One sublime finale scene cuts through all the season’s noise. Photo: Apple TV+
Spoilers follow for Severance season two, episode ten, “Cold Harbor.”
There’s a scene in Severance’s season-two finale that feels inevitable and impossible at the same time. To this point, the show has maintained a nearly impervious wall between grief-stricken widower Mark Scout and his alternate self, imprisoned Lumon Innie Mark S. They are intimately linked; each Mark’s existence relies on the continued participation of the other. They are the same and yet wholly different people. Innie Mark can’t talk to Outie Mark, and that barrier has been Severance’s central source of tension.
At last, though, Ms. Cobel and Mark’s sister, Devon, realize they can scale that divide by taking Mark to the remote birthing cabins, first introduced in season one, where women escape the pain of childbirth by transitioning to an Innie self. The trio is working on a plan to free Mark Scout’s wife, Gemma, from somewhere deep inside the Lumon facility, and they need Mark S.’s participation. Using a camcorder, the two Marks walk back and forth across the Innie/Outie barrier, watching the alternate-Mark footage and recording responses. “The first thing I need to say to you is that I am so sorry. I created you as a prisoner and an escape,” Outie Mark says. “You’ve been living a nightmare for two years.” “Nightmare is the wrong word, actually,” Innie Mark responds. “We find ways to make it work.”
Compared with Severance’s usual storytelling mode in season two, where any explicit plot point is buried in layers of ambiguity, vagueness, and artful indirection, the conversation between the Marks is immediately, beautifully blunt. There are no hidden motives, no creepy goats or unexplained ether huffing. There’s just Mark Scout and his Innie having a straightforward conversation about what they both want, how they want to get it, and what the stakes are for both of them.
It’s a shocking scene, all the more effective and upsetting because of how fuzzily low-rent it feels — Mark’s face is partially cut off on a tiny, high-contrast camcorder screen — compared with Severance’s typical moody, stark landscapes and queasily clean fluorescent interiors. It’s also a huge relief. At this point in the season, the screws have been turning tighter and tighter in ways the show doesn’t always pace well. The Cold Harbor completion rate has sat just short of 100 percent for way too long. Much of season two’s discoveries, especially in the later half, loop back to the past, with time spent learning about Cobel’s childhood and understanding where Gemma has been all this time. The conversation between the two Marks finally offers a meaningful push of forward momentum.
More fundamentally, though, the discussion between Innie Mark and Outie Mark stems from exactly the place where Severance’s writing works best. They’re talking about their real lives and real futures, sure, but it’s through a very heady, very abstract conversation about what it is to be a self, how much value an unseen laborer’s life can possibly have, how much Mark Scout is culpable for the tragedy of Mark S.’s existence, and what responsibility these two men have toward each other. Taken as a whole, the conversation proves that these are, in fact, two different men. The audience has known this all along, but the dual Marks’ conversation emphasizes that Outie Mark has not, and by the end, he still cannot accept it.
The arc of their discussion moves from suspicion to wonderment to good-faith negotiation, with Outie Mark trying to talk his Innie into what he sees as a fair compromise. They can help each other! If his Innie will only help him find Gemma and get her out of Lumon, then he can offer Innie Mark a form of escape as well. They’ll reintegrate, and Innie Mark will no longer be trapped in what is essentially a form of slavery. From Mark Scout’s point of view, it’s all upside. But when Innie Mark starts to ask reasonable questions about how this will all work, Mark Scout responds with the tone and logic one might use to try to talk down a toddler on the verge of a tantrum. Outie Mark’s concept of the world is predicated on the belief that Innie Mark is a brief and regrettable blip, and when Innie Mark starts pushing back, Outie Mark can barely summon the patience to hear him out. His love for Gemma is more legitimate than Innie Mark’s relationship with Helly; his life and his family outside of Lumon are real and complex, and Innie Mark’s world is tiny and simplistic. It’s not that he wants to hurt his Innie. It’s that his Innie does not really exist, and so hurting him does not matter.
Adam Scott does remarkable work as the dual Marks; his performance elevates the scene from a stark philosophical discussion into something palpable and tragic and infuriating. Because the performance is so striking, in fact, it’s suddenly clear how much has been lost on the way to arriving at this point. In the service of emotional spectacle and visual style, Severance season two often sacrificed storytelling logic for what looks really cool. This problem is all over the rest of the finale: Why on God’s green earth is there an entire severed marching band? Are they severed on some kind of freelance contract basis? Have they been trained to play instruments once they were severed, or do people retain their saxophone skills across the severed barrier? How does it make sense to use resources for a marching band but not adequate security staff? Why does it take so long for anyone to intervene once Mark starts sprinting around the building? Why is the exit door unlocked?! Despite Severance’s growing attempts to court Easter egg–level readings, with its cluelike names for all of Gemma’s different Innie rooms and its perpetual hinting at further mysteries to unravel, the show cannot sustain the detail-level logic. Its visual approach and overall direction remain stunning, but the show perpetually prioritizes those elements over obvious questions about mechanics and motives.
It’s frustrating, because to its enormous credit, Severance cares, deeply, about the big underlying questions of its premise. When its visual panache is harnessed in the service of the show’s core questions rather than following cars as they wind endlessly through winter landscapes, Severance is incredibly compelling. It has built two whole seasons of TV to arrive at this moment between the two Marks, this very plausible and unbearably sad proof that even its own protagonist cannot see his Innie’s humanity. The show loves to invest buckets of energy into marching bands and ORTBOs, but all of it works best when it’s primarily functioning as the set dressing for this big Socratic argument at the show’s heart, about who exists in the world, who matters, and who is disposable.
