Your best self is your worst nightmare

On Severance and what it means to come alive

All is forgiven, Severance!

I will admit, I found myself getting frustrated with the Apple TV show throughout its second season. Twists that were meant to land like a surprise left hook ended up feeling obvious and telegraphed. As in, it seemed clear from the first episode that Helly was not actually Helly, but instead, Helena pretending to be Helly as to spy on the inner workings of Macrodata Refinement? That seemed apparent to me, personally, from the first episode of the season. Certain storylines also felt like placeholders for larger revelations, as in the whole episode where Cobel visits her hometown. We learn, there, that she worked for Lumon in one of their ‘ether factories,’ that she won a scholarship to work at Lumon corporate (the same one, the Wintertide Scholarship, that Miss Huang of the current season won) and, of greatest import, that she was the one who invented the severance procedure, not Jame Eagan, Lumon CEO. Presumably her work became the intellectual property of Lumon, and she was denied credit. But did we really need an entire episode to learn that? Feels like Lost would have filled that in with a three-minute flashback, then gotten back to Hurley making a coconut radio.

But the finale, which aired last week and is titled “Cold Harbor,” was a return to form. It was exciting, funny, surprising, emotional. And it also highlighted one of the fundamental ironies of the show: that the story, which looks an awful lot like a critique of office work as a form of indentured servitude, still needs the employees to remain in the office. Because how else would you have a show?

There’s a lot of plot happening here, so let me summarize as briefly as I can: Mark has learned that his wife, Gemma, is not dead from a car accident as he believed, but is instead being held in the basement of Lumon, below his own severed floor. She has been undergoing a series of experiments where she is further severed not once, not twice, but twenty-five more times. Each new consciousness is confined to a single room experiencing some trauma: painful dental work, a plane crash.

Also, the “mysterious and important work” that Mark and his colleagues have been doing is tied in directly with the experiment on Gemma. The numbers they shift around on their computer screens result, through some still-unexplained method, in the creation of each new personality for Gemma, down in the basement. The final file they work on, and the final room Gemma has to enter, is titled Cold Harbor. And when Mark finally completes his last file, Gemma enters the final room. She has no memory whatsoever. She is confronted with an empty crib, an embodiment of the greatest trauma from her real life. She had a miscarriage, and her husband Mark, in a fit of anger, took apart the crib. She now has to reenact that trauma.

She does, but she betrays no emotion at all. A doctor watching on the other side of a screen says that “the barrier is holding” suggesting that the pain from her original trauma is not affecting this blank Gemma at all. This, it seems, is the goal of Lumon’s severance procedure: to sever people from their pain, so they no longer feel it.

Mark does indeed descend to the basement, rescue Gemma from the Cold Harbor room, and take her back up to the exit, to escape the Lumon building. But—and this is important—Mark himself does not leave. Or rather, Mark’s innie does not leave, instead remaining himself on the severed floor, so that he can take Helly by the hand and run off…somewhere? On the severed floor presumably, since that’s the only place they can exist? The episode ends there, on a downright cinematic freeze frame.

It would be easy, and basically correct, to see Mark’s choice to remain on the severed floor with Helly, rather than escape with his wife Gemma, as merely the machinations of the plot. It has been confirmed that Season 3 is in the works, and a severed love triangle (love square?) makes for an ideal conflict. But something more fundamental, more human, is at play here too. Mark chooses to remain on the severed floor with Helly because that is where he is at his best as a person.

Mark S, the severed self, is, strangely enough, the best, fullest version of himself. He is curious, loyal, devoted, faithful. Mark Scout, in the outside world, is depressed, withdrawn, eternally sarcastic, incapable of expressing any emotion other than anger. Severing himself from that outside version does him a favor.

He is not alone, either. Helly, when she is in the outside world, is Helena Eagan, heir to the Lumon empire. She is devoted to her father, Jame, as a kind of humorless Shiv Roy. But Jame, like Logan Roy, cannot stand his daughter. In a thrilling scene, Jame travels to the severed floor himself, and confronts Helly, the severed self of his daughter. He tells her that he hates his daughter, that she brings him shame for not embodying the boundless spirit of Kier Eagan, founder of Lumon. But Helly, the severed innie, does embody that spirit. He says so. When she tells him to scram, he declares that, there, is the spirit of Kier, the spirit he has labored long to bring back into the world, siring children with unknown women, like an Elon Musk of metempsychosis. Jame sees what we, the audience, see: that Helly, not Helena, is the best version of herself.

Thus we see the central irony of Severance: these innies are, in a real sense, slaves. Persons condemned to servitude without their consent. But it is that very quality that makes them more compelling, more interesting, more human, than their real world outies.

And what are we, the audience at home, to make of this? Often we think that who we are at work is the truncated, uninteresting version of ourselves, and only do we become who we fully are when we leave work for our personal lives. I think this myself, working at a grocery store and stocking milk on shelves. But what if that is where I come most alive? What if that is the Best Adam that exists?

Or perhaps I am my Best Adam here, writing these thoughts to you, pure mind and emotion, having left our bodies behind. Tap your keyboard like the innies of Severance and fashion a new personality for me. I’ll be here all the while, waiting.