Inside Severance’s Shocking Season 2 Finale: “She’s Been Pushed Too Far”
The cast of Severance break down Season 2’s bombshell finale, “Cold Harbor.”
Leave it to Severance to drop yet another bombshell in the final hour.
Apple TV’s heady sci-fi satire became a runaway hit in its first season, in part because of its iconic finale. Severance Season 1 ended with the cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers — “She’s alive!” — which fueled theories in droves and kept the fandom talking before Severance’s highly-anticipated return. With Season 2, creator Dan Erickson, director Ben Stiller, and their collaborators spent 10 hours of television bolstering workplace intrigue and exploring the dark corners of Lumon Industries. It all comes to a head in “Cold Harbor,” a feature-length finale that answers a few burning questions, but leaves the door open for so many more.
Severance’s latest episode is 76 minutes of pure, audacious filmmaking. Reintegration takes on a whole new meaning as Mark Scout (Adam Scott), the senior refiner on Lumon’s Severed Floor, finds a way to converse with his work persona, or “innie.” His two consciousnesses have to work together to pull off an escape plan three years in the making. Their tentative team-up is poised to shake Lumon to its core — but with innies and outies destined to be at odds, it doesn’t take long for “Cold Harbor” to veer into delightfully uncharted territory.
Following that blindsiding finale, the cast of Severance sits down with Inverse to unpack the biggest moments of “Cold Harbor.”
CHOREOGRAPHY & MERRIMENT
Mr. Milchick is finally able to “get down” after so much stress.
There’s a lot going on in “Cold Harbor,” and it all effectively kicks off when Mark asks his innie to help him rescue his not-actually-dead wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) from Lumon. The two versions of Mark aren’t completely on the same team when all is said and done — mostly because innie-Mark doesn’t want his workplace romance with Helly R. (Britt Lower) to end — but he does agree to save Gemma and complete Cold Harbor, the final MDR file on his to-do list.
As soon as Cold Harbor is finished, Severance treats fans to one last offbeat office party. Mark and Helly are congratulated by a sardonic animatronic of Kier, the founder of Lumon, and their ever-chipper manager Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman). Before Mark can sneak down to the Testing Floor to find Gemma, Milchick calls in the Department of Choreography & Merriment (Lumon’s resident marching band, because of course they have a marching band) to perform something called “The Ballad of Ambrose and Gunnell.”
Stiller was the first to suggest another musical sequence for the Season 2 finale. “He has a fascination with marching bands,” Tillman tells Inverse. “He had this really brilliant idea to incorporate a band, and he wanted me to serve as the band director or the drum major.”
But Tillman needed some convincing. “I was reticent about having Milchick dance in Season 2, because you can’t re-create MDE,” the actor says, referencing the iconic “Music Dance Experience” that gave us Defiant Jazz in Season 1. “That lives on its own. You can’t re-create that.”
Fortunately, C&M serves a different purpose in “Cold Harbor.” It’s a massive set piece that serves not only as a distraction for Mark and Helly — it’s the stage for another innie revolt.
After completing Cold Harbor, our refiners get the weirdest office party ever.
Tillman also used the sequence as a high point in Milchick’s arc. “I said, ‘Let’s tie this back to where Milchick is at this moment.’ Right before Choreography & Merriment, he has this standoff with this Kier statue. And again, the Kier statue is speaking to his vocabulary.”
Throughout the season, Milchick’s had to deal with Lumon’s upper brass about the issue of his robust vocabulary. He finally stood up to his direct superior, Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) in Episode 9, but the pressure has still been building for Milchick elsewhere. “Before Drummond checked his vocabulary, he had a performance review,” Tillman says. “Before that, he tried to connect with Natalie about the paintings. This guy is dealing and wrestling with his identity.”
Milchick’s ordeals have given Severance leave to explore issues of identity, race especially, in suppressive corporate spaces, but he finds a temporary resolution in “Cold Harbor.” Through C&M, Milchick is finally able to “get down,” unleashing the tensions that have been building all season.
“I said, ‘Let's take it to an HBCU kind of feel and allow Milchick to tap into his roots a little bit,’” Tillman says. “I had a choreographer who helped me find the moves and find the shape of it.”
Their collaboration gave birth to one of the few instances Milchick has actually been able to let loose. “He is doing the body roll. He’s [channeling] Debbie Allen, Paula Abdul. He’s going for it… But then again, one of the innies, they ruined it, you know?”
He’s referring to Helly, who locks Milchick in the bathroom to give Mark time to rescue Gemma from the “testing rooms” one floor below. She and Dylan G. (Zach Cherry) even enlist the C&M band to keep Milchick from escaping, blocking the door with a heavy (and real!) vending machine.
“They just can’t let Milchick be great,” Tillman jokes. “But fun fact: I actually knocked down that vending machine, no help.”
MAMMALIANS NURTURABLE
Lorne the goatherder returns in “Cold Harbor.”
For all of the unexplainable parts of Severance, the weirdest has to be the goat farm on the Severed Floor. We’ve only gotten glimpses of the Mammalians Nurturable department, but it’s clearly meant to play a big role in future seasons. “Cold Harbor” notably brings back Gwendoline Christie’s Lorne, the head of the goat department. She pops up to offer Emile, a baby goat with extraordinary “verve” and “wit,” as some kind of sacrifice to Kier.
