‘Severance’ Creator Dan Erickson And EP Ben Stiller Unpack “Inevitable Confrontation” In Season 2 Finale And Season 3 Hopes
The conclusion of Severance Season 2 answered some questions while prompting many new ones, especially when the penultimate episode gets factored in alongside the eighth and seventh installments, setting several characters on new and uncertain paths.
The final scene of the 77-minute episode, titled “Cold Harbor” suggests all sorts of changes bound to occur in the show’s freshly renewed Season 3 announced this morning. After a harrowing sequence of events for Mark Scout’s (Adam Scott) innie including finishing the Cold Harbor file, accidentally killing the sinister Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), saving Emile the goat’s life and rescuing Gemma (Dichen Lachman) from the Testing Floor, innie Mark can’t find it in himself to follow his outie’s wife out the exit stairwell door, and he makes the choice to run away with Helly R. (Britt Lower) in the ever-complicated triangle (or square) that has formed between his two halves of self.
“That was the track that — since the beginning — the series has been leading to on an emotional relationship level. Innie Mark has his own life. Outie Mark has his own life. Outie Mark, we meet first in terms of understanding what he wants, but then over the course of the first and second season, innie mark is living his life and developing these emotional attachments and relationships in his life that are very valid,” director and executive producer Ben Stiller told Deadline ahead of the finale launch. “These two characters are at odds because [outie Mark] getting his wife out is going to basically end innie Mark’s whole existence. And isn’t he a person? And isn’t Helly a person? It’s this inevitable confrontation that has to happen between the two of them.”
The added sentiment of Helly’s pleas to Mark’s innie that “I’m her” meaning she is really Helena Eagan in the outside world, further complicates the choice because, as Mark’s innie tells his outie in brain-bending conversation via video camera, there’s no way Helena will reintegrate like Mark has begun to do.
“The hope is that the audience is, in some way, split or feeling like some people are like, ‘Yeah, I’m Team Innie Mark’ and, ‘I’m Team Outie Mark,’” Stiller said. “It’s a real conflict.”
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Deadline dove deep into the finale as well as plot points in the final four episodes with Stiller and the series creator Dan Erickson before Episode 10 landed and before the Season 3 renewal news was made official. Below, they further dissect what goes into Mark’s ultimate choice between Gemma and Helly, Harmony Cobel’s (Patricia Arquette) backstory, what’s next for Irving’s (John Turturro) outie among other moments in Season 2’s conclusion.
Stiller told Deadline that he and the team behind the show knew how Season 2 would end — down to the very last scene — from the beginning.
“Our hope was to do something that felt like a full meal as a final episode that would also be different than the first season’s finale,” he said. “The first season finale was very much this idea of tying up these loose ends, but this sort of real-time experience of the innies in the outside world. It had a great cliffhanger at the end too, and we just didn’t want to have the same cliffhanger ending here.”
Viewers will recall that Season 1 ended on Mark’s innie getting a dose of his outie’s life thanks to the Overtime Contingency and realizing that his wife Gemma, who also has an innie at Lumon named Ms. Casey, is still alive.
“We felt like ‘Okay, this is going to be leading to this decision of Mark between Helly and Gemma. It felt like also the first time that Mark would ever communicate with himself,” Stiller added. “We wanted to make it, hopefully, like its own little movie that tonally was different than anything we’d done before, but was rooted still in what we felt were like the elements of the show, but a little bit more intense.”
The whole complication of Mark’s choice throws the question of what transcends the severance barrier, specifically when it comes to love, into prism refraction when thought about from Mark’s innie versus outie perspectives and his innie’s hesitation to follow Gemma through the exit stairwell door even after innie and outie converse via camcorder.
“I think there’s no easy answer to that question in terms of what it transcends, and it may be different for different people. In the case of Irving and Bert, we see that there is something that transcends, whether it’s some sort of instinctual memory of the love that they had, or if it’s just that they are both intrinsically, the same people as their innies, and that they would tend to be drawn to each other. There, we see [that] it does seem to cross over,” Erickson told Deadline. “With Mark and Gemma, we see the inverse of that, which is, as he’s looking at her, part of it would be easier if he did feel love for this woman and if he could fulfill the mission that he’s sort of had since the beginning of the season, which is to save her.”
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“It’s a painful realization for him in that moment that he just doesn’t feel that for her is how he does, but he just doesn’t, and the only person that he feels that for is standing behind him and and so that’s ultimately the direction that he goes. And it’s, it’s a it’s a moment where he, you know, it’s a choice between two loves, but it’s also a choice between two identities and two wives, and it’s and it’s him saying, you know, my love and thus my existence is valid and is as important as that of my Audi, yeah,”
Stiller praised Adam Scott for the “mind-numbing” dialogue between Mark’s innie and outie, a scene which was rewritten through rehearsals up until the take.
“Adam [was] rehearsing it with himself, which is challenging playing both parts,” the director said. “I remember we got on the set and we were rehearsing it on a Friday, we were gonna shoot on a Monday, and we rewrote it again as we were rehearsing it, to really get the dynamic the way we thought it should be. [We] finally locked in at the end of the day on Friday and said, ‘Okay, this is it’ so Adam could go off and learn the scene and memorize both sides of it.”
The disconnect between Mark’s innie and outie stems from innie Mark’s love for Helly, who outie Mark calls “Helleny,” which tips off his innie that the outie might not care as much about his innie’s life as he claims. This tension becomes apparent as the two halves of Mark turn what starts as a civil conversation with an apology into an argument about existence.
