Is That What You Expected? And Other Severance Questions

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“Seven Severance Questions” is a weekly attempt to digest the events of one of television’s twistiest shows by highlighting the weirdest, most confusing, and most important unresolved issues after this week’s season-two finale, “Cold Harbor.” There will be theories. Many will be unhinged.

Severance has a way of giving out answers loaded with another bucket of questions. The season-two finale did just that across multiple levels of the Lumon building. Want to know how Mark’s innie and outie handle the Helly-Gemma situation? Sure, the show will tell you. Want to know what Cold Harbor was all about? Got you there, too. Want to know what the deal is with the goats? Coming right up. But none of it will be clean. None of it will settle anything. Sometimes, the answers can take you deeper down the rabbit hole than any of the questions ever did.

They can also make you shout a little. Were you shouting? At the end? In the hallway? I was. I’m not sure I even knew what I wanted Mark to do or whom to choose. I just kept shouting “NO!” and “YES!” and “WHAT ARE YOU DOING??” Arguments can be made that this choice was as tough on me as on him. The arguments aren’t particularly good, but they are definitely arguments. This show can twist you into a pretzel. And sometimes a marching band shows up. You just have to accept all that.

Below, please find our final round of questions about this season. I’m sure you have more. So do I, if I’m being honest. But these feel like a good place to start …

Was that the love story you were expecting?

I guess the answer to this one depends on the lens you’re using to view the show. Are you rooting for the outies to find the happiness that was so elusive to them that they sought refuge through brain surgery that could segment off an entire chunk of their life? Are you rooting for the innies to experience something like a full life instead of just being drones created in a fit of hopeless desperation? Do you want to see thought-lost love rekindled or new love continue to blossom? Those are the things we all were trying to process as Mark’s innie was standing in that hallway between Gemma and Helly. It’s kind of what he was processing too.

You can see why he made the choice he did, even beyond the selfish reasons, even beyond “I love the redhead and don’t even really know that other woman.” There are issues of trust at play here that were planted at the beginning of the episode, when Mark’s innie and outie were having that conversation via camcorder that went sideways almost immediately. Mark’s innie did not appreciate how dismissive his outie was of the life the innies built inside Lumon. He got very prickly when his outie mispronounced Helly’s name as “Heleny” in a tone that scanned as Aw, it’s cute you think you have a little girlfriend, buddy. He didn’t particularly love how his outie just kind of expected him to be onboard with this plan that would essentially kill his friends and rest his own existence on a promise from the guy who put him there in the first place. Mark’s innie has been through a lot. He has reason to be skeptical. I’m not sure Cobel’s being there helped a lot.

There’s also the issue of … I mean, why would his innie think his outie deserves any of this? His outie is a depressed mess with no friends who has now subjected their body to two experimental brain procedures in the hope of digging out of a rut. Yes, getting Gemma back might solve some of that, but Mark’s innie has no real knowledge of what their life was like before. All he knows is that he has friends and a purpose and is in love, and this guy who has gone years without any of that is asking him to give it all up for something uncertain at best. So yes, he freed Gemma, and yes, he went through with most of the plan, but in that final moment, looking at his two potential futures, he went with the one he wants to fight for. Hard to blame a guy for that.

But, like … where does any of this … go … from here?

Right, there’s the sticky part. Mark’s and Helly’s innies got their Butch & Sundance moment, running down the hallways as the alarm blared, ending on a freeze-frame that, if we didn’t know better, would read as a finale-finale and not just the final moments of this season. But things are still complicated. If Mark’s innie leaves the severed floor even for a second, his outie is never going back. Drummond is dead in a large Icelandic lump outside the elevator. (If you know anyone who went to law school, please do not ask them whether Mark’s innie or outie is responsible for the murder. They will never stop talking.) The Cold Harbor project was working until it didn’t. The goat lady has gone rogue. The vending machine is broken. It’s messy on the severed floor in a number of ways.

Here’s where it’s interesting, though. Jame just straight-up admitted he likes Helly R. more than his own daughter, Helena. He likes her fire and spirit and sees Kier in her, whatever that means. We could be looking at a world where he tries to keep her severed full time, which would in theory save the severed floor, corpses and all, and could keep Mark’s innie down there too. The only guarantee is that things are going to get weird. Gemma will have a lot to unpack. Devon will flip out. Lumon will have to somehow keep all or most of it quiet. It’ll be a mess. I’m ready whenever they are.

