The Devilish Genius of Severance

On innies and outies.

I was not prepared emotionally for the Severance Season 2 finale. First of all, for some reason I thought the season was 12 episodes instead of 10. So then, when a 90-minute adrenaline coaster dropped onto my Apple feed under the title “Cold Harbor,” my defenses were utterly down. I have no ironic distance from this show, no critical skepticism, no stylish chill. I love it unreservedly. I am going to try and say why without spoiling anything, and then, for my fellow superfans, I’ll put in a section break where the spoilers begin and we can pore over the details together.

I’ve found it’s hard to convince people to start watching Severance if you just explain the premise—“so, there’s this company, and they put a chip in your brain, and it splits your memory in two so that one half of you only remembers your work hours, and the other half remembers the rest of your life.” Sounds...really depressing!

And without question, it’s impossible to feel at ease in the world of Kier, the company town which seems locked in perpetual winter and suspended eerily in the 1980s. Not to mention the underground hallways of the “severed floor,” whose walls look like they’ve been spackled flat with toothpaste and whose perforated ceiling panels, ribbed with tubes of fluorescent light, stir up instant post-traumatic ick for anyone who’s ever attended so much as an HR training.

The “innies” (those half-people consigned to plod through workday after workday without rest) battle in a stilted, pseudo-Shakespearean corporate patois with their employer-captors. After hours, the “outies” drift ghostlike through a dreary suburban landscape and wonder what goes on in the part of themselves they’ve banished to the underground dark. If it all sounds intensely bleak, it is. Sort of.

Yet the whole thing is executed with such originality, such hyper-specific quirkiness of tone and design, that the way in which it’s bleak feels fresh, invigorating. Lead actor Adam Scott (he of Parks and Recreation) and director Ben Stiller (he of Zoolander and Tropic Thunder) give the show an absurdist sense of humor to leaven the melodrama. Writer Dan Erickson, who’s getting his big break, comes at the material with a relish for the zany as well as the macabre.

And the supporting cast is utterly stacked, from Patricia Arquette as the inscrutable ice queen Harmony Cobel—who takes the disgruntled employee arc to positively Wagnerian levels—to relative unknown Tramell Tillman, who manages to be a horror villain and a human being all at once as Severed Manager Seth Milchick.

The effect of all this talent coming together in service of a coherent artistic vision has been positively nourishing. There have been other enjoyable T.V. shows and movies in recent years, but even the good ones have tended to feel aesthetically timid and indistinguishably drab. The grey wash of CGI gunk that saturates Marvel movies and shows like 3 Body Problem is almost a visual metaphor for the inherent sameness in pop culture, the auto-generated production line of predictable material that circles around within the constrained range of focus-grouped expression and opinion. Severance just doesn’t look or feel like anything else out there, and it’s working through actual new ideas in real time. It has broken gloriously free.

This is why—especially after this week’s finale—I’m not all that worried that the show won’t come to a satisfying conclusion or give answers to its major questions. There may not be the kind of intricate felt-board-push-pin Grand Theory answer that cracks open every little easter egg, the way people are trying to do on the show’s Reddit board. But the creators obviously have a very clear idea of the points they want to make about the threats and quandaries posed by modern tech and office life to the integrity of the human psyche. I trust them to drive those points home.

In fact, at a symbolic level, the story is almost uncannily coherent. It’s a near-perfect metaphor for about ten different things all at once. It’s about the way we partition and compartmentalize our lives to manage the unbearable weight of our own pain. It’s about how office work has come to feel pointless in the age of machines. It’s about the temptation to “optimize” our experience by giving over the inconvenient parts of ourselves—and so our full humanity—to the ruthless logic of corporate and digital efficiency.

It’s about all this, and about something deeper at the heart of all those modern trends, something that can’t be stated outright but simply has to be expressed in the form of a story. That’s what sets a true artistic symbol apart from a moral fable or metaphor: a symbol unveils spiritual realities that can only be captured by that symbol. It lends itself to many interpretations, but each interpretation is less, not more, than the story itself.

If I had to put a name on what’s being symbolized in Severance, I think the closest I could come is to say that it’s about the sheer inconvenience of personhood. All our perfect systems and grand designs falter on the inexplicable but undeniable existence of human consciousness, which cannot be instrumentalized or automated except at grave moral peril. The fact that innies are people is what almost everyone else in the show keeps trying to stamp out and deny. But it can never be erased. And here, to underscore the point, I’m afraid I have to spoil some things. Before you read the rest, go watch the show. Seriously, it’s unmissable.