"You know, my mother was an atheist. She used to say there was good news and bad news about hell. The good news is it's just the product of a morbid human imagination. The bad news is whatever humans can imagine, they can usually create."
– Harmony Cobel, "Good News About Hell"
"You and your family created Hell, and you're going to burn in it."
– Helly R., "Cold Harbor"
If the first season of Severance was about the absurdity of work-life balance, Season 2 realigns those scales for a weighing of souls. Note the revisionist iconography of the creepy oil paintings. Regard the goat in its trolley, bound for the hidden killing chamber. If Season 1 took us on a tour through the labyrinthine halls of purgatory, this next stop is hell.
We descend the elevators ever deeper to that hell of Lumon's own creation, the so-called testing floor. We learn that Gemma has been kept down here for over two years, her two dozen innies subjected to repeated torment in an effort to test the severance procedure's barrier against pain. One seems to exist in a neverending plane crash. Another is forced to write thank you cards with her non-dominant hand as an amateur dentist leers on in his matching Christmas sweater.
This, with apologies to Michael Schur, is the Bad Place.
Whether you believe in a fiery underworld or not, I think we can agree that little lowercase hells are created every day in the here and now. We inflict them on each other. We inflict them on ourselves. We've gotten all-too good at it.
Castigated in his performance review for using big words, Mr. Milchick confronts himself in a mirror and goes about abbreviating himself. "You must eradicate from your essence childish folly," he says. He repeats this again and again, gradually shortening the phrase, simplifying the words, until finally, "Grow. Grow. GROW." I was reminded of last year's The Substance, the arresting sequence of Elisabeth Sparkle getting ready for a date, scrutinizing her appearance in the mirror, second-guessing the application of her lipstick before violently smearing it in self-sabotage. These characters both sought to edit themselves. To will their mind and presentation into something more palatable. It's one thing to be treated as less-than. But to be made to agree? It's heartbreaking.
Harmony Cobel was made redundant last season. Given the recent revelations in Salt's Neck, that insult registers as but the latest in Lumon's long term efforts to exploit her innocence, her genius, her devotion. As they did with the seaside town of her birth, Lumen wrung out what it needed and relegated her to the rag heap. This is the woman who invented severance!
Which is why it's so sad to realize she's been fighting for scraps all this time.
Like any cult worth its salt, Lumon specializes in isolating its workers, sowing discord and distrust between its departments. They distort time and gaslight the innies in an effort to disorient them. They dehumanize.
In "The After Hours" Dylan G. proposes to his outie's wife with a ring cut from a finger trap, one of the cheap prizes Lumon awarded him over the years for reaching quota. It's among his few physical possessions, and a cruel token of his situation; a snare that gets tighter the more you resist. A toy that teaches the value of compliance. In the limbo of the severed floor, party favors are trophies and the egg bar is coveted as fuck.
What happens when the mice in the maze realize there's more to life than cheese? What happens when they realize there's more to life than this maze?
Helly R. once wanted nothing more than to escape the severed floor, threatening self harm with a paper cutter–again with the fingers!–if she wasn't permitted to resign. This is when we first learned of her outie's cruelty, denying Helly's request and dismissing her as less than a person. Since then, Helly's been motivated to hurt her outie and the whole Eagan dynasty. Though the loss of Burt is what took him over the edge, Helly was the initial catalyst that former company man Irving needed to lose his religion and vow to burn the place to the fucking ground.
With the finale, time has come for the innies to decide whether to accept their lot or fight for more.
In a masterfully edited exchange via camcorder recordings, Mark Scout bargains with his innie in what feels like a meeting of god and mortal. Adam Scott crushes it. At first, the innie is simply grateful to enjoy an audience with his creator. He lets him off the hook; he's made a life for himself at MDR with people he cares about. The dynamic shifts when outie asks innie to rescue Gemma from the testing floor. He doesn't fully grasp that the success of this mission might mean the end of the innies' existence.
As Mark sits to finish out the Cold Harbor file, fearful that he's consigning them all to obsolescence, Helly takes comfort in her limited grasp of geography. What places are there aside from Delaware, the touchstone for all innies in their entrance interview? She dares to dream. Mark and Helly have some inkling of the Equator, but they're not sure where or what it is. So they muse that it's a building so large it's become a continent. Can love work like that? Can love transcend its confines and become a country unto itself?
Helly gives Mark permission to prioritize Gemma's rescue over their future, partly because she can't imagine Helena Eagan allowing her to escape. But also because she loves him and wants some version of him to be happy, even if it can't be with her.
But that's scraps.
Mark completes the file and hurries off on his mission, Orpheus in pursuit of his Eurydice in the depths of the Underworld. And as Helly and Dylan divert Milchick's attention, Helly remembers the fight at the very core of her. The drumline rallies her and then she rallies them.
"They give us half a life and think we won't fight for it!" she shouts from atop her desk.
Mark S. probably doesn't hear this as Drummond throttles him on the floor. They're far off at the end of a memorized maze. But Gwendoline Christie's Lorne is feeling the drums, and we're treated to a kaiju battle straight out of Revelation. A goat is pardoned and Mark's necktie runneth over with the blood of the faithful. A blood sacrifice to gain access through the final threshold of Cold Harbor.
Here's the brilliance of Severance. How they can render something as complicated as Mark and Gemma's flight from the testing floor–a relay race consisting of two actors playing four different combinations of their characters' personalities–so legible, is beyond me. It's the kind of beautiful, funny, garment-rending tragedy that elevates this show above anything else on television.
And just like Orpheus, Mark S. turns away in the final moment, leaving Gemma, like Irving B. in last season's finale, to pound on the door in confusion and sorrow and rage.
Mark S. brough Gemma out of Hell only to turn around and choose Helly and himself over the happiness of his outie. Is that tantamount to betrayal? Is it selfish? Only so much as what Mark Scout asked of him. I can't be mad at him, pained as I am for Gemma.
So, where do Mark and Helly go from here?
Hand-in-hand.
Through the fire.
Together.
