Latest news with #ChikhaiBardo
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How the longtime ‘Severance' cinematographer wound up directing Season 2's standout episode
As Severance has refined its wintry, corporate aesthetic over the course of two seasons, one woman in particular has been central to crafting the show's look. Jessica Lee Gagné has worked as cinematographer on most of the show's episodes so far, continuing her collaboration with director Ben Stiller from the 2018 miniseries Escape at Dannemora. Mark Chernus, who plays Ricken on Severance, recently told Gold Derby of Gagné that 'her eye, her lens, is the look of the show.' But towards the end of the most recent season, Gagné finally made her directorial debut — and created one of the show's standout episodes in the process. 'I definitely had a lot of doubts going into it. I've doubted myself for a long time,' Gagné tells Gold Derby of taking the step towards directing. 'But then it seemed so obvious that this episode was meant for me to direct, just because of the themes and the possibility of style and language that it could have, and also what the writer wanted from it. So I was like, 'Well, if anyone's going to do this, I have to do it.'' More from GoldDerby Justine Lupe on the unexpected chemistries that power Netflix's 'Nobody Wants This' 'What We Do in the Shadows' cast on alternate series finale endings and the parody that didn't work Catalina Sandino Moreno on 'From' fan theories: 'Whenever you think that you're in the right lane, you're not' 'Chikhai Bardo,' the seventh episode of Season 2, breaks from Severance's usual format by focusing on the character of Gemma (Dichen Lachman). Gemma's shadow looms large over the show, since her supposed 'death' is the reason that Mark Scout (Adam Scott) volunteered for a job on the severed floor of Lumon Industries in the first place. Back in Season 1, viewers met her own Lumon 'innie' persona, Ms. Casey. But 'Chikhai Bardo' actually introduced everyone to Gemma herself for the first time, both in flashbacks to her relationship with Mark before her disappearance and in present-day scenes showing her being experimented upon as a prisoner on Lumon's testing floor. Through the flashbacks, viewers see how Gemma's struggles with getting pregnant pushed her towards Lumon (who apparently own and operate fertility clinics among their many mysterious business holdings). Gagné felt a strong connection to this material. 'I feel like one thing that helped me direct and work with actors in this capacity for the first time is my own life experience with my career and how I've gotten where I've gotten,' Gagné says. 'I got to have access to amazing projects at quite a young age. I really lost myself within my work for a long time. So going into my 30s, I went through a big questioning phase of, 'OK, I need to find my partner, freeze my eggs, do all of these things … or did I miss out on that part of life?'' Gagné adds, 'I felt like those everyday moments, those everyday conversations, are things that I've felt and lived. So it hit really close to home in that sense.' Bringing this perspective to the director's chair was a big help to Lachman, who in addition to portraying Gemma's fertility struggles also had to do something that no other Severance actor has had to do yet: Portray multiple 'innies.' 'When I found out she was directing that episode, I was very excited,' Lachman says. 'I think she's an extraordinary talent, and I love her vision. I love her creativity, and I love how flexible she is in terms of doing whatever she has to do to capture the moment. And I thought it was really nice to have a female director for that episode.' Most Lumon employees have two personas: The 'outie' that exists outside of work, and the 'innie' they become when they take the elevator to their office on the severed floor. But on the testing floor, Gemma becomes a different 'innie' with every room she enters. This revelation has greatly expanded the possibilities of what can happen within the world of Severance. 'I was terrified because it's an expansion of the idea. It's a new iteration of the concept of the show. And I was like, 'Can the show sustain this?'' Severance creator Dan Erickson tells Gold Derby. 