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“[Adam] had to record video messages to himself for both sides that he watched, that we then would use when we were shooting, so he could actually listen to himself,” Stiller said. “He did these sort of like temp versions of it that he did on the video camera. It took a few days to shoot that sequence because it was just very confusing. I was happy when we were done with it.”
A theme that became apparent in the final four episodes of Season 2 was that of the involvement of women in Lumon Industries, the workforce more generally and society as a whole whether it be from the concept of innies and outties at the Damona Birthing Retreat cabins to Harmony Cobel’s (Patricia Arquette) specific ideas and contributions that Lumon stole without giving her credit.
“I don’t think there’s a way to have an honest conversation about corporate America without looking at the way that certain groups are sidelined and where their contributions are co-opted,” Erickson said. “I think for Harmony, both as a woman and as a non-Eagan, there’s always a little bit of a sense that she’s just lucky to be there and that she should be grateful that she was able to contribute something that the Eagans now get credit for, and that adds to their glory and their grandeur. I think that’s a big part of being in a cult is, the sense that you lose — you sort of get to a point where you are willing to give up your own importance to bring glory to those above you.”
Erickson also tied in Severed Floor Manager Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman), who replaced Cobel at the beginning of Season 2.
“For Cobel as a woman, and for Milchick as a Black man, I think that both of them have a very unique experience with that, with having their contributions and their intellect co-opted and taken away from them,” he added. “We wanted to have an honest conversation about that.”
One face missing from the finale was John Turturro’s Irving Bailiff, whose outie Irving B. was extinguished at the end of Episode 4 during the ORTBO, or Outdoor Retreat and Team Building Occurrence. As Erickson mentioned above, in Episode 9, titled “The After Hours,” Irving and Burt Goodman (Christopher Walken) had a heartfelt goodbye moment that entailed Burt driving Irving to a train station where he got on a locomotive to ride “to the end of the line.” Irving took his beloved dog Radar with him.
“I’m not sure physically, where he’s headed. I’m glad he has Radar with him. That gives me a lot of comfort that they’re still together. I can’t speak to what’s to come, but I will say that in the limited time that we’ve had with outie Irving — I understand that there’s a lot that we still don’t explain at this point about his backstory — I think the picture we’ve gotten is somebody who had come to terms with the idea that love is not for him, and that that he’s not someone who gets to have that,” Erickson said. “I think he’s very committed to this mysterious, lone wolf mission that he’s on and has since, accepted that he can sacrifice love at the altar of that.”
Irving and Burt’s innies met at Lumon on the Severed floor where Burt worked in Optics & Design for Season 1, but their reconnection as outies holds other layers like outie Burt’s past with the company and Irving’s disconnection from his MacroData Refinement teammates Mark, Helly and Dylan. Viewers might remember that when Irv and Burt almost kissed in a botanical garden setting at Lumon, Irv told Burt that he just wasn’t ready, implying romance. At the train station before embarking on his journey, he tells Burt “I’m ready” repeatedly and that he’d like to have love in his life.
“To learn that a different version of him had that and that it was real and that it was beautiful, I think it reawakens this idea that maybe he could have that too,” Erickson said. “So I like to think that wherever [Irv]’s going, he is bringing with him a sense of optimism, that maybe he can be happier in a way he didn’t know.”
Stiller also touched on the violent sequence of Drummond’s aggression and death and how it compares to the death of Doug Graner (Michael Cumpsty) in Season 1. The director of the finale wanted to expose even more “ugliness of what’s there beneath the surface” of Lumon.
“That moment when he starts to strangle Mark, you realize, okay, whatever has happened in the course of the Cold Harbor experiment and all that, for whatever reason, Mark is now someone that [Drummond]’s willing to kill. There’s this underlying violence and ugliness to Lumon that we’ve never seen before that’s coming out,” the director said. “We felt like that was something [to see] because everything is so implied all the time. That’s why I was hoping [it] would be weirdly shocking when Drummond and just punches [Mark] in the nose the first time because it’s like, ‘Whoa, wait a minute. We’ve never seen anybody do anything.’”
Gwendoline Christie’s leader of Mammalian’s Nurturing had just offered up a baby white goat, Emile, to Drummond to kill as a sacrifice “to lead a cherished woman to Kier’s door.” Mark’s journey down to the Testing Floor interrupted this ritual, causing Drummond to almost choke him to death before Christie’s mysterious Mammalian employee threatened him at gunpoint, asking for no more killing of humans or animals.
“Shooting [it], we thought, okay, hopefully, the fun of this whole sequence is that [Mark] has to get down there and get her, but he’s going to have to figure out how to get through all this. “And it did feel like a natural moment when he’s severing that he would lose control of his, autonomy. It felt like a fun surprise moment that could happen, especially after [Drummond] gets so close to actually dying,” Stiller said. “Gwendoline, Dari Ólaffson and Adam worked with this fight coordinator friend of mine, Phil Neilson, and a guy named Dean Neistat, who’s our stunt coordinator. It was like fun to really go for something like that, where it just like a level of violence we hadn’t seen in the show. It felt to me, like that would hopefully be a little bit shocking, and surprising in a good way.”
When asked about a potential Season 3 for the record-setting series, Erickson expressed that he was “hopeful” for the opportunity to tell more of the Severance story.
Stiller “definitely” sees “a lot of questions to explore” for another installment, especially after the finale and revealed details of Cold Harbor and the experiment “set up the stakes of what they’re doing down there.”
“Of course, the fact that, innie Mark, is now with, Helly, [that’s] his choice, and Gemma is just stuck out there, and the irony of him being so close, Mark being so close, if he had just gone through that door, he could have been with her,” Stiller said. “I feel like that’s, obviously, something that’s left hanging there.”