<i>Severance</i> Season 2 Finale Recap: The Great Escape

Spoilers below.

For weeks, Severance fans have been pouring their energy into some truly gut-wrenching fan edits, many of which addressed Mark, Helly, and Gemma’s trials through the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. For those unfamiliar, that Greek myth follows the romance between Orpheus, a musician and poet, and Eurydice, a wood nymph, whose death leads Orpheus to embark on a trip to the underworld. There, the power of both his music and his love for Eurydice convince Hades, god of the underworld, to allow Orpheus to escort her back into the realm of the living. But, of course, there’s a catch: He must navigate the journey ahead of her, and if he pauses to look back, he will lose her forever. Spoiler alert: He looks back. Severance season 2’s finale was always headed for an equivalent sucker punch. We just didn’t know what form it might take.

Episode 10 begins with Mark facing one such trip to the underworld: a descent to the Testing Floor, where his Outie’s wife, Gemma, has been imprisoned for two years. Harmony Cobel spells out how Innie Mark will need to finish the Cold Harbor file, make a break for the Testing Floor, phase to his Outie, rescue Gemma from the Cold Harbor room, phase to his Innie, and then guide her to the exterior stairwell, through which she’ll at last be set free. Innie Mark is frightened but generally amenable to this rescue mission, except for one problem: If saving Gemma means taking down Lumon, and taking down Lumon means the end of severance itself, wouldn’t that also mean the end of Innie Mark and his friends? Fair question, Mark!

To convince him to abandon such concerns, Devon and Cobel turn to Outie Mark himself. Using video-camera recordings, the Outie and Innie Marks communicate with each other, an exchange that begins with baffled respect but ends with outright resentment. Initially, Outie Mark plays the role of the caring but impatient mentor, and Innie Mark the naive but rebellious apprentice. Those roles are flipped when Innie Mark realizes he has no concrete reason to trust his Outie’s motives, and that, without his help, his Outie has no chance of getting his wife back. Outie Mark offers the reintegration procedure as a participation trophy, should Innie Mark deliver on saving Gemma. But Innie Mark doesn’t care for this condescension. Screw reintegration. He doesn’t want his Outie’s memories and emotions. He wants his own. (Innie Mark’s frustration worsens when his Outie accidentally refers to Helly as “Heleny,” much like Helena Eagan herself called Gemma “Hanna” in episode 6.)

Finally, Cobel takes a crack at Innie Mark’s defenses. She tells him the true purpose of Macrodata Refinement: that the numbers Mark “refines” on his console are a “doorway into the mind of your Outie’s wife, Gemma Scout.” Each group of numbers he sorts corresponds to Gemma’s Four Tempers, “the building blocks of her mind,” and each file he completes corresponds to a room on the Testing Floor, where Gemma phases into a new consciousness. To date, Mark has completed 24 MDR files, meaning he has opened the (literal) doorways for 24 distinct Innie Gemmas. Each of those Innie Gemmas only know their respective rooms, and in those rooms they have only experienced some sort of pain or discomfort. Innie Mark is rightfully horrified to learn his complicity in Lumon’s experiments, even if he does not see Gemma as his wife. Cold Harbor, Cobel tells him, is his final file—and Gemma’s final Innie. “You will have served your purpose, and so will she,” she says.

Innie Mark understands the seriousness of this revelation, but he clocks that Cobel’s motives might have less to do with saving Gemma than with retribution against Lumon itself. When Cobel tells him that “there will be no honeymoon ending for you and Helly R,” he refuses to believe her. Cobel keeps trying: “You’re nothing to them. Nothing to her. They’re using you! And they’ll discard you like a skin husk! I care for you!” But Innie Mark has grown all too accustomed to lies from Lumon employees, whether current or former. He tells Devon and Cobel that, if his Outie ever wants to see his wife again, they better let him back on the severed floor.

Sure enough, the next place he “wakes up” is in the Lumon elevator, which slides open to reveal a fresh horror: a new painting depicting him as a psuedo-saint, having brought together the Eagans, the Innies, and his Outie’s friends and family in pursuit of Lumon’s betterment. Helly arrives on the floor a few minutes after him, and together they walk to the MDR office, where an animatronic Kier awaits them with a waffle-themed card instructing Mark to complete his 25th file, Cold Harbor, and for Helly to watch. “Goodly splendors await upon your victory,” Milchick promises. Whatever that means!