'I love the idea in my head, but you always wonder, 'Is it going to play? Is it going to come across?' What I knew we had was this amazing secret weapon in Dichen. Not that she was a secret, but I knew that she was going to be able to play each of these versions of the character so strangely and tenderly and differently, and she just knocked it out of the park. She nailed it. And then of course Jessica Lee Gagné, who directed that episode, is one of the most brilliant people on the planet. Even with all of us knowing how good she was, she managed to surpass those expectations.' Each of the rooms Gemma is forced into seemingly represent a different unpleasant life experience. One of her 'innies' only goes through dentist appointments, for example, while another has to endlessly write out Christmas thank-you cards. Making all of these selves feel real with limited screentime was the episode's main challenge for both Lachman and Gagné — but thankfully they both made each other feel comfortable in their collaboration. 'Dichen's openness to exploration on set and trying different things made it a lot easier for me, working with actors like this for the first time. She wasn't afraid of doing anything or trying anything. There were some moments that we were just exploring and trying stuff,' Gagné says. 'Like I said, I have a lot of personal experience with these kinds of themes. So I just wanted to really anchor them in reality with her as much as possible. So we had lots of conversations, personal conversations, to see what we could touch on. This very female way of hiding parts of ourselves and not fully showing what we feel in order to put other people first, was always a thing we'd come back to. We had many conversations and we moved through it together.' Gagné didn't make things easy for herself. In addition to directing 'Chikhai Bardo,' she still worked as cinematographer on five other episodes in Season 2. But she thinks this amount of work made it easier for her to push through without getting caught up in her own doubts. 'I think that's what really pushed me through. I would be shooting Episode 10 and then prepping Episode 7 at the same time. It was like I had two or three full-time jobs. I lived and breathed Severance for sure. The main difference between cinematographer and director, Gagné found, is how many more questions you have to answer as the latter. 'The prep work is much more laborious and you are answering 3 million questions. I wasn't used to that as a cinematographer,' she says. 'As a DP I'm very involved in terms of set design and these kinds of things, I'm that kind of cinematographer who really gets in there, but I don't get to take over any of the smaller details. So for me, those meetings with the props department and the costume department, when we were researching all of these new things, that was just joy. I was like a kid in the candy store. To get to direct for the first time on Severance was a pretty luxurious first-time directing experience, and I felt like I needed to live up to it. So I gave it everything I had.' The results of her hard work speak for themselves; the episode astounded viewers and set pieces in place for the epic season finale. Not everyone was surprised by this. 'That was not surprising to me because we've been working together for a while and I know how talented she is,' Stiller tells Gold Derby. 'I thought it was really important that that episode had a female point of view. Jessica is just so talented and really is interested thematically in a lot of the ideas that are in that episode, in terms of how we connect with each other, and how people who have some sort of spiritual connection are linked in different ways. What she did with it visually was just so impressive. It's great to watch her do her thing.' Now that Gagné has gone from cinematographer to director, she's ready to start working on her first feature film. She 'leaves some really big shoes to fill' as Severance's go-to DP, according to Patricia Arquette, but also everyone's excited to see what Gagné does next. 'When you're putting your name on something like that and saying that you approved it, you have to be quite vulnerable. You're opening yourself up to criticism, and I have to admit, I was really afraid of that,' she says. 'But after seeing that it went so well, I think I needed that to help push me forward in the rest of my career.' Gagné isn't yet ready to share many details about her plans, but says, 'We're in the beginning stages, but I'm giving it my heart. It's going to be a personal one, and it's very different from Severance.' Best of GoldDerby Chloë Sevigny on Kitty Menendez and 'Monsters' fascination: 'People are endlessly curious about those who have privilege and abuse it' Jason Isaacs relives filming 'The White Lotus' piña colada scene: 'It was one of the reasons I was worried about taking the job' Kaitlyn Dever on playing 'horrible' characters in 'Last of Us', 'Apple Cider Vinegar': 'I just don't see any other option but to give 100 percent' Click here to read the full article.
