All the Revelations in Severance’s Supersize Finale, Explained

The innies are running the asylum. The finale of Severance’s second season gave most of us what we wanted — a reunion of outie Mark Scout (Adam Scott) with his imprisoned and once-thought-dead wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) — and then ripped it away with a twist that was both brutal and, perhaps in retrospect, inevitable. After finally managing to talk to each other via camcorder, Mark’s innie and outie work together to bust Gemma out of Lumon Industries’ testing floor and severed floor, two areas where her brain snaps into different consciousnesses with no knowledge of the other. Gemma reaches an exit stairwell where she inhabits her regular, outie brain, but Mark’s innie decides he’d rather not effectively kill himself by going with her.

Instead, innie Mark runs back into the arms of Helly (Britt Lower), the severed version of Lumon scion Helena Eagan. They head back into the recesses of the severed floor, where a bunch of severed marching-band employees are holding cowed severed-floor overseer Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) hostage. Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), Milchick’s predecessor before she turned on Lumon, began this season by telling Mark’s outie that there would be “no honeymoon ending” for him and the missing Gemma. She ended it by telling Mark’s innie that there’d be none of that with Helly, either. We’ve learned that innies are just as stubborn as their outies about giving up a shot at a future with the only person they love.

Apple hasn’t told us yet that we’re getting a third season of Severance, but it feels like only a matter of time, because this show is having a cultural moment that transcends Apple TV+’s otherwise tiny place in the streaming ecosystem. Much of the enthusiasm comes in the form of fan theories, and we learned in the season finale that some of the internet’s most popular hypotheses were bang-on, while others were way off. And while the finale had no shortage of infodumps, we ultimately learned almost nothing about the fates of our characters, save for dead Lumon security boss Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), who learned the hard way what happens when an innie’s finger is on the trigger as he snaps into his outie’s consciousness while riding a Lumon elevator.

Where are we, then? Here’s where various fan theories and open questions stand after “Cold Harbor.”

What were all those numbers on Mark’s computer?

They were little pieces of Gemma’s consciousness. “The building blocks of her mind,” as Cobel told Mark’s innie.

A lot of amateur theorists had pegged this one from the first episode of the season (or even before), when the show flashed a black-and-white picture of Gemma, looking like a testing subject, as Mark and his fellow macrodata refiners dragged numbers into boxes. We still don’t know exactly what makes numbers correspond to the categories Mark gave them, but we do know what those categories are: Mark was sorting them to correspond to Lumon cult founder Kier Eagan’s “Four Tempers” of woe, frolic, dread, and malice, which seems to be Lumon-speak for what are sometimes thought to be the four basic emotions: sadness, happiness, fear, and anger. Over his two years at Lumon, Mark has now reconstructed 25 different versions of Gemma’s mind, each representing its own innie when Gemma steps into a different testing room.

What is Cold Harbor?

The final test of the 25 that Lumon has now run on Gemma. We saw some of the previous tests in Episode 7 of this season, when Gemma’s different innies were living life in an endless loop of dentist appointments, violently turbulent flights, and traumatic Christmas-card writing. I theorized then that Lumon was using Gemma to test consumer applications of the severance procedure, which could unburden people from the memories of painful or unpleasant moments. I still feel good about that theory after seeing what Lumon did to Gemma’s innie in “Cold Harbor,” the final test. The company had her disassemble a crib, calling back to her memory from Episode 7 of Mark taking apart a crib after Gemma miscarried during their marriage. (Lumon also played Billie Holiday’s take on “I’ll Be Seeing You,” a favorite of Mark and Gemma in their outie existence.) The couple’s fertility struggles set Gemma on the road to Lumon in the first place.

The severance barriers held even as Lumon put Gemma’s new innie through the most emotionally torturous test possible. Or at least they were holding, until Mark burst in. The Cold Harbor version of Gemma didn’t know who Mark’s outie was, and she initially threatened him with a piece of the crib, but she seemed to realize after a few seconds that Mark was at least a trustworthy person. Was this a case of love overpowering severance? Maybe! Once Gemma snapped into her outie self in the testing floor hallway, she and Mark finally had their moment back together in their own heads. It was sadly short.

