Et Tu Severance?

SPOILER ALERT FOR SEASON 2 FINALE

I admit it. I wanted a happy ending, whatever that could be, for the Season 2 finale of Severance. In some ways it was a happy ending for the innies. But maybe I never bought in to them being real people with real lives. The line that sticks with me is “you gave us half a life and didn’t expect us to want to keep it.”

On one level I understand Mark S. turning at that last moment from his real (outie) life wife Gemma, to his innie girlfriend Helly and running with her through those never ending corridors of Lumon, ignoring the emergency red flashing lights and sirens toward whatever life they could have. But Gemma, now freed, standing outside facing another kind of life entirely is the haunting vision I keep seeing. What’s she supposed to do now? Save Mark from himself? Or are all the innies going to self-destruct once Gemma is gone and the experiment is a failure?

Having come from a career in a corporation, I totally understand the idea of a severed life inside a workplace—dare I say a kind of prison. I did my time for the same reason as Dylan in the series. To support myself and my little boy as a single mom then. Sometimes it was a good inside life, with work I truly loved, but sometimes it was torturous with horrible Milchick bosses. And I witnessed people finding their Helly or Mark S. inside and trading for that reality instead of their outie world with their spouse and family. It happens. You spend a lot of time inside. Usually more than outside. It can get mentally confusing. So what’s the difference between that executive who runs away with the administrative assistant, against all reason leaving a wonderful wife and two kids, and Mark S. choosing Helly?

Lumon was extreme, and crazy, of course. The series has been a fascinating expansion of the innie/outie experience of some work environments. But there are so many still unanswered questions. How were the numbers really Mark’s wife? What was the goal of these awful people who were playing with brains and people’s lives? World domination through mind control?

But why oh why couldn’t we have just one happy ending that gives us a sense that the world is a good and kind place, at a time when reality points to the opposite. I needed it! I protest! Maybe I’m ready for a chip in my brain to take me to a different reality too.