Los Angeles Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘What if this doesn't work?' The ‘Severance' cast reflects on Season 2's biggest swings
On Feb. 18, 2022, Apple TV+ unveiled 'Severance,' a striking new series set at Lumon Industries, a mysterious biotech company whose employees in the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) division have undergone a procedure in which their at-work consciousness (known as their 'innie') is 'severed' from their personal-life consciousness (their 'outie'). Over the next two months, audiences obsessed over the show's seductive examination of work-life balance and the different guises we wear throughout the day. Then the series went on an agonizingly long hiatus — and not just for fans. 'Our No. 1 concern was people sticking with us after a three-year break,' admits star and producer Adam Scott. 'We stopped shooting about a year ago — I've been spending all of that time either watching cuts of the show or discussing the show with [executive producer] Ben [Stiller] and [creator] Dan [Erickson]. 'Severance' is a constant in all of our lives. Whether we're shooting or not, we're always in close contact talking about it.' That angst is apparent when I speak to Patricia Arquette, who plays Lumon's icy, menacing Harmony Cobel, the day of the shocking Season 2 finale. 'How's it going?' she asks excitedly about the online response. Relieved that fans hail 'Severance's' sophomore run as more provocative and moving than ever, she confesses, 'I was scared of some of the risks [the creative team] were taking: 'What if this doesn't work?' They really didn't sit on their laurels from the first year's success — they took a lot more chances in the second year.' Because of the outsize anticipation, initial reports of delays and extensive rewrites on Season 2 created worries that the series' intricate narrative puzzle might implode. Scott dismisses those reports now that audiences have seen the finished product. 'It's a unique show,' he says, 'and in Season 1 we were figuring out what it was as we were doing it. In Season 2, the show was changing and expanding — we were figuring out what it was all over again because it was important to all of us that it not feel the same. Sometimes it takes a while.' Certainly, the show's emotional stakes are raised. Dichen Lachman, who plays Ms. Casey/Gemma, is especially proud of this season's heartbreaking seventh episode, 'Chikhai Bardo,' which flashes back to Mark and Gemma's once-blissful time as husband and wife, their relationship affected by miscarriages and IVF treatments. Lachman felt responsible for ensuring 'Severance' properly conveyed the anguish of infertility issues. 'I have not been through the process of IVF, but I just know [from] speaking to my friends how difficult that is,' she says. Without getting into specifics, she says, 'I've had things happen. It is very shocking — you do think that there's something wrong with you. It's a difficult thing to talk about — and it's very difficult, I think, for a man to understand it on the same level as a woman.' The actors' personal experiences informed the season in other ways. John Turturro's older brother, Ralph, died in December 2022. 'It was hard to go back to work,' says the actor, who plays Mark's Lumon co-worker Irving. But something shifted once the cast headed into the freezing wilderness for 'Woe's Hollow,' an episode that finds the MDR division engaged in a bizarre team-building exercise. 'When I was up in the mountains, it just felt like I was invigorated,' Turturro recalls. 'It was also arduous, being in the snow — [my character] had a lot to do and I was very active. But along the way, I felt myself being able to incorporate it. You're surrounded by trees and snow, and it was beautiful. You could contemplate a little bit and look out at the sky. I was appreciative of that.' For Tramell Tillman, whose breakthrough performance as the eerily formal Lumon manager Mr. Milchick was among the first season's revelations, the series' central themes — especially the unknowability of one's 'true' self — continue to hit home. Reflecting on his journey to come out as gay — he was raised Baptist — Tillman says, 'I've always admired people that were consistently the same, no matter the circumstance. I think me being able to become a chameleon is just a condition of growing up and who I am — that kind of malleability has afforded me a lot of opportunities. But I never as an adult walked away from the true essence of who I am — I never wanted to step away from my values. That took a while for me to learn: What is it that I believe in?' Living multiple lives is also something Zach Cherry, who provides both comic relief and pathos as fellow data refiner Dylan, understands. The actor long knew he wanted to be a performer, but initially he had to get a day job. 'I was an office manager,' he says. 'It wasn't quite as distinct as the innie/outie, but they didn't know that I was doing comedy every night. I wasn't that version of myself [at work] — I was compartmentalized in that sense, so that informed what I did on this show.' Cherry was at the job 'for quite a few years,' but where other actors are quick to dismiss their earlier 9-to-5 gigs, he proudly declares, 'It was a job that I did enjoy. I was good at it! But it very much was not my passion.' Since this season's finale, which sees Mark abandon his outie's wife, Gemma, to run away with the anarchic Helly, Britt Lower, who plays the character, has observed fans' impassioned response to that cliffhanger. But she won't answer a question many viewers have: What, exactly, is Helly thinking when she looks at Gemma just before she and Mark escape? Does she feel bad for Gemma? Or is she feeling triumphant that Mark chose her? 'It's a Rorschach test of how it resonates with a viewer based on their own experience,' Lower says of her character's neutral expression. 'I would never want to rob someone of their interpretation. I will say that a woman simply looking across the hall at another woman can be interpreted in so many ways.' As for what awaits viewers in Season 3, the 'Severance' castmates are uniform in revealing nothing. 'I'm just excited to see where they go,' Lower says. 'For the time being, it's really fun to let my imagination run wild.' Throughout her career, she has taken to drawing to help enter the headspace of the characters she's played — has she done any sketches about what Helly's future might look like? Lower sparks to that suggestion. 'Not yet,' she replies, 'but maybe next time we talk, I'll have some drawings to show you.'
