It Has Wiles, It Has Verve: Severance, “Cold Harbor”

There was a brief moment at the beginning of “Cold Harbor” where I thought, in horror, Oh. I thought, Perhaps there hasn’t been an announcement about Severance being renewed because this is it. Perhaps this is a two season show. Perhaps Mark is going to commune with his inner child and heal.

Yeah. We all know how well that conversation went. On the upside, though, Severance was just renewed, so the ending of this long, wild, intense episode is, thank Kier, not a series ending.

“Cold Harbor” had a lot to live up to: The first season of Severance was fantastic, and the second season just kept ratcheting things up—mysteries, yes, but also the connections between the characters, the details of how they move through the world, and the ways that slightly off-kilter world works. How any viewer feels about the finale will depend on what they’re watching Severance for: Do you want answers? Certainty? Solved mysteries? Or do you want to see what these wonderful, damaged, baffling people will do next?

You’ll get a little of both, but for me, this was a slightly less satisfying episode because despite the 76-minute runtime, it felt like there was less of it, somehow. Some of this is simply down to spending this much time on the severed floor without Irving, and I think that’s entirely intentional. We’re supposed to feel that missing piece, to be aware of that loss. Something is missing, and it’s not just the fourth desk. It’s the ineffable Irving-ness of it all. He’s present in the slip of paper he left, the directions to the testing-floor hall, but he’s not present personally, and he’s much-missed.

That little slip of paper, though, is everything. When Mark tells Ms. Cobel the innies know about the hallway, and they know where it is, it’s one of the few times she seems genuinely surprised. Of course, she got fired; she hasn’t been watching them. But her reaction is a strong suggestion that the MDR team can keep things from their unsevered supervisors.

To bring the mysterious, important Cold Harbor file to completion, this episode was always going to be mostly on the severed floor, which also means very little Ms. Cobel, or Devon, and who knows what Ricken is up to, working on his collaborator-version of The You You Are. Everyone has been pushed aside or shut out so that the episode—written by series creator Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller—can focus, as Lumon seems to be focusing, on that all-important file.

But first, the threads from the end of “The After Hours” are picked up: Innie Mark is very confused by the birthing cabin, because who wouldn’t be (good lord, the creepy pregnant Kier figure by the fireplace!). And Helly is still in the the office with creepy Jame. “God, you’re fucking weird,” she says, speaking for all of us. He conveniently explains why Cobel made that remark about “one of Jame’s” last week—he “sired others in the shadows,” because he didn’t see Kier in little Helena. He didn’t see Kier in those poor kids either (where are they now?). But Helly. Helly has fire.

I kind of wish Helly had stabbed him with that damn pen, but then she really would never have seen Mark again. But wow, that shot of the two of them in shadow, just dark figures against those white, white walls. 

Meanwhile, Cobel explains the Gemma-saving plan to a skeptical innie Mark, revealing in the process that his chip is “only attuned to” the severed floor. This is a weird statement, though, because Cobel is talking to innie Mark at that very moment, and they are not on the severed floor. They’re in the birthing cabin. It’s kind of a weird detail, but I think she’s just speaking to innie Mark in language that he’ll understand. 

Innie Mark, though, sees what no one is saying: If they rescue Gemma and take down Lumon—kind of a leap, but sure—the innies essentially die. No one will go back to their severed state. Their other selves are over. It’s been made very clear, all season, that innies are people. But this is the first time this line has been explicitly drawn: Defeating Lumon would mean ending innies. Unless they can reintegrate successfully, which clearly hasn’t happened. Yet. And even then, what does it mean for either person?

(It means that becoming whole and healed may mean letting go of the versions of yourself that you used to be, but no one here is quite there yet.)

I’ve never seen a sequence quite like Mark’s long, fraught, infuriating, believable, conversation with himself. Adam Scott plays it so well, so effectively: the innocence and anger of his innie, his outie’s more complicated arguments and attempts at manipulation, the literal inside-outside back and forth of the two versions of him talking into the camcorder. The innies have never gotten to make their case like this, and all of innie Mark’s skepticism is totally warranted—just like all of outie Mark’s frustration is understandable. He got himself into this situation, and he doesn’t understand himself at all. He wants Gemma back, but hasn’t realized that he can’t get that happy ending without cutting part of himself off, because he never dealt with his grief. He just stuffed it away.

The two sides of the Mark coin are similar—romantic, moody, stubborn, funny in their way, curious but also sometimes rule-following—and this scene brings every opposition into play, gradually and uncomfortably. Most uncomfortably when outie Mark calls Helly “Helleny,” which is somehow both hilarious and deeply upsetting. He tries to appeal to innie Mark’s romantic side, but all he does is more forcefully remind him that in order for outie Mark to get what he wants, innie Mark has to lose everything.