What makes Gemma’s case different from the standard severance procedure? Didn’t Mark’s severance also free him from his grief when he thought Gemma was dead?

The simple answer is that Gemma is being severed a lot. Mark has one innie, but Gemma has 25. Lumon may find both commercial and spiritual value in learning how to split a person’s brain into 25 different consciousnesses. With one innie, Lumon can free someone from the pain of work, or of birthing a child, but with as many as 25, Lumon may be able to achieve what seems to have been its ultimate goal since its days making ether: freedom from all pain.

Why does Lumon have an indoor goat pasture on the severed floor?

Cobel had informed Mark’s outie in the previous episode that Gemma would die when Mark’s innie finished his Cold Harbor data refinement. We learned in the finale that not only was Lumon likely to slaughter Gemma once it was done with this last test but also — in perhaps a twist on Judeo-Christian tradition — a cute little goat.

Back in the third episode of the season, we met Lush, the severed goat farmer played by Game of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie, a member of the Lumon department known as Mammalians Nurturable, and one of the most baffling questions since the show’s first season has been “What’s up with the goats?” We’ve now learned that the company has a dark, sacred vision for the goats. Lumon’s plan, Drummond tells Lush, is that Lumon will ceremonially sacrifice the goat and then “this beast will be entombed with a cherished woman whose spirit it must guide to Kier’s door.”

But while the show may have begun to tell us what’s up with the goats, there are still questions. Recall that Lush asks Drummond, “How many more must I give?,” and earlier in the season, when Helena meets Mark’s outie, she mistakes Gemma’s name as “Hannah.” How many women has Lumon kidnapped and held for testing? How many goats has it slaughtered with them?

Why did Lumon’s CEO secretly father countless children?

The Eagans are wildly creepy people, but it felt gross even by their standards to learn at the end of Episode 9 that current (and elderly) Lumon chief executive Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry) is a serial fatherer of new babies. “She’s one of Jame’s,” Cobel tells a security guard at the company’s severed birthing retreat, using the line to sneak outie Mark’s sister, Devon, into the facility with her.

It turns out that Jame believes his existing children, Helena included, are all disappointments. They do not remind him of Kier. But Helly, the innie version of his daughter, has the founder’s fire. Helly, the innie, now seems to be Jame’s pick to succeed him as the boss of the company. Not sure how that would work! Helly certainly would not want it anyway.

What did Jame Eagan mean when he said that Helly had tricked him?

It was a popular theory over the past week that Helly, the innie, had somehow escaped Lumon’s severed floor for a second time and was cosplaying as her outie to sabotage Lumon from headquarters. Nope. When Jame entered the severed floor at the end of Episode 9 and told Helly, “You tricked me,” he was just referring to the end of Season 1, when Helly pretended to be her outie and then gave a speech at a Lumon gala about the company’s abuse of the innies. There was no fresh meat on that bone.

Is Seth Milchick a company man or part of the resistance?

All season, Severance has seemed to lay the groundwork for Milchick to turn against Lumon and become an ally of Mark and the other innies. Early on in the season, the company gifts Milchick a painting of the very much not-Black founder, Kier, only with Black skin, so that Milchick can “see himself” in the tradition of the company. Milchick is visibly uncomfortable. Drummond castigates Milchick for using an elegant vocabulary, something Milchick might not be doing in the first place if not for his need to make a name for himself at an almost all-white company. The security boss blames Milchick for failures that aren’t his fault, and by Episode 9, Milchick has had enough, telling Drummond to “devour feculence.” In the finale, during a ridiculous company skit involving an animatronic statue of the founder, Milchick breaks character and notes that the real Kier was five inches shorter than the one that’s been wheeled onto the severed floor.