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
WATCH: Dichen Lachman Revisits Early Severance Days, Talks Gemma vs. Helly and Dollhouse Comparisons
It's been almost a month, so, yeah — this interview mentions all kinds of spoilers from the Season 2 finale, streaming on Apple TV+. When Dichen Lachman paid a visit to TVLine's New York office, 1) it was almost 16 years to the day that I published my first interview with her, and 2) the pop culture-verse was abuzz with theories about the Severance Season 2 finale, which dropped March 21. More from TVLine Will Trent Shocker: EPs Tee Up 'Really Emotional, Really Scary' Ormewood Storyline Save the Dates: Taron Egerton-Jurnee Smollett Series Premiere, The Brutalist on Max and More Doctor Who Stars Praise Season Premiere's Stealth, 'Compassionate' Take on [Spoiler] Culture - Grade It In the video Q&A above, Lachman and I very quickly commemorate our 'anniversary' before diving into all things Severance — starting with what all she was told about the role when she was first eyed for it some four-and-a-half years ago. 'I only had two or three [script] pages and absolutely no context about who this person was,' the Aussie actress recalls, 'and she's saying the most random, bizarre things!' Lachman was allowed a bit more context after she and executive producer Ben Stiller navigated a potential scheduling conflict with her role in Jurassic World: Dominion. At that juncture, 'he finally, reluctantly told me the Season 1 cliffhanger,' where Mark S. bellowed to a confused Devon and friends, 'She's alive!' — meaning, his 'dead' wife Gemma. Lachman then talks about the early direction she was given, on Ms. Casey's overall vibe as Lumon's wellness counselor. She hails Stiller's 'empathy and curiosity,' being an actor himself, and how he was able to play for her, on-set, the actual music that would score Ms. Casey's sessions. 'It really helped inform me of the pace and the tone,' she recalls. After touching on how she developed Ms. Casey's speaking voice, Lachman talks about first getting wind of Season 2, Episode 7, which introduced viewers to a lot of Gemma Scout's other Innies. Until that point, 'I was noticing I wasn't in the scripts very much!' she says with a laugh. 'Finally, [series creator] Dan Erickson, who's just an extraordinary talent, mentioned, 'We have this episode….'' Once apprised of what 'Chikhai Bardo' would entail, 'I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel the pressure' — not just to do right by her castmates and bosses but 'for the fans of this show,' Lachman admits. 'It's an intensity I haven't experienced, the attention and love they have for the show.' The dual Hollywood strikes of Summer 2023 and the pause in filming they dictated worked in Lachman's favor, affording her time to speak at length with 'Chikhai Bardo' director Jessica Lee Gagné and co-writers Erickson and Mark Friedman. What's more, 'We were fortunate enough to go to the house [where the Gemma/Mark scenes filmed] and have rehearsal,' she shares, where 'things did change a bit.' Lachman then talks about working with teen icon Robby Benson as Dr. Mauer ('I'm from Katmandu, so I didn't know who he was! But I did learn very quickly that he was an absolute legend and is antithetical to the character he's playing'), and to what degree her stint as a regularly reprogrammed Active on Fox's Dollhouse helped with her portrayal of so many Innies. 'There are similarities, absolutely…,' she allows, though Actives were even more detached from their true selves. 'Maybe Dollhouse is the sequel in terms of the tech?' she quips. From there, Lachman shares her take on the Season 2 finale (namely, whether Gemma saw the redhead Mark was with as any kind of threat)… explains why she enjoys 'living in the not knowing' what's to come ('I have complete faith in Dan and the entire team to come up with something that won't let anyone down')… and along those lines, gets candid about what all she knows about the Season 3 of TVLine Yellowjackets' Tawny Cypress Talks Episode 4's Tai/Van Reunion: 'We're All Worried About Taissa' Vampire Diaries Turns 10: How Real-Life Plot Twists Shaped Everything From the Love Triangle to the Final Death Vampire Diaries' Biggest Twists Revisited (and Explained)
Buzz Feed
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
After THAT Finale, We Can't Stop Thinking About 'Severance' Season 3 — Here's Everything We Know So Far
