Enjoyed it. Excellent TV. Figured there would a “Sophie’s choice” moment.
It also feels kinda wrapped up enough for me.
Sorry, although YMMV, this was among the worst episodes of scripted television we have watched.
No spoilers, just wholly insulting, disappointing and juvenile. Sympathies to the actors who endured this script and direction.
Please, take ALL the time you need for season three. Seriously.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that this will become an unpopular opinion.
I absolutely loved every other episode. I thought the Cobel one was amazing. And I am not chomping at the bit to see what happens next. I don’t really care if that was Helly or Helena at the end. Take three years. I’ll watch next season as every other ep was great.
Again some great individual bits but too much was not, for me.
Yeah, I’m kind of with you. I mean, I love the show and all, but I think that this was a real copout ending.
What was the copout? We got answers to big questions, the resolved the main issue set up at the very end of last season, and set the plot threads in motion for next season.
I liked it. I found it to be in line with all the other episodes in levels of weirdness and answers beget more questions.
I wish we had had Irving and I’m glad that yet again, Dylan gets to have a big hero moment.
Don’t throw a tin of candies at me. I loved it. Thought it was genius.
Out of all my inane theories, even the jokey ones, at least I guessed the goats were part of it!
Lessee… I’m sure we all have full bingo cards:
Marching band. Of course! Who didn’t see this one coming? 
A knock-down drag-out in the hall between two very unstable Eagans. Of course!
More blood than in Alien coming out of Drummond. That was comedy gold because it happens right when he switches, has no clue WTF Drummond is even in the frigging elevator for! Then tripping over his body while the legs block the door.
Cold Harbor was-- a crib! With old guys getting hard watching her take it apart. Of course!
So many surprises.
But I loved the convo between iMark/oMark. Heleny? Really, Mark? A little research might’ve been protocol, ya know?
And I REALLY loved how they jumped in from where they left off for once AND gave us answers. Yep, it’s Gemma’s tempers they’re coding.
But what I really liked was iMark being stubborn about what he has to do, tells Helly, who is the only one that reminds him that Helly is also Helena Eagan with “Mark, I’m her.” Just like you, Mark S. is Mark Scout. So he finishes the file, gets Gemma (sort of) out, and goes for the iLove.
“Fuck you, Mr. Milchick.”
I thought it was a wonderful episode, everything I’d hoped it would be. I knew it couldn’t end with Mark and Gemma happily ever after (or there’s no season 3), so I was worried Gemma would get killed off. Instead, the ending was great storytelling and great acting.
And so many good things contained in the episode: the innie/outie conversation, a marching band, goat weirdness (“His name is Emile.” “OK.” ), the hallway fight, and the mistaken throat shot out of nowhere.
What world-changing event did Cold Harbor represent? They were interested in stripping out her emotional reaction to everything, so was it their ultimate goal to have emotionless innies that I suppose would never be curious, never react badly to their plight, so you could build essentially a human robot?
I didn’t interpret it quite like that. They aren’t stripping out emotions, they are building a new personality with some desired balance of tempers. The innies still have emotions, but they don’t cross over the outie barrier.
As for what Cold Harbor is, that’s a mystery for next season. Maybe it’s nothing special at all, other than the 25th test representing the end of the testing phase.
The goal is to make the whole world like that. Everyone chipped. Daddy Egan mentioned that to Helly when they met in season one.
Here’s a quote from Dan Erickson about Cold Harbor:
One thing that I think is noteworthy is that in all the other rooms we’ve seen the question is, will the suffering carry over from the room to the outside? Will Gemma feel the emotional effects of having been tortured by a dentist for two hours? The fear of being on an airplane in horrible turbulence, will it carry outside? This is the first time that we’ve seen the opposite where there is this question of will her pain from the outside carry into this room, into this new innie version of her? What exactly that means and why that’s important to Lumon is something we still don’t quite know yet as viewers. But that’s the main thing that differentiates that room.
The crib was meant to trigger her worst life experience-- her miscarriage. She was showing no emotional effect at that, so the severance was “holding” until oMark enters the room. So the file was completed, the task wasn’t.
My wife and I keep saying that Lumon is going to “Dollhouse this thing”, as in they are going to hope to make a weapon/device that can sever people at will in order to create a slave race or something.
It sort of was the plot of Dollhouse.
Which, by the way, co-starred Dichen Lachman…who is Gemma on Severance. I think…well, it’s probably a coincidence, but is almost a reference.
Here’s what I posted on the severance subreddit:
I thought the S2 finale was brilliant. A genuine masterpiece. It redeemed the promise of S1, but couldn’t make up for an overall shaky season.
I loved just about everything about it. The camcorder conversation was brilliant, and also illustrated everything I love about the show. The acting and dialog, and the flow the conversation, were all fantastic. But at the same time, I loved that it respected the rules of the universe as established, and then worked around them cleverly. We know from S1 that there are doors where someone switches instantly from innie to outie while passing through them (although we didn’t precisely know that the birthing suite had such a door, as opposed to using some equivalent of overtime contingency tech, although it was reasonable). That alone wouldn’t allow innie-to-outie-communication. But throw in a camcorder, and bam, you’re good to go. Genius. A fantastic synthesis of plotting, acting, writing, worldbuilding, everything.
And just about everything that happened on the severed floor was also incredibly entertaining, from the marching band to Milchick getting whacked by a trombone to the incredibly tense fight with Drummond to the final fatal decision. It all felt like the inevitable evolution of the characters and situations we met in S1. I’m in.