And wow, wow, do I love this—this uncomfortable conversation, this literal vision of the things people do in our silly little heads all the time. Part of why I love this is that I love really great television shows about grief. And that grief, Mark’s grief about Gemma, is at the core of Severance. The show is about work, and technology, and corporate horrors, and friendship and love and mysteries and a whole lot of other things, but Mark Scout would not be in that basement if he hadn’t lost his wife (who, yes, he probably lost because of Lumon, it’s a rich tapestry yet to be fully revealed!).

I’m reluctant to pack Mark’s journey into a neat little sentence, but both Marks are in the positions they’re in, for better or worse, because they can’t let go. It’s a good thing and it’s a bad thing; it’s a totally understandable thing and it’s a limiting thing. This is what I watch Severance for: the way the show teases out tangled, complex, difficult emotional connections. Do you want Mark to be with Helly or with Gemma? Do you realize that the first one is impossible? Do you want it anyway? Yeah. Both Marks are in love, and desperate, and they simply can’t have it both ways. 

In the tangle of all of this, we get answers, as Ms. Cobel tells innie Mark a whole bunch of very interesting things, beginning with, “The numbers are your wife.” He’s been refining her tempers all this time, creating “a doorway into the mind” of Gemma. Now we know what the work is, and of course that raises so many other questions. (Who, who are the other MDR folks refining?) All those files are new consciousnesses—so Mark is responsible for all those blank slate Gemmas going into all those horrible rooms. Cold Harbor is the last one, and once it’s done they will both have served their purpose, Cobel says. Which means there’s no future for innie Mark no matter what. 

Notably, Cobel doesn’t answer when Mark asks, “What are you doing here, really?”

Innie Mark, poor, poor, angsty teen innie Mark, storms off, demanding that the next thing he see be the severed floor. And it is, but it’s different. Shall we pause for a moment and consider that terrible, terrible painting? With weird, closed-eye Mark raising his hand in praise as all the other characters look on, and the Eagans loom from the top of the waterfall at Woe’s Hollow, just like the mysterious doppelgangers did in that episode? (Please, I must understand the doppelgangers.) Everyone is here, even the poor dead security guy from the first season, and Natalie, and Milchick with his arms tightly folded. And the tempers, too. Eesh. 

And then Lumon puts on a light show—the first of a couple, this episode. The doomy, heavy strings start up as Helly and Mark follow the lights to MDR, like they don’t know where they’re going. Creepy animatronic Kier lurks in the MDR office with a note from Milchick (the fact that it’s signed “Love, Mr. Milchick” absolutely sent me, as did Helly doing the eyes-are-following-me thing with the figure of her ancestor). The light is very green. There is a lot of green, this episode.

It’s morning at Lumon, which means a little scene with everyone: Gemma, giving a heartbreaking gasp when she sees the outfit from her last day with Mark; Dylan, bitter that he’s back again; and Mark and Helly, telling each other what they’ve learned—including the additional revelation that when they remove the severed chip, Gemma dies. (This isn’t outright said, but it’s certainly implied—though what Lumon wants to do with said chip is unspecified.) Mark, speaking of Cobel, says, “She’s the same, but, like, different same,” which is delightful given that he’s talking about an unsevered character. 

As he and Helly discuss what they’re going to do, she spells it out: They’re screwed either way. Either they get Gemma out and things (maybe) come crashing down, or they don’t get her out and it’s still innie Mark’s last day at Lumon. There’s no future, no matter how desperately he wants to be with Helly. But Helly, tears in her eyes, says, “But I’m her, Mark.”

I may have gasped in horror at that, thinking she was saying that she was, in that moment, Helena. I don’t think Helena would do all the things that come next; those are Helly actions. But we’ll come back to that thought, because I want to talk about Dylan. 

Dylan’s outie, in his childish handwriting, has written a note explaining to innie Dylan why he sent him back to Lumon, and why he’s leaving the choice to resign in his innie’s hands after all. It’s sort of sweet, and sort of heartbreaking (“Point one: fuck you”), and it’s key to a couple of things here. One is the mention of shared physiognomy: they are the same physical body. They are always the same person, falling in love with their wife. Only one body has touched her, and touch is important, here.

And another is that this note—this notion that innie Dylan is a “self-assured badass”—helps save the day. After a really loaded conversation about the equator—the concept of which the innies don’t understand, but which clearly symbolizes the middle, the balance of two halves—Mark completes Cold Harbor, cheek to cheek with Helly, their hands entwined. 