Following an excruciating near-three-year wait, Apple TV+ finally delivered the second season of Severance in January. We all returned to the offices of Lumon alongside Mark S., Helly R., Dylan G., and Irv, where Mr. Milchick ascended the ranks as the floor manager of the severed floor, and the work of the MDR department remained nothing short of mysterious yet important. Buuut, after the "Cold Harbor" finale last week, we certainly got some of the answers that we've been looking for after two whole seasons. Just hours after airing, Tim Cook and Ben Stiller confirmed that Apple TV+ had ordered a third season of Severance. Praise Kier! View this video on YouTube Theories are running rampant online surrounding the direction of the show in the next season. But before we dive into what we know about season 3 of Severance, let's recap what we learned in the season finale. Ms. Cobel finally reveals the sinister operations at Lumon and Mark's significance to the company. He has been instrumental in creating multiple consciousnesses for his wife, Gemma, who is alive and held captive as Ms. Casey. Mark's task, including the Cold Harbor file, involved refining data clusters that corresponded to these personas, effectively constructing new identities for use within Lumon's severance program. And "Cold Harbor," the highly discussed file throughout the series, is finally revealed to be the final test in the Macrodata Refinement project that creates new consciousnesses for Gemma, Mark's wife, as part of Lumon's experiments to test the severance chip's ability to suppress core emotional responses. And seemingly, the end of Gemma Scout's existence as we knew it. Calling back to "Chikhai Bardo," the baby crib in the Cold Harbor room serves as an emotional trigger related to Gemma's past miscarriage, and her dismantling of it without emotion demonstrates the chip's effectiveness in erasing deeply ingrained trauma. Meanwhile, we got to see Innie Mark and Outie Mark share their first conversation together. While it was kind of heartwarming at first, it didn't take long for things to take a turn once Innie Mark realized that he, along with the rest of the Innies at Lumon, might not exist if Outie Mark had his way. Of course, this episode took us through a serious and violent journey that saw Mark catching a body (I'm still wondering how a court would hold an innie accountable...), finally finding Gemma, and sadly, abandoning her at the last minute (as his Innie) so he could remain inside Lumon with Helly R. Speaking of Helly R., as part of this plan to take down Lumon and save Gemma, she led the revolt on the severed floor that saw her and Dylan G. imprisoning Mr. Milchick in a bathroom. We also have to mention that creepy look on her face at the end of the episode that spurred theories that it was actually Helena Eagan. The ending gave much more closure than the cliffhanger of season one (and a stellar marching band performance led by Tramell Tillman), yet there are still many more questions that need to be addressed. Without further ado, here's everything we know about season 3 of Severance. The good news: we probably won't be waiting another three years between seasons. A few factors played into the delay between the first and second season including the writers and actors strikes in 2023. So it seems like everyone is hopeful that the next season of Severance will be back in the near future including both Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller. "I would love to finish the show before I'm 70," Erickson told Entertainment Weekly. "I would hope that season 3 comes sooner," he continued. "Certainly a big part of it was the fact that we had the strikes which shut us down for five or six months for production. And there was a difference between that and being shut down for Covid in season 1, because when we were shut down for Covid, I was still writing that whole time, and this time literally it was pencils down. I was making an effort to not even really look at or think about the scripts during that time." He added, "... Having done it twice now, there is more of a sense of understanding procedurally what works and how to streamline it, so our goal is never to draw out people's pain for three years. And I hope that we don't have to do that again." Hopefully, 2026? Even better, Ben Stiller already confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter in February that they were working on the new season in a writers' room, adding that he hoped that we wouldn't have to wait three years between seasons, again. Speaking of writers' rooms, it appears that they've recruited new showrunners for the third season, according to Nexus Point News. Per the Writers Guild of America database, Eli Jorne (Walking Dead) and Mary Laws (Succession) will be joining Erickson for the third season, replacing Chris Black and Mark Friedman, who served as showrunners in seasons 1 and 2. There isn't a whole lot of information surrounding the plot of the upcoming season or what might happen to Mark and the gang after breaking Gemma out of Lumon. However, as pointed out by Harper's Bazaar, the final shot of the season finale strongly indicates what's to come in season 3. Apple TV+ "For me, that image was just in my head from the beginning — when we said, OK, we're going to go this far and this is where we're going to take it,' Stiller told Indie Wire. 