Honestly, the goats still don’t make a lot of sense. If Severance returns for another season, as so many are hoping for, true answers may come then. For now, Lorne’s sequence with Drummond remains an eerie tease for something more. It’s also another great showcase for Christie, who took her job as Lorne very seriously.
“The idea of the connection to the earth was something I did try to work on to give a groundedness to Lorne,” the actor tells Inverse. She sees her character as someone who’s been “pushed too far”: a lover of the land and a keeper of a lifestyle that really has no place in Lumon’s hell on earth. That manifests in a knock-down, drag-out fight against Drummond, which incidentally gives Mark the leverage to get down to the Testing Floor. It’s hard not to think of Christie’s past bouts in shows like Game of Thrones, which made her a household name as Brienne of Tarth.
“Has it verve?”
Christie is tickled by the idea of a pattern forming in her body of work, though she’s been careful not to play into it too often. “When Game of Thrones ended, I made a very strong decision that I didn’t want to do combat anymore,” she admits. “But it’s very difficult when Ben Stiller asks you to do that for the finale of Severance, because of course it becomes a dream.”
It helped that Lorne’s situation in Severance offered a unique perspective for Christie. “It's very different playing someone that wants to protect and wants to be a knight, and is connected to a higher sense of purpose, [versus] Lorne, who is a woman that’s been pushed too far. Out of her comes something unimaginable: a howling animal that’s prepared to go to any lengths to protect a vulnerable creature.”
Like so many Lumon employees, Lorne is a “vulnerable creature” herself. Not unlike Milchick’s C&M interlude, Lorne’s fight with Drummond allows her to excise the “pain” and “desperation” she’s suppressed in her time on the Severed Floor. It’s hugely satisfying to watch, even if we don’t know much about Lorne just yet. Christie’s physicality does so much with a little; though we don’t know where Lorne and Emile head off to, hopefully this won’t be the last we see of Mammalians Nurturable.
COLD HARBOR
MDR and the Testing Floor are intimately connected.
Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) dropped the biggest bombshell of all when she told Mark that the “numbers” he works on every day at Lumon are actually connected to Gemma. The clusters he refines for MDR are reinforcing Gemma’s mental barriers, which came as a surprise to everyone — including Gemma actor Dichen Lachman.
“He is refining her down there,” Lachman tells Inverse. “She’s connected to severance personally somehow.” Mark has refined 25 disparate identities for Gemma, which explains why certain innies, like Ms. Casey, feel “fragmented.” The episode doesn’t fully explain why Lumon is working so hard to split her consciousness so many times, but Lachman definitely has her theories.
“It feels like they’re trying to get this chip to market in a commercial way, potentially.”
That would certainly make sense, given what she’s been exposed to on the Testing Floor. The skeevy, constantly-whistling Dr. Mauer (Robby Benson) has employed drastic methods to test the barriers compartmentalizing her brain. One of Gemma’s innies is constantly getting dental work; another suffers perpetual turbulence on what has to be a flight simulator. Maybe Lumon’s trying to make daily inconveniences easier for consumers: the company has, after all, already done that for childbirth.
Gemma’s connection to severance is still a mystery, but Cold Harbor was clearly a success.
Whatever Lumon’s plan, Gemma may be their biggest success yet. Her final test in Cold Harbor shows us all just how strong the severance barriers can be. Maur instructs Gemma’s new innie to dismantle a baby crib, the same one Mark once assembled before Gemma suffered a miscarriage. Innie 25 obviously has no personal connection to this memory, even with Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” filling the room. It’s a chilling manifestation of the obedience that Lumon has been looking for in its employees, and Lachman felt tremendous “pressure” to convey that alongside the other sides of Gemma.
Lachman transitions from Innie 25, back to Gemma, to Ms. Casey and back across the Season 2 finale. “I was nervous about some of those transitions because they’re quite tricky to go from,” the actor admits. “In [Episode 7], it was a little bit less, but in the final episode, it was more complex in terms of hitting those beats.”
Once Mark finally locates Gemma in the Cold Harbor room, it’s a frantic race from the Testing Floor to the exit stairwell on the Severed Floor above. Even after Gemma makes it through, free for the first time in years, they still aren’t out of the woods. With his innie back in the driver’s seat, Mark never follows Gemma out of Lumon. He elects to stay with Helly, literally turning his back on Gemma to run off into the sunset with his forbidden love. It’s a moment of triumph for the innies, but for Gemma, it couldn’t be more confusing.
Does Helly R. win Mark in the end?
“I felt like she doesn’t initially understand what’s happening,” Lachman says. Gemma hasn’t seen Mark in years, and neither had anything to do with Lumon before her disappearance. She likely has no idea Mark’s even been severed, but “as soon as he starts walking, I think it’s dawning on her.”
The version of Mark that she’s pleading with in the final moments of “Cold Harbor” isn’t the Mark she knows, but that doesn’t stop Gemma from trying to appeal to his subconscious, which could somehow be listening. As Mark retreats to the Severed Floor, “she’s just giving it one last go to see if she can reach his outie self.”
Unfortunately, Gemma’s pleas fall on deaf ears. As far as he’s concerned, he doesn’t owe Gemma or his outie anything more. But plenty of dangers await: Milchick is no closer to siding with the innies after the chaos of C&M, and Lumon CEO Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry) probably won’t waste any time trying to get his assets back in line. As for Gemma, there’s no way she’s about to leave Mark to the wolves. “Cold Harbor” is a wild ride from start to finish, so the story we get in Season 3 can only take this sci-fi ride in even zanier directions.
