Reintegrating the clues
We’re only hours away from the highly anticipated season finale of “Severance,” the Apple Original that’s currently one of the most talked-about and acclaimed series. I’ve watched the first season twice, and its puzzling nature has compelled me to pay close attention to every detail during the second season.
About a week ago, a friend with whom I delight in discussing each episode—and speculating on what’s to come—proposed a wager: “Shall we bet a beer that the second season ends with a cliffhanger like the first season did?” I told him that was too easy at this point; we’d have to bet on our predictions for the last episode. What will we finally uncover, which characters will do what, and what will remain a mystery—since a third season is likely, though not confirmed—I decided to think through my ideas and write about them. And here they are.
spoiler alert! Everything that follows is full of spoilers. Chock-full of them. If by some rare chance you—who are you?—are reading this and haven’t watched the series, please stop here unless you’re okay with spoilers.
An Essential Recap
Season 1 introduced us to the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) team—Mark, Petey, Dylan, and Irving—as their dynamics shifted with Petey’s disappearance and the arrival of a new refiner: Helly R. Helly quickly realized her captivity and fought against it, while Petey underwent the supposedly impossible “reintegration” process before dying unexpectedly after meeting Outie Mark, hoping to convince him of Lumon’s nefarious activities. As the new MDR team’s members are drawn to uncover what they are doing down there, they start questioning the true meaning of the question they got asked at the very beginning: who are you?. Irving forms a forbidden romantic relationship with Burt from Optics & Design, and Dylan discovers the “Overtime Contingency”—a backdoor allowing Innies to awaken outside Lumon’s severed floor. This led to two key revelations: Mark’s supposedly dead wife was actually alive as Ms. Casey at Lumon, and Helly was Helena Eagan, daughter of Lumon’s CEO. Just when we were most eager to know what’s next, the season ended, leaving us to wait for nearly three years.
Season 2 has (naturally) raised the stakes. Helena Eagan infiltrated the MDR group by posing as Helly through another backdoor, the “Glasgow Block,” somewhat the opposite of the Overtime Contingency. Mark decided to undergo his reintegration process to recover memories of his wife, while Irving discovered the mysterious “Exports Hall” and left clues for Dylan before his demise following an attempt to drown the faking Helena. Dylan’s arc took a more personal turn with visits from his Outie’s wife, Gretchen, creating a complex emotional relationship between three human beings; predictably, his Innie fell in love with her. In the second half of the season, we learned two significant facts: Gemma/Ms. Casey is indeed alive and has been severed multiple times to undergo some exhausting “laboratory trials.” These tests are closely linked to the mysterious “Cold Harbor” file that Mark is rushing to complete. We also learned that Harmony Cobel, the former manager of the “Severed Floor,” is the mastermind behind the creation of the severance procedure: the design, the software, the backdoors—it’s all hers. However, Jame Eagan, current CEO and Helena’s father, took credit for the entire discovery and its introduction to Lumon several years earlier.
My Predictions
I believe the Season 2 finale will be more conclusive than Season 1’s. In my opinion, the first season aimed more at creating an engaging TV distribution rather than narrative satisfaction. I expect the Season 2 finale to provide genuine conclusions to several storylines without exhausting dramatic potential. As John Yorke writes in “Into the Woods,” stories consist of narrative arcs that repeat at every level:
Stories are built from acts, acts are built from scenes, and scenes are built from even smaller units called beats. All these units are constructed in three parts: fractal versions of a three-act whole. Just as a story will contain a set-up, an exciting incident, a crisis, a climax, and a resolution, so will acts and scenes.
Without further ado, here are my confident predictions for today’s last episode.
- A final confrontation with Harmony Cobel will reveal the connection between Mark and the testing floor where Gemma is trapped.
- Mark will complete his reintegration, successfully unifying the memories of his two personalities—at least those relevant to his wife.
- Helly will find the Export Hall. Her upcoming meeting with her father—who appears at MDR at the end of the ninth episode—should tell us something about her true role as a “mole” in the severed floor and MDR.
- Mark, Devon, and Cobel will devise a strategy to let Outie Mark—now aware of some of his Innie’s crucial memories—access the severed floor and find a way to reach Gemma. Cobel will demand something in return for helping the Scout siblings undermine Lumon’s master plan from within.
- There will be an in-person meeting between Mark and Gemma, in versions where they remember each other. The outcome of this encounter could be the real cliffhanger leading us into Season 3.
I can’t be sure any of my guesses will happen, but from a purely narrative perspective—how a well-thought-out story and its characters evolve—I think they’re quite plausible.
As a bonus, I have a couple more speculative predictions:
- I think we’ll discover the true meaning of the refiners’ work. My guess: the pruning and labeling of numbers associated with Kier Eagan’s four “tempers” is a training phase for software to be uploaded to the severance chips. This software would activate specific personalities (of a multiply severed individual) in certain circumstances, isolating life experiences from unwanted or unpleasant emotional consequences.
- Consequently, we’ll learn the true meaning of the “Cold Harbor” file. My guess: it’s connected to the most undesirable experience (death) which Gemma has, in a sense, already encountered. Mark himself has had to deal with the consequences of his wife’s sudden—and by now only presumed—death.
While the rest of the world is diving into Severance’s finale today, I’ll be getting ready for the first multi-day hike of this year. My crave to learn Mark’s fate must wait a week because I’ve chosen to trade Lumon’s hallways for Mediterranean hiking trails. To preserve the mystery until my return, I’m embracing airplane mode in the most literal sense—completely unplugged. And I hope my friend won’t find a way to spoil the surprise for me.