that they had to clock out and come home every night?) got more bothersome. And without John Turturro\u2019s Irving and Christopher Walken\u2019s Burt, the finale was missing the show\u2019s two most appealing performances. Oh well, no waffle party for me.<\/p>\n \u2014Mike Hale<\/p>\n In the Season 2 finale of \u201cSeverance,\u201d Mark S. completes his 25th macrodata refinement file. A celebration ensues, culminating in a performance by a full marching band. The scene, however sinister, enacts a fantasy that hard, tedious work will be rewarded. The episode also insists, for perhaps the first time on \u201cSeverance,\u201d that the work the show\u2019s characters do has a material purpose, that it matters.<\/p>\n A chilly, bizarro tragicomedy, \u201cSeverance\u201d is fundamentally about work and the numbing futility (enlivened by friendship, flirtation and the occasional egg bar social) of most office jobs. For 19 episodes, Mark S.\u2019s job has been an empty exercise: using a trackball to sort and group seemingly random numbers. (It\u2019s like the dullest grayscale version of Candy Crush Saga.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The finale reveals that this seemingly pointless work has a point, sharp and painful, involving Gemma, the wife of Mark S.\u2019s outie, now trapped on the company\u2019s testing floor. Or as Harmony Cobel, Mark S.\u2019s former supervisor puts it, \u201cThe numbers are your wife.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSeverance\u201d has always depended on the paradoxical \u2014 but maybe also at least somewhat true? \u2014 notion that work is both a respite and a hassle. Mark S.\u2019s outie agrees to the severance procedure so that he won\u2019t have to mourn his wife during work hours. (He also, in his video conversation with his innie, indicates that it was perhaps the only way he could function in a workplace after her \u201cdeath.\u201d) A bonus is that his outie can elide the tedium of number sorting. Working for the weekend? Congrats. Your outie is all weekend. The show has never before insisted that the work itself is vital.<\/p>\n Though the timing is obviously coincidental, the finale arrives in a moment when many thousands of federal workers have been asked<\/a> to justify their jobs. And it suggests that even tasks that seem needless, superfluous, might be absolutely essential.<\/p>\n But even if that\u2019s true of the work, it\u2019s not necessarily true of the workers, who might be let go at any moment. Discarded, as Cobel colorfully explains, \u201clike a skin husk.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014Alexis Soloski<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nWhose Side Are We On?<\/h2>\n
\nMy Outie Is Concerned<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\nThe Meaning of Work<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n