Severance

The innies have a big day out in the exhilarating Severance season 1 finale. Here is everything you need to know about that shocking ending.

Since Burt is the only person he feels he can trust, he heads over to the address that his outie has marked on the map. While all of these emotionally loaded things are happening at the same exact time, strongman Dylan gets intercepted by Milchick, and the entire experiment gets terminated. He races up to the door and pounds on it, shouting “BURT! BURT!” Unfortunately, Burt doesn’t answer in time to get to chat with Irv’s innie. Unfortunately, Irv finds out that he doesn’t seem to have a family or friends or any sort of social support network on the outside. Innie Irv wakes up and starts to go about the business of snooping through his outie’s belongings. The initial mission that the innies agreed to was to find someone they could trust and tell them everything. An unflinching look at society’s insistence on maintaining a “work/life balance,” Severance introduced us to the idea of the “severance” process, or the process of implanting a chip into one’s brain in order to surgically separate work and life memories. Severance wasn’t going to leave us hanging without first serving up some jaw-dropping reveals, and they disclose the true identity of Helly’s outie in the first few moments of the episode. Full of tension, anxiety, and cliffhangers galore, the fantastic Severance season 1 finale is sure to go down in the history books as one of the best season finales of 2022. In the finale, the innies stage a daring attempt to find out more about their lives in the real world. Ok, all joking aside, the last 10 minutes of this episode are “I-forgot-to-breathe” good. And Helly, ah, poor Helly, no one in her outie’s world is trustworthy, least of all her outie self.

But like anyone who loved the end of 'Lost' season one, Scott knows the power of delayed gratification.

“The discipline it took them to wait until that moment to get that camera to go down that hole and looking up at the actors…it was incredible,” Scott says. “And just how I think I leapt up from the couch and just screamed, ‘No!’” And Irving, having embarked on the year‘s best workplace romance with Burt (Christopher Walken) before Burt is forced to retire, finds Burt out in the real world for the first time—seemingly happy at home with his husband.

Following the first season finale of the Apple TV+ series Severance, “The We We Are,” a look back at all the clues the show has given us about Lumon ...

Maybe the second season of Severance is about the person sent there next in order to help Kier come back. (I am very aware that my “Adam is Javi” theory from Yellowjackets did not pan out!) Maybe I’m taking a leap forward in interpreting lines like Mark’s “We’re people, not parts of people” and Helena’s “I don’t think severance divides us. - The little 2-D animated version of Kier Eagan says “I love you” to the person who successfully sorted all their quarterly MDR data, and that’s what the cult is looking for, right? … In this theory, the larvae eventually eats and replaces you.” So sort of like the horror movies The Brood and Possession, in which host/original bodies are replaced by duplicates? That transference of consciousness and the manipulation of people’s bodies is what I think Lumon has been working on this whole time with the severance procedure, with the end goal of bringing Kier Eagan back to life. “The We We Are” ends on a cliffhanger for the MDR team once Milchick breaks through the door and tackles Dylan, ending the Innies’ rule-breaking excursion.

Created by Dan Erikson and directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, Severance follows a biotech employee, grieving widower Mark Scout (Adam Scott) of Lumon ...

