About 'Severance' season finale: My fave theories on what comes next

Fans who watched this second season were treated to a jaw-dropping display of high-quality TV. Severance has a look and style which suits its nerdily precise, creatively ambitious story — focused on a situation where the cult-like corporation Lumon Industries creates a procedure to sever staffers’ memories at work from their outside lives. In the process, they create a class of oppressed people sentenced to an existence inside a windowless office floor with no family, non-work personal history or memory of what the sky outside looks like.

I crafted a spoiler-avoidant review/appreciation for NPR of the show’s season finale, which dropped on Apple TV+ last night. And click here to hear me talking about it on NPR and WBUR’s midday show, Here and Now. But the conversations I’ve been having on social media with fans of the show, made me want to create a space here where I could float some of my more unhinged ideas about where the story could go next.

Be warned: There’s going to be spoilers aplenty in the stuff I write below.

There are several films and TV shows which try to distill the plight of oppressed people in stories which are detached from current culture. A series like The Handmaids Tale tries to get past the world’s actual history of enslavement to depict a fictional universe where middle class, contemporary American women are turned into sexual and reproductive enslaved people, for instance.

I’m most intrigued by the way Severance covers this ground. In the season finale, the outside-existing version of Adam Scott’s Mark Scout (or “outie”) gets into a protracted negotiation/argument with his own innie — trying to convince him to free his wife Gemma, who the outside world thought was killed in a car crash, from a department deep in the bowels of Lumon’s office building. Outie Mark wants his innie to walk outside the building with her, so he can finally be reunited with the woman whose absence wrecked his life.

(For those of us who knew Robbie Benson as a supercute teen idol from 70s-era films like Ice Castles, it was tough to even recognize him as the creepy Dr. Mauer.)

They both know, if innie Mark does what outie Mark is asking, he may never step inside a Lumon office again, effectively killing his inside self. In the end, innie Mark rescues Gemma, but stays inside Lumon to be with his love, fellow employee Helly R.

So where can this story go next?

I would love to see an outie who has left the company — perhaps John Turturro’s love-stricken Irving B. — file a lawsuit contending that staffers’ innie selves are separate people and cannot be erased without their permission. Not by Lumon or even by their outies.

A legal action like that would keep Lumon from just erasing all the innies when they rebel, which I would also love to see happen in the third season. Another question the series doesn’t illuminate much is: when you are literally defined by work, what does freedom even look like for the innies of severed people?

Helly R’s outie is Helena Eagan, daughter of Lumon’s CEO, who presumably would object to being part of a rebellion inside the company. So, what happens when a person’s innie and outie want two diametrically opposed things? Can anyone mediate an internal fight like that?

Of course, we’ll have to learn more about what this Cold Harbor file is/was, and why Lumon needed Mark and Gemma Scout to complete it. If Mark’s work inside the company was based on organizing the thoughts of his wife’s many different innies, where was the data everyone else in his department — and other severed floors across Lumon — actually coming from?

And, will there ever a be a warm, sunny, frost-free day in the land of Severance?

These are just a few ideas and questions I had after watching the season finale. Feel free to post your questions, analysis, reactions or predictions in the comments below.

Because the only thing more fun than watching a puzzle box show meticulously crafted as Severance, is trying to guess where it may go next.