The next eerie light show starts, the Kier animatronic says some creepy things about how Mark is one of the most important people in history, and Milchick shows up for a disturbing comedy bit in which the Kier figure curiously pronounces “Seth” the same way Irving did in Woe’s Hollow and makes weird jokes at Milchick’s expense. We are witnessing the slow awakening of Mr. Milchick, and I’m so glad we’re going to get another season to see what transformation awaits. 

But for now, he’s still a company man, beaming as he introduces the latest Lumon department: Choreography and Merriment! Good lord, that marching band would have been unbearably loud in those hallways. They march Gemma to her doom to a peppy version of Kier’s hymn; they tramp majestically through MDR, trapping Mark and Helly in place, while elsewhere, Jame visits a minimalist closet to watch Gemma’s fate. Or, rather, “the efficacy test.”

Tramell Tillman killed it in these scenes. The conducting, the dancing, the fury he displays when Helly steals his walkie-talkie and locks it and him in the bathroom: he embodies all the tempers, one by one, and he does it with style. 

While Mark runs through the halls—a nice mirror to his season premiere running—in search of the all important hallway, Drummond uses the full force of his body to open a new doorway right across from it. And self-assured badass Dylan does the same with the vending machine, shoving it in front of the bathroom door to block Milchick’s escape. It is meaningful that he does this to help Helly, who he was just cruel to in the last episode, and who called him on his newly cautious behavior a few episodes ago. He was torn between the family he can’t have and his teammates—and now he’s back on team MDR.

Everything goes on for so long, this episode. This is not a complaint but a description of how tense, how uncomfortable, the drawn-out scenes are; they’re like the pauses in Cobel and Hampton’s conversations, loaded, dread-filled. Of course Gemma takes slow, uncomfortable steps into the Cold Harbor room, which holds only the crib from her past. Of course it is a long run through endless white hallways to find the testing floor door. Of course it is locked. Of course—of course!—the goats are relevant. 

You know from the moment the camera shows Gwendoline Christie’s face, red and angry and trying to hide it, that nothing good is on the agenda for that goat. Let it be noted that she looks incredible. The goat brooch holding her vest closed! The whole black get-up! The braid in her hair! Stunning, no notes, would sign up for her cult immediately, especially given how she feels about her small, bleating charges.

I was certain they were not going to kill the verve-and-wiles-filled goat, and I was deeply relieved to be right, but wow, wow, did they make us wait for it. The incredible cruelty of making her kill the goat herself: that is pure Lumon. Those in power want to run from pain, but in pursuit of that goal they will inflict endless pain on anyone beneath them. 

Yes, this is a show about capitalism.

Drummond’s ritual line is very telling: “We commit this animal to Kier in his eternal war against pain.” While Gemma, unfeeling, dismantles the crib that held so much pain for her and Mark, Drummond is up here spelling things out for us: this whole cult is about running from pain. Kier went through trauma(s), and decided he could stop that. Maybe it was his brother’s death in the woods (though I kind of think Kier killed him; the man is nothing if not an unreliable narrator); maybe it was the fate of his wife (who Hampton jokes about coughing up a lung in the ether mill). Maybe it was just life. Either way, this entire company/cult is probably the work of a man who refused to feel his feelings, for whom the ultimate success is a way to make other people not feel their feelings either. 

It is, as we know, and as the show elegantly demonstrates over and over again, impossible. The cut-off bits will become their own people, find their own hearts and heartbreaks and strengths. Difficult things make us who we are as much as beautiful things do. Kier has all the naivete of an innie, in some ways, but the power and determination of an outie. 

“How many more?” Lorne asks Drummond, and she means goats, but the question extends to humans, too: How many more must suffer for Kier’s impossible goal? How many people have already been through what Gemma has been through? She’s clearly not the first, not if they have this elaborate ritual in which they murder a goat so that it can guide her also-murdered soul to Kier. 

Not today, Satan (as the saying goes). Outside the goat-murder room, Mark tries to get into the testing floor hall, and he makes a ruckus. It’s nothing compared to the ruckus that starts when Drummond finds him there. What a sloppy, terrible, uncomfortable fight, and what a satisfying conclusion. Well, two conclusions. First, there’s Lorne, having truly had enough. “No more killing,” she says, goat-gun to Drummond’s head. I would like to applaud whoever decided to have Lorne go for the balls. But this scene contains all her pent-up fury. How long has she been down here? How many goats has she had to kill? We barely know her, but there’s so much in this brief scene: her horror, her anger, her unwillingness to kill another goat for these rich people and their terrible dreams. “Emile thanks you” is my single favorite line in this episode.