'You don't see freeze-frames at the end of movies that often these days, but it used to be done a lot more. It's just kind of this moment in time where you're like, 'Oh, wow, this is the end of the movie, but it's going to keep going. We just don't know where it's going to go.'" The most important question is, who will be making their return? Adam Scott suggested that we might see the whole crew back on screen again, which makes sense. After all, the last time we saw Dylan G., he rallied the Choreography and Merriment department against Milchick while Mark S. and Helly R. ran off. Apple TV+ "I couldn't be more excited to get back to work with Ben, Dan, the incredible cast and crew, Apple and the whole 'Severance' team," Scott said in a statement announcing the show's renewal. However, a key question surrounds the return of Irving, played by John Turturro. By the end of episode 9, Irving boards a train with his dog, Radar, after Burt (Christopher Walken) spares his life and tells him to never return to Kier again. It could be the end of Irving's story as we know it but there's a chance it might not be. "When you're doing scenes at the end of the season, it's always tricky to find that sweet spot," he told The Wrap about that emotional scene at the train station with Burt. "Because you think it could be the end, but it maybe it's not the end." What's a bit more promising is that Turturro said he's in "open" conversation with Stiller and Erickson about what could come next. "If there's stuff that's good and active and interesting to do, then I could see that, yeah,' Turturro said. 'If people wanted there to be [a third season], there could be, and there could be big, big surprises too. You know, Irving's left all those paintings behind. There's a reason why they went into his apartment, why they're looking around.' Although details on the plot of Severance season 3 are still under wraps, the wait for answers is already unbearable. Does outie Mark reunite with Gemma in the outside world? Will Milchick survive the revolt of the innies at Lumon? And how deep does the rabbit hole go? Share your best theories below.
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Severance Twist I Can't Forgive
This article contains spoilers through the finale of Severance Season 2. The world of Severance is so unfailingly cold, so sterile, that the seventh episode of Season 2, 'Chikhai Bardo,' came as a palpable shock. Flashback scenes detailing the love story and marriage of Gemma (Dichen Lachman) and Mark (Adam Scott) were stylistically totally different; they featured dappled natural light and ambient noise, and were shot on film—a production choice that gave both characters a grainy, imperfect aura. Directed by the cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné, the episode explained what happened to Gemma after her supposed death in a car crash—her severance into multiple consciousnesses, each one set up to endure a different kind of torment, and her captivity on a hidden floor of Lumon that she never gets to leave. But it also drew a sharp distinction between the corporation's frigid absurdity, with its history of ether-huffing children and creepy animatronic hall of founders, and the naturalistic humanity of the world beyond it. 'Who are you?' Mark asks Gemma when they first meet, donating blood via ominously Lumon-branded equipment. This is, I should note, exactly the same question he asks Helly R. (Britt Lower) in the opening seconds of the series. Unlike Helly, though, Gemma has no trouble responding. Season 2 made Gemma fully human, after first introducing her as Lumon's robotic, apparently lobotomized 'wellness counselor,' Ms. Casey. Unsevered, the show revealed, Gemma was funny, sharp, fully in love with Mark, and devastated by her inability to have a child with him. Lumon has always been sinister in a buffoonish way, but its treatment of Gemma in 'Chikhai Bardo' was horrifically evil: preying on her pain at a reproductive clinic, faking her death, confining her to windowless quarters, lying to her about Mark's new life, and experimenting on her like a lab rat, making her suffer through staged dentist appointments and airplane disasters over and over and over again. All of this is in service of a mission that, after the Season 2 finale, 'Cold Harbor,' remains blurry but seems to entail sacrificing Gemma in a goat-attended ritual in order to revive the consciousness of Lumon's founder, Kier Eagan. (And, yes, I feel high even typing these words.) [Read: Severance cannot save you] Season 1 of Severance spent enough time outside of Lumon to fully underscore how weird the company was, with its cultlike devotion to Kier, its obsession with round foods (eggs, melons, waffles), its bizarrely hostile leadership. The people who fleshed out the show's world beyond the company—a Lumon-protesting punk band; Mark's sister, Devon (Jen Tullock); and even depressed Mark himself—were mostly recognizably normal. Its inner acolytes came across, by contrast, as uncannily contrived kooks. Season 2, though, has confined itself more closely to the Lumon realm, which made 'Chikhai Bardo' and its depiction of pre-severed Mark and Gemma stand out. And, to me, the season's cramped, airless Lumon setting also made the finale's closing scenes crueler, as outie Mark rescued Gemma from the company's netherworld, only for innie Mark to abandon her on the other side of the door, screaming, while he ran back toward