And yet. Milchick not only does nothing to help Mark bust out Gemma but tries hard to get in his way. For Milchick, the season ends in purgatory. Lumon is poised to punish him for letting Gemma get away, but the company might not even get the chance, because a bunch of severed marching-band musicians are holding Milchick hostage in MDR. Your employer doesn’t see you as family, Seth.

What about the oft-theorized Lumon plan to build a whole severed workforce?

A common fan theory holds that Lumon wants an army of severed workers, maybe ones who never leave the building and thus don’t even have outies. In this episode, we meet the marching band from Choreography and Merriment, a department we haven’t seen before. There are dozens of musicians in this band, and they comport themselves more or less like robots, not deviating from their act or acknowledging others’ speech until Helly and Dylan (Zach Cherry) convince them to stop their song and assist in the hostage-taking of Milchick. Maybe Lumon has more severed workers than we thought.

Is full reintegration even possible? And is Mark still pursuing it?

No idea. We haven’t seen Reghabi (Karen Aldridge), the former Lumon doctor who was helping to merge Mark’s two minds, since she had a falling-out with Devon in Episode 7. (Mark’s sis was not happy about the unsanctioned brain surgery the doctor was doing on her brother.) Mark ends the season not fully reintegrated, though he and his innie have started to see little glimpses of each other’s lives. Some of the questions that innie Mark asks outie Mark about reintegration also seem like awfully good ones.

Is someone in outie Mark’s family spying on him for Lumon?

Probably not. Lots of Severance fans are under the impression that Mark’s brother-in-law, Ricken — or maybe even his sister, Devon — is a Lumon mole keeping tabs on his outie. We get no whiff of that from Devon in the finale, as she helped plan what amounted to a second Macrodat Uprising, and Ricken was absent (save for flashbacks to Mark and Gemma’s old life) from the final few episodes of the season. Not every theory about this show will be a winner.

Where have you gone, Irving?

Irving B. (John Turturro) has spent years trying to merge the memories of his innie and outie, and both versions of him have been among the most rebellious fighters against Lumon. The company knows what Irving is up to, and in Episode 9 of the season, Jame Eagan tells Helena, “We’re seeing to Mr. Bailiff.” Excitement about finally learning Irving’s last name aside, he was the target of a Lumon manhunt. The company likely would have killed him, but Irving’s innie love interest, Burt (Christopher Walken), drives him to a train station and sends him away. Burt is a low-level Lumon enforcer of some kind, but he feels an attachment to Irving on the outside as well as the inside. We see neither of them in the finale, and I’m not sure if we ever will again.

Why does the final shot of the season look exactly how it does?

The most heart-wrenching moment of the second season is its last. Innie Mark and Helly leave outie Gemma sobbing in an exit stairwell, rescued from Lumon’s torture but abandoned on the outside because innie Mark has decided to stay inside with the love of his tortured life, Helly. If Gemma can get all the way outside of Lumon’s office complex, she’ll be physically free after two years as a lab rat, but she’ll be alone in the same way her husband was when he thought she had died in a car crash. Plus, there’s always the threat that Lumon could “see to” her.

What happens after Mark and Helly turn away from the exit caught my eye. The two characters are almost skipping down the hallways of the severed floor, laughing and holding hands. I might even call their movements frolicking. But in the episode’s closing seconds, two things happen. First, Mark and Helly’s smiles begin to fade. As with the runaway lovers in the famous final moments of The Graduate, it all dissolves to closing credits (and some very 1960s-styled credits at that) just as doubts seem to set in. (What is Lumon going to do to them now that they’ve led a second revolt and Mark has killed a high-level Lumon employee? Does Lumon even have any more use for them now that Cold Harbor is complete?) Second, the screen fades out to red, a color that, many have theorized, Severance typically uses to represent the outside world. I don’t think that color choice was merely because Mark was covered in Drummond’s blood. What is Severance telling us when it cuts from two innies to a red screen?