The fact that Drummond ultimately dies because Mark twitches while switching from innie to outie is perfect. Transitioning from one self to the other is a little death (no, not that kind) for the innies and outies; here, it is a big death for Drummond, and a brutal one at that. We have seen no evidence that he was anything but a terrible enforcer, and I’m not sorry to see him go. I do wonder if he had another temper tattooed on his other hand, though.

This season has leaned into horror more and more, and the entire sequence of Drummond’s death, the sound of the elevator doors trying to close, Mark wandering the white hallways covered in blood, the cuts to the chaos in the MDR office, Milchick slowly finding his determination and becoming the predator on the floor again—it’s all in keeping with that vibe. Helly gives us a little Norma Rae break, climbing on the desks to give a solidarity talk to the C&R folks. “They’re going to turn us off like fucking machines!” she says, pleading. “They give us half a life and think we won’t fight for it.”

There’s weird humor, though, too, in the scene of Mark and Sandra Bernhard’s nurse shouting at each other, flailing and cursing, and in the gruesomeness of Mark using Drummond’s blood to get to Gemma, at long last. 

Faced with a choice—a voice in the walls giving her orders, and a bloody man in front of her asking for her trust—Gemma chooses Mark. When she takes his hand, Jame, in his closet, mutters, “Oh, fuck.” It’s that touch that does it. A real person in front of you, taking your hand, is a million times more powerful than going through the motions of something that once hurt. 

The blaring sirens and flashing red lights that fill the rest of the episode—the color theorists among Severance fans would point out that red is often the color of the outside, of knowledge from the real world. Red is, of course, also the color of love, and those lights kick on once Mark and Gemma are reunited, grief and love all over their faces. The lights follow everyone through the hallways: more running, always, but also: important things happen in those hallways. Helly’s moment to herself, once she learned about Mark and Helena, was in a hallway. The scene early in this season when Mark and Helly seemed like they might kiss and didn’t—the scene that made me wonder if she was really Helly—was in a hallway. Of course it all ends in the hall. 

And once again, for a second, I was afraid this might be a series finale. (Phew.) At the season start, Mark ran through the hallways alone, and now he ends the season running, hopelessly but in love, with Helly. I don’t know where they think they’re going (maybe to hide with the goat people?). I just can’t stop thinking about how many times it’s been emphasized that Mark couldn’t tell when Helly was Helena. And about how she says “I’m her” earlier in the episode. This seems like Helly, from her posture to her shoeless feet to her defiant, rousing moment on the desks. I’m not going to come down on one side of the other of what I assume is already a raging theory: Is it Helly or Helena that Mark runs off with? The symbolism says Helly: Gemma is outside, back to herself, screaming and tragic (Dichen Lachman broke my heart here). Helly is inside, unable to accept the innies’ likely fate.

But Helena Eagan is also inside Lumon. It could really go either way. Mark was as important to Cold Harbor as Gemma, and perhaps with Gemma lost, they just want a new subject, in Mark. It’s clear that his innie doesn’t recognize his feelings for his outie’s wife. What else might they decide to put him though? Is the next season a reversal: Unsevered Gemma outside, trying to save her severed husband? They had to guide each other to the exit, here: Gemma leading Mark through the testing floor, Mark leading her through the severed floor. Their fates are in each other’s hands already.

For now, this is innie Mark’s victory. When outie Mark calls his innie a fucking child, at the beginning, he’s not wrong: innie Mark is not very old, in the throes of first love, and wildly uninformed about the world. He’s a creature of hope who has not yet learned the thing that outie Mark tries to tell him: You can’t separate the good from the bad and be yourself. You can’t only feel good things; you can’t sever one kind of feeling from the other. You’d wind up feeling nothing. Like, well, an automaton. Like a weird animatronic Kier figure.

Innie Mark, at the beginning, tells outie Mark that the innies find ways “to feel whole,” which is, you could argue, the whole point of this show: How can a person feel whole when their life is divided? What are the divides that we put in place, and are they worth it? What role does capitalism play in this? What does work do to and for us? How much can love transcend? How can we learn to be kinder to ourselves, to give ourselves choices and options instead of shutting ourselves down and closing doors?

I have no pithy summation to end on. This season was excellent, and I expected nothing less. There are whole entire essays to write about the design, the score, the color-coding, the casting, the way it is impossible to write a short review of an episode because every detail matters. (Someone who knows more about marching bands: talk to us about that!) If someone had told me that the next great mystery show was also going to be capable of talking about love and trauma and growth and acceptance—without ever being pat or on the nose or cloying—I would have been extremely skeptical. And yet here we are, watching the best thing I’ve seen on screen in ages. I’m so glad it’s not over yet.[end-mark]

The post It Has Wiles, It Has Verve: <i>Severance</i>, “Cold Harbor” appeared first on Reactor.

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