Helly. At a theoretical level, the final twist makes sense. Innies and outies, Severance has emphasized throughout Season 2, are essentially different people with distinct personalities, needs, desires, and moral compasses. Innie Mark, emotionally innocent and as impulsive as an adolescent, might indeed choose Helly, even if the two are now trapped together with no conceivable way out. The ending sets up a third season of Severance that remains relatively stable, with the Lumon CEO Jame Eagan likely still intent on completing Kier's 'grand addendum,' even if it means ignoring yet another messy employee uprising. And Lower's double-edged work this season toggling between her innie, the lovely, irreverent Helly, and her outie, the icy, manipulative Helena, has been astonishing, more than justifying the ending by emphasizing the show's philosophical questions about nature versus nurture and whether love can transcend severance. So why is what happened to Gemma still so hard to swallow? Maybe because, on the show, Gemma has only ever experienced suffering: before Lumon, during Lumon, and now after. Even in her escape, she's losing something yet again. (Lachman's bewildered, 'Mark S? What's taking place?' as she found herself kissing him in the elevator, having switched into the severed mode of Ms. Casey, was pitch-perfect.) Otherwise, 'Cold Harbor' did everything it needed to plot-wise, while throwing a spectacularly nervy marching-band set piece and a teeth-grindingly stressful escape sequence into the mix. There were revelations. (Mark has indeed been coding different souls for Gemma this whole time, as part of a momentous project to possibly bring back Kier—which does, though, urge the question of whom the other innies have been refining.) There were suggestions. (Is Kier Eagan actually alive in digital form, imprisoned in the animatronic form of himself?) There were hugely gratifying insurrections—Dylan and the marching band against Seth Milchick, the manager of the severed floor; Milchick against a roboticized Kier; the mysterious goat lady against the Lumon manager Mr. Drummond. (Emil thanks you.) [Read: What are the puzzles of Severance about?] There were also eggs. So many eggs! (Presumably, with the show's rumored $20 million an episode budget, the show can afford them.) We spent so much time this season pondering the meaning of the goats when the eggs were there all along: raw eggs, egg bars, eggs cut neatly into six different segments, served on the most menacing plate a prop master ever thrifted. From its opening scenes, Severance has presented the procedure the show is named for as a kind of birth, the spawning of a new, immature being. With 'Cold Harbor,' we finally got a sense of the full life cycle. The childlike innies have become more akin to teenagers, discovering sexuality and falling in love. Next, it's presumed, comes adulthood, and then death, and then resurrection via blobs of data with four tempers. And apparently, with death come sacrificial scapegoats. A show as rich in symbols, details, and Easter eggs as this one is always going to be thrilling to decode, with Reddit threads and screenshots trying to make sense of the mysteries. The challenge for the finale was offering just enough to keep hard-core Severance-heads engaged without alienating the less committed viewer or relinquishing the qualities that make for satisfying television. And, for the most part, 'Cold Harbor' succeeded. The rest of the season, though, had more than a few bugs in its system. Is Mark, after undergoing a process designed to reintegrate his two minds, still severed or not? Who actually is Reghabi, the ex-Lumon employee doing brain surgery on Mark in his basement? Is Ricken, Mark's offbeat brother-in-law, anything more than comic relief? The revelation that so many of Lumon's core characters, including Harmony Cobel, have been damaged by both trauma and repetitive exposure to ether as children might help explain their sheer strangeness. But the show's focus on expanding the historical lore of Lumon this season left it less time to devote to its characters, the verbose and truly fascinating Milchick among them. (Severance: The Lexington Letter, a fictional e-book released to accompany the series, hints that Milchick is related to a newspaper editor, which perhaps explains his love of words.) Last week, The Guardian posited that Severance has become the smash it has because it offers different things to different tastes (or even different tempers): puzzle-box mythology, workplace comedy, allusions to cultlike organizations and the heartlessness of corporate America, an overarching sense of dread. But for me, what makes the show so captivating is its humanity: the riveting, fleeting moments when the characters feel real, despite the eggy, etherized monstrousness of the world they're trapped in. Should Severance return for a third season (which it seems fated to—praise Kier), all the pieces seem set up for more ambitious, absurd storytelling. But I'll still be craving justice for Gemma. Article originally published at The Atlantic