As Mark works to complete the file, Helly tells him about her batshit-weird encounter with Jame Eagan the night before. During this conversation, Jame told her that he does “not love my daughter, [Helena]. I used to see Kier in her, but he left her as she grew.” He continued, explaining that he “sired others in the shadows”—alluding to the secret children first revealed last episode—but “[Kier] wasn’t in them either. Until I saw him again. In you.”

Mark relays his own strange exchange with Cobel, Devon, and his Outie, leading Helly to wonder “what happens when they extract the [severance] chip” from Gemma’s brain. (We can assume she means after Gemma’s would-be death, post-Cold Harbor.) But then she urges Mark to save Gemma and to pursue reintegration, no matter if his Outie is lying. “At least you’ll have a chance at living,” she tells him, tears filling her eyes. Mark doesn’t care; he wants to live with her. But “her,” Helly reminds him, is an Eagan. Cobel is right. Lumon will never let them have their honeymoon ending.

Realizing that saving Gemma is the only good option at their fingertips, Mark completes Cold Harbor with Helly standing over him, their heads pushed together so they seem almost to inhabit one consciousness. (Severance, baby! Everything’s symbolic!)

With the file completed, “goodly splendors” indeed abound: The animatronic Kier awakens to the sound of “Sirius” by the Alan Parsons Project, also known as the Chicago Bulls’ entry music. In other words, most audiences will recognize “Sirius” as a hype song, and it absolutely succeeds in hyping what’s to come in the finale. But it’s equally disorienting, transplanted off the basketball court and onto the severed floor, where Mr. Milchick attempts a wooden comedy routine (complete with laugh track) with the robot Kier. We don’t know how many of Kier’s “jokes” are pre-programmed versus input by an external voice, but they slowly crawl under Milchick’s skin—especially once his propensity for “big words” comes under Kier’s ire. Milchick replies with his own retort, targeting Kier’s falsely inflated height. Kier (or whoever’s voicing him) does not take kindly to this “feedback.”

But robots are far from the only curveball Severance throws at us. Next up, we get the reveal of yet another severed-floor department: Choreography & Merriment! An impromptu marching band storms into the MDR office playing an instrumental version of Kier’s anthem, everything from their tubas to their sashes branded with bright “LUMON” letters.

(A quick side note: I need to know everything about this department. Does their entire existence hinge upon these performances? Do they spend most of their working hours rehearsing? Do they consider this work “mysterious and important,” even if it’s, like, practicing “The Imperial March”? Can we get them to play the next Beychella? Anyway.)

Regardless, the band succeeds in getting Milchick to dance again for the first time since season 1’s “Defiant Jazz,” and, frankly, that alone was enough to satisfy me. But while Milchick is busy getting his boogie on, downstairs, Gemma opens up her closet to find an outfit she’s only encountered once before: the wool coat and scarf she wore on the night she disappeared. Once dressed, she’s marched to the Cold Harbor door. Jame Eagan sits in an observation cubicle to witness Gemma’s “efficacy test,” while his daughter’s Innie works to distract Milchick from Innie Mark’s escape. Attempting to flush Milchick’s walkie-talkie down the toilet is exactly the kind of juvenile humor I adore from the MDR Innies, but it’s also effective! With Dylan’s strength (and the weight of a heavy vending machine), Helly is able to trap Milchick inside the bathroom.

Ah, yes, Dylan! He’s back! His Outie having replied to his resignation request with a pep talk affirming his Innie’s “self-assured badass” status, Dylan realizes life inside Lumon still has value. Without pausing to ask for Helly’s motives, Dylan jumps into the skirmish against Milchick, thus granting Mark the time to sprint to the exports hall. Without a key card, Mark is temporarily SOL...at least until Drummond walks into the hallway to discover the Innie crawling up the doorframe like a chimpanzee.

Let’s pause to address Drummond here. He’s on the severed floor to answer a long-running Severance question: What’s the deal with the goats? As it turns out, the goats serve a horrifying purpose: They are ritual sacrifices, intended to steward deceased human souls to rest with Kier. “This beast will be entombed with a cherished woman, whose spirit it must guide to Kier’s door,” Drummond tells our old friend Lorne, the leader of Mammalians Nurturable. “We commit this animal to Kier, in his eternal war against pain.”