My comments on a few of the more common criticisms raised specifically against the finale:
-Innie mark’s final decision was heartbreaking for us, as viewers. But it was absolutely in character for him. What’s his end game? Who the fuck knows. Maybe he’ll only exist for another day. But totally in character for him to choose to live with the woman he loves.
-Could he have been a bit more explicit with Gemma about what was going on? Sure. But it’s not ridiculous for him not to. First of all, he’s under a fair bit of stress and not thinking straight. And also it might just not occur to him that she doesn’t get it. I mean, from his perspective it’s super obvious. And she is severed. Why wouldn’t she get it?
-Is it ridiculous that there’s a marching band on the severed floor? Sure, sorta. But it basically fits into the rules established in S1, which is that the severed floor is all a bit of a trance state. Weird stuff happens. The rules don’t entirely apply. I mean, I’d call foul if suddenly people on the severed floor could fly or were vampires or something. But it’s just an extension of “also there are goats” and “also behind O&D is a huge room with machines stretching as far as the eye can see and who knows how many additional people”. Someone in a different thread made the interesting point that a show gets to make one and only one “here’s how this world is different from our world”. So in Harry Potter there’s a hidden wizarding world. And in a vampire show there are vampires. In Severance, it’s that severance technology exists and there’s this weird culty company exists and the severed floor is weird and spooky and somewhat plays by its own rules". So weirdness in the severed floor I accept as part of the show in a way that I don’t accept, say, outies acting out of character.
-Is it ridiculous that there is so little security on the severed floor? This is the criticism I come closest to agreeing with, although it partly fits into the the-severed-floor-is-weird exception listed above. But we do know that the concept of security exists… there’s a security office and a security officer and so forth. I would have enjoyed the episode more if there had been a side note that they used Hellie’s Eagan powers to disable the cameras, or we heard Milchick complaining that the new security guys weren’t ready yet, or something to acknowledge it. But, for me, a minor complaint at the most.
-Does everything we now know about Cold Harbor/MDR/etc make sense and really hold up? This I’m happy to wait for S3 to pass judgment on.
So, finale episode, fantastic, two thumbs way up. What it did not do, for me, was make up for missteps throughout the season. In fact, imho, it made one of them far worse, namely, the abortive reintegration storyline. What makes the finale so fantastic is the conflict between oMark and iMark… the conversation, their differing motives, etc. The finale works so well because of how much it leans on they-are-two-different-people. Reintegration is precisely the opposite of that. It makes no sense to introduce a plot point, lean heavily on it, stress it, emphasize it… and not only ignore it for the rest of the season, but have the climactic episode actually depend on that plot point being forgotten.
I also continue to strongly dislike several other earlier plot points, particularly the ORTBO (which absolutely violated the established rules of the universe)… and for the most part, the finale did not change that one way or the other.
So, my grade for the finale: 9.8/10
My grade for S2 as a whole: 7/10
I forgot to mention one other part of the episode I absolutely loved: the Dylan storyline. It was a perfect resolution - totally in character for both innie and outie Dylan, humorous and touching, and I didn’t have to say goodbye to him.
I thought it was a great contrast to Mark where it’s all about the conflict between innie and outie. Here, each of Dylan’s two sides helped the other one grow.
No right or wrong to opinions, it just fascinates me how different they can be! I loved the rest of the season with the final episode overall whiffing. Still some agreements and some room perhaps to discuss?
The camcorder back and forth was a great bit.
The individual things that happened on the severed floor were entertaining. They mostly were however either things that were weird without making sense or let down reveals to me. Love the whole Milchik show as entertainment but … why? iMark is presumably not long for this world. Why the big production for him? Why sticking around to see it rather than getting a move on right away? He knows time is of the essence. The payoff on the goats is just being there for ritual sacrifice? That’s all?
Yet it leans on how they are the same basic person too. Really both are selfish and very willing to kill off the other, unable to have any empathy even for the other version of themself. The conceit is not how individual they are but how much the same they are, just with their outie trauma and episodic memories removed and replaced with the trauma of being work life only.
Of course iMark would choose his own even brief moment of happiness at the expense of oMark’s existence and Gemma’s grief. He’s the same self absorbed asshole as oMark who is willing to do the same to him.
I love the reddit page for Severance, but I am SO TIRED of idiots thinking it was Helena, not Helly, in the final scene. Even Britt Lower confirmed she was playing Helly.
I agree that it’s a bit weird that there was this big production to celebrate finishing Cold Harbor, although it’s not particularly clear what Lumon thought iMark was going to be doing tomorrow. Clearly there is refining that goes on other than purely Gemma (after all, the three replacement refiners from early in the season had learned to refine), so maybe they assumed he was just going back to that?
Although my headcanon is that on the severed floor, when someone completes something, they get an incentive. That’s just what they do. Bigger completion = bigger incentive… even if there’s nothing further to incentivize.
But again, I’m willing to cut all that some slack because it is in down-the-rabbithole-world that is the severed floor. YMMV.
I don’t think either of them is an asshole. They both have normal levels of empathy and selfishness, as most of us do. Both of them, push come to shove, if they HAVE to pick, would pick their own happiness. As most of us would. But iMark did go out of his way to rescue Gemma. And I don’t think oMark was lying when all the time he said he felt sorry for creating iMark. He was condescending and insensitive and at least somewhat manipulative, but not totally cruelly or heartlessly insincere.