Do we have a clearer picture of what Lumon is up to now?

I think we may. My theory earlier in the season was that it was after some sort of immortality hack, a way to sever memories and move them from vessel to vessel in perpetuity. I thought this for a bunch of reasons, some having to do with Miss Huang (clones????), some with the goats (clones????), and some with the thing where rich weirdos always seem to be after immortality (Jame Eagan is nothing if not a rich weirdo).

But then we learned Miss Huang was just a regular kid who had been part of Lumon’s long-standing tradition of child labor. And then we learned the goats are just being raised as sacrifices to be buried with dead test subjects and guide their souls to the afterlife. Then we heard about Kier’s “eternal war against pain” and saw that Gemma’s final test in Cold Harbor involved taking apart the same baby crib from back when she and Mark were struggling to conceive. And then I remembered that the only thing rich weirdos love as much as immortality is the idea of a technology-assisted utopia.

That’s where I’m at now. That’s why I think Mark and Gemma were so important to the project: This was a couple experiencing pain. If Lumon could separate them and sever the parts of their brain that remember that pain, they could — their theory here, not mine — be on the path to ending suffering. Mark saw Ms. Casey without triggering his Gemma trauma. Gemma was run through a series of stressful situations, culminating in one that would be downright cruel if it didn’t work, to see if they could sever the memories out individually. All of that could be pointing toward a world in which everyone gets a chip placed in their head at birth, and you go to the doctor every time you experience something unpleasant, and the doctor punches a few buttons and bloops the bad vibes out of existence forever — a society of pleasant zombies who feel nothing and never have to learn lessons.

Cold Harbor didn’t pass the ultimate test, though, which turns out to be “your blood-soaked husband rushes into the room and tells you to come with him.” Gotta refine a lot more macrodata to account for that one. It’s not necessarily back to square one on the whole plan now, but it’s probably back to a single-digit square somewhere.

Are Dylan and his marching-band army now the most formidable force inside Lumon?

Some preliminary notes:

— I did not foresee a scenario in which Dylan’s outie denied the resignation request. I thought he would have been thrilled. But it’s kind of sweet, in a way, that his loser outie is taking all of this as a wake-up call and motivation to become a better man. I’m rooting for him.

— This entire piece could easily have been questions about the marching band. What do they do on the severed floor all day when they’re not performing? Do their outies play instruments? Did their innies have to be trained from the start because they came in with no knowledge of music? Do you think one of them is a drummer on the outside but when he got down there they needed someone on the trumpet so he had to switch? You can see how this quickly spins out of hand. I’ll stop before it does.

Anyway, yes. It is my hope that next season begins with Dylan covered in war paint and the band marching behind him with its brass instruments sharpened into pointy weapons. You cannot take this away from me. Not yet.

What’s going on with Milchick, man?

I’ll be honest, I’m a little disappointed in how Milchick’s arc ended this season. I thought he was going to pop. I thought he was going to take Lumon down after a season of slights and long hours and the company taking him for granted. I really thought we were headed there after his little zinger about Kier’s height. (I also hope I’m not the only basketball-obsessed ’90s child who heard the opening notes of “Sirius,” by the Alan Parsons Project, and half-expected the Kier statue to say, “And now, your Chicago Bulls!”) And yet … nope. He played ball right up to the end, when the marching-band army had him surrounded.

At least he got to dance again. Maybe that’s how he works out his frustration. Maybe it’s in his contract: “Must let Seth dance once a month.” It does seem to make him happy.

Aren’t you kind of glad they got Miss Huang out of there before all this went down?

I was sad when Miss Huang got shipped off last week. She had just been humanized, and I was starting to like her, and I wanted to see her get to play her theremin a little bit more. Maybe a cover of a pop song from the ’80s. Something peppy. Hall & Oates would work fine.

After all of this, though, after the murder and the blaring alarms and the uprooting of everything she was working on, I’m glad she got out when she did. Miss Huang did not need to be part of this. And I did not need to spend the whole episode worrying about the safety of a child I just got attached to. It would have been very stressful for both of us.

Should you ever hand a bolt gun to a traumatized goat herder with instructions to sacrifice yet another of her beloved baby goats and then walk away to investigate a mysterious noise in the hallway as her eyes fill with a combination of tears, doubt, and rage?

You really should not.