Severance: Season 2, Episode 10 - A Harbor So Cold Your Toenails Will Be In Your Throat
Coooold in the Harrrrbor! Cold in the Harbor, children... (Sing it like "Wade in the Water")
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Greetings, friends, and lovers! It's nice to be back after an amazing trip to Nairobi! I'll tell you about that trip soon, but the only U.S. thing I kept up with was the Apple TV show, Severance. Last night was the final episode of the second season. I have no idea where or if it's going after this.
So, let's break it down. I'll explain a little about the show, give a spoiler-free summary, and summarize spoilers and questions I was left with after this event for paid subscribers. Let's get down.
What is Severance?
As it took a few years before a second season followed the first, I'll take a second to explain it for those that forgot haven't started the season yet.
Severance is what I call "corporate horror." It takes something like Office Space, gives it a 180, and jams in various questions on top. In the future/past/wherever we are, people can allow themselves to be severed. With Lumon's technology, a person can create an "outie" that is who they've always been, and an innie that appears throughout the work day. It turns one being into two beings. The outie lives in the real world while the innie only exists in the Lumon Compound completely separate from everything outside, not even knowing the color of the sky.
When I started watching the first season, I remember thinking how awesome something like this would be. Go to work every day without remembering any of it. You get home and have money in your bank account. Doesn't matter at all how it got there!
Unfortunately, it didn't take long for Severance to show its fangs. The entire process creates an identity crisis. Not one of thought, but of action. This show became hard to watch the deeper my thoughts became because the abuse involved crept around my eyes the more I watched.
Regardless, if you haven't seen Severance or heard of it, give it a look and let us know what you think. You could love it, or put the remote down because it's too scary - all praise to the founder, Kier Eagen.
Severance: The spoiler-free breakdown of season 2.
The second season of Severance was a little too wild. Unlike the first season which mostly took place in the Severance Building and Mark Scout's (Adam Scott) house, the second season went much much bigger.
Mark Scott's wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman) died and he's been mourning her ever since. He lost his professor job due to excessive drinking. For reasons we don't understand, Mark thinks the best way to deal with his feelings is to allow the Lumon corporation to split him into two people.
This does not work well for the outie, particularly when he learns his wife is alive and working as a wellness coordinator for his innie.
The innie, on the other hand, comes back to a much bigger work-life. Mark S. (Adam Scott) returns to the office with a different team than the one he had in season 1. He refuses to work until his original workplace family of Irving B. (John Turturro a.k.a. The Jesus), Dylan G. (Zach Cherry), and love interest Helly R. (Britt Lower a.k.a. The boss's daughter) are reinstated.
The innies wake up to a retreat in a frozen forest to learn more about Mr. Kier and their place in the world underneath their lord and master. We find out that work Mark S has been doing is so important that Lumon relents and does what he needs so that he'll hurry and finish project Cold Harbor. I don't know what that is, but it is an insane plan that somehow contains Mark Scout's dead wife, Gemma, for whom the rumors of her death were greatly exaggerated.
Severance is trippy. Like the innies and outies, viewers don't know where we are either. Sometimes innies meet outies. Sometimes they fall in love. Nobody working for Lumon likes to give straight answers about... anything. Someone asks a question, the other person refuses to answer that question, then someone walks away. The entire process feels insane. The fun kind of insane that makes us desperate to know what happens next.
Severance is uncomfortable. It knows it's uncomfortable and does a great job of passing that discomfort onto us. What felt like a good idea in the first two episodes of season one, gets worse, more abusive, and more cult-like with every future episode. You become more and more filled with dread the more you learn about Lumon and its founder. Corporate Horror, remember? It's like... if The Office tried to scare you with less comedy and growing uneasiness. That's Severance in a nutshell on a nutshell on a nutshell on a nutshell... it's nutshells all the way down.