Lorne, clearly, has undergone this process many times—and she’s tired of the grief and loss that accompanies it. These goats are her companions. They’re her children. She asks Drummond “how many more” of the creatures she must “give,” and he replies, “As many as the Founder calls.” And if the goats are intended as spiritual facilitators to dead humans, we can guess that Lumon isn’t only killing goats; they’re killing humans, too.

Furious at the injustice of this arrangement, Lorne attacks Drummond as he attacks Mark. The ensuing battle is the bloodiest in Severance’s history, especially given that Severance is not a particularly action-forward drama. (But alas! What a privilege to watch Gwendolyn Christie give her best Brienne of Tarth once again.) Together, Mark and Lorne succeed in incapacitating Drummond, who allows Mark entrance to the Testing Floor elevator. The only problem? Moving from the severed floor to the Testing Floor phases Mark from his Innie to his Outie. Awakening with a gun in his hand, Outie Mark accidentally pulls the trigger, piercing Drummond’s throat and ultimately killing him. All that excess blood comes in handy, though! When the door to Cold Harbor requires a blood sample to gain entry, Mark is able to trick the system with Drummond’s blood, soaked into his tie. The door slides open as if by magic.

At this point, I curled into a ball, literally holding my breath in anticipation. The moment Outie Mark sees his wife for the first time in two years, he can’t seem to comprehend her reality. She is sitting in a white room, attempting to deconstruct the infant crib he himself bought while they attempted, fruitlessly, to have a baby. Now, she’s an Innie who doesn’t recognize him—but when she chooses to trust him, and then to touch him, their bond is irrefutably forged. (“Fuuuuuck!” Jame Eagan screeches from his viewing chamber. Take that, weirdo.)

When Innie Gemma steps out of the Cold Harbor room, husband and wife are reunited at last. Their embrace is hard-fought and wondrous, their tears mixing with their laughter as they hug and kiss, the Lumon halls around them temporarily forgotten. But when both the Testing Floor and the severed floor go into lockdown, they make their great escape. Dr. Mauer attempts (unsuccessfully) to cut them off, crying “You’ll kill them all!” as the elevator doors swing shut. We can’t yet know to whom he’s referring. The Innies? Lumon employees? Other Testing Floor subjects? The baby goats? All of the above?

As Outie Mark and Outie Gemma embrace again, they phase into Innie Mark and Ms. Casey, who extract themselves from the make-out session with hilarious politeness. Innie Mark nevertheless succeeds in getting Ms. Casey to the exterior stairwell, where she phases back into Gemma. But her joy is short-lived.

“Whatever this life is, it’s all we have, and we don’t want it to end,” Innie Mark told his Outie during their video-camera exchange earlier in the episode. Watching Gemma through the window in the stairwell door, he begins to back away from it, caught between the desire to live and the desire to save her, taking down Lumon in the process. But when Helly appears behind him in the hallway, Innie Mark makes his Orphean choice. He turns back.

Once he sees Helly, there’s no question of what he’ll do next. Both he and she will plunge back into the underworld. And so they do so, linking hands and sprinting, their footsteps echoing against Gemma’s screams and the background music, Mel Tormé’s “The Windmills of Your Mind.” The season ends much as it began: with a seemingly never-ending run inside the corporate maze of Lumon itself, its captives heading into a terrifying unknown, their hope miraculously still intact.

Will it now become Gemma’s mission to rescue her husband from Lumon’s grasp? Might the company force Mark to take up Gemma’s experiments? What about Cobel and Devon, who will have extracted Gemma but lost Mark in the process? Now that Jame has singled out Helly for the “Kier” inside her, might he attempt to make her his new heir? And if Mark was “refining” Gemma all this time, then who were Irving, Helly, and Dylan “refining”? These are all pertinent plot questions, but Severance is as much a series about human psychology as it is about science-fiction twists and turns. We now understand that the severance barrier can separate a person’s mind from even their deepest tragedies and triumphs. The chip’s chemical amnesia is powerful. But how long can its power last? If our bodies know what our minds do not have the tools to accept, then what will it take for Innie Mark and Outie Mark to collapse in on one another? Now that the reintegration process has begun, can they even backtrack? Severance has already proven that both love and pain cannot be erased entirely. Be assured, there’s a reckoning ahead. And if season 3 is anything like season 2, we’re in for some serious goodly splendors.