Severance season 2 finale review: thrills and chills without resorting to lowest common denominators

Telegraph

21-03-2025

I have every confidence that, even as the credits were rolling on the mind-blowing finale of the second season of Severance (Apple TV+), fansites were exploding with a myriad theories and PhD outlines were being hastily scribbled, ready to deep-dive into a show whose liminal world is so multi-layered it can make your brain ache.
Which, I hasten to point out, is no bad thing. At a time when streaming sites are frantically chasing the algorithm and dumbing down into hollow echoes of past glories, Severance is a rare and shining example of TV that knows how to thrill and chill without resorting to lowest common denominators.
Which brings us to the question of numbers, just one of the Severance mysteries unpacked in a final episode that opened with a pivotal confrontation: Mark Scout, our everyman hero from day one, was brought face to face with his innie and outie selves, the terms used to describe the departmentalisation of his workplace and private life personalities as practiced by shady tech giant Lumon. He was understandably discombobulated.
This was where Severance started, asking us to question how we compartmentalise our lives and behaviour, so here the story was coming full circle. We learned that the numbers Mark, played with note-perfect edginess by Adam Scott, endlessly scrolled through on screen turned out to be the macro-data of human emotions, the building blocks of our emotional individuality.
This was key to the knife-edge thriller element writer Dan Erickson had cannily constructed to drive Severance to its climax. Once Mark had completed his 25th programme, code name Cold Harbor, his usefulness was complete and his number was up. Could he calculate a way out and reunite with the wife he thought dead? Should he try to reintegrate both sides of his life or was he better off divided? The question marks, as ever with Severance, dangled tantalisingly in the air.
Let's take a little time out here to unpack the galaxy of references at play in that last paragraph. For starters 25 was no random choice, there's a school of philosophical thought that pinpoints 25 human emotions (though Inside Out upped it to 27, that's inflation for you). Cold Harbor refers to an American Civil War battle in which huge military losses occurred due to tactical outmanoeuvring.
Can I mention here that the goat – yes, there's a goat in it – being called Emil is likely a reference to left-field thinker Emil Cioran, who embraced the virtue of a life doing nothing as a way of finding meaning? Though that might be me doing a Severance, which I'm sure is a thing.
This second series, stretching its wings outside Lumon's sterile bright corridors, has taken some strange diversions along the way. But as it hit the closing stretch, underscoring the stories and emotions of its key players, it's built into something closely resembling televisual perfection. It takes some doing to weave analyses of workplace exploitation, the deconstruction of human personality and take a pop at organised religion and still have you on the edge of your seat. You don't get that with Ten Pound Poms.
A circle in a spiral, a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning, on an ever-spinning reel, how else could Severance end – and this really should be the end, it pains me to say it but it really doesn't need a third season, which has been mooted – by playing out with Windmills Of Your Mind, one of the most perfectly formed pop songs of all time?
As Mark and the love of (one of) his lives hurtled down endless corridors to bloody oblivion, we were left both up in the air and down in the dumps. The message: Love will triumph, even if there's no happily ever after.