This room is – in the words of the show’s superb production designer Jeremy Hindle – “the womb of the office”, and it is where the just-severed Helly is reborn as an “Innie”. “Am I livestock? “It’s like having two different lives suddenly stitched together, but the relativity’s fucked,” he explains to Mark. In or out, wherever Mark goes and whomever he encounters, a sense of atomised isolation and foreboding infuses everything as he – and we – try to piece together just what the hell is going on. We will survive this crisis, but we need the support of readers. We are wired to associate such pleasing proportion with beauty, and the eye certainly seeks that reassuring balance amid the confusions of our current global moment. This relatable sentiment ultimately resulted in a series that discomfortingly hits closer to home than much horror or sci-fi – not quite tragedy, not quite comedy, but somewhere in between, where most of modern life takes place. From Oliver Latta’s magnificent opening credits – an original feat of complex, compressed animated storytelling in their own right – to its perfect establishing shots, frame after frame of Severance delivers a fearful symmetry. Everything – technology, fashion, furniture and the paintings of Lumon’s hallowed founder Kier Eagan (which reference Francisco de Goya and Caspar David Friedrich, and were described in detail in Erikson’s scripts) – is closely curated but temporally unlocated. We meet Burt (Christopher Walken), who runs the Optics and Design sector with laconic glee, and the sheer scale of the Lumon labyrinth starts to reveal itself. Sigmund Freud opened his curious 1919 essay “The ‘Uncanny’ ” – on the particular sense of “dread and creeping horror” evoked when the familiar turns unfamiliar – by framing it as a matter of aesthetics. Created by Dan Erikson and directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, Severance follows a biotech employee, grieving widower Mark Scout (Adam Scott) of Lumon Industries. He has chosen to undergo “severance” – a surgical procedure in which his work memories are neatly and permanently split off from his personal memories. With co-workers Irving (John Turturro as the nebbish ne plus ultra) and Dylan (Zach Cherry), Mark and Helly toil busily but inexplicably at their quartet of desks clustered together on an otherwise vacant floor. “I can’t help but feel this isn’t the same as healing,” Mark’s sister, Devon (Jen Tullock), tells him in an early episode.

Anthony Flagg reviews the first season of Severance now streaming on Apple TV. Severance was directed by Ben Stiller and stars Adam Scott.

In the last 20 or so minutes of the season one finale “The We We Are” I should have worn my Apple Watch to see the leaps my heart rate was making as the final moment intensifies and cuts to black. His alcoholism more than once drove people away from him and it was interesting to see this depicted quite accurately throughout the season (one example is Mark eating minimal food to drink more instead). Even when in his “innie” mode, others notice things such as the smell he sweats off to help underscore the severity of his drinking. As the work and the season progress, the uncoverings of Lumon are horrifying – aversion therapy that hammers away at their apologies until they actually “mean it” as Milchick urges them on for the 1,287th time. So back to Data Refiners. In the MDR (Macro data refinement) wing, the team gathers clusters of numbers on a screen and categorizes them into certain digital buckets based on their interpretation and emotional connection to what they are seeing on the screen. Currently in the spotlight for his portrayal of Carmine Falcone in The Batman is John Turturro as Irving, the longest-tenured “innie” as they refer to themselves, the 8-hour split that works within the walls. The show discussions on the subreddit have been incredible and as of this writing, Variety has confirmed that it will be renewed for a second season.

To put it simply, Severence is lucky that it was renewed for a second season the day before the season finale aired.

Nevertheless, if Severance Season 2 is going to live up to the expectations of the first, it’s going to need to pick up the pace and raise the stakes even more. As intriguing as the entire season was, and as much as I will be eagerly awaiting the second season, it was almost painfully obvious that Severance was written to be more than one season long. We’re left to ponder a laundry list of questions; What is it like on the research floor where Ms. Casey was sent? He tells Helly that everyone in the world will “all be Keir’s children” because of Helena’s decision to sever herself, which is a welcome expansion to the exploration of the real world consequences of being a severed worker. (Though we’ve seen again and again that Cobel is one of Keir’s fiercest devotees outside of the Eagan family, there is still no true explanation for why she is so deeply invested in the company.) Regardless, Cobel manages to contact Milchick and send him after Dylan, which leads to the end of the MDR outing into the real world. As Dylan barely holds on to the override switches that keep the innies in the outside world, Severance finally gives us the big reveals we’ve been waiting for all season.

"Severance" creator and stars on the finale's very big Eagan twist and where the show will go for Mark, Helly and Lumon gang in Season 2.

And when he arrives at that party, he is finally ready to move on from severance and from Lumon and also ready to move on from Gemma and heal a bit. Stiller: There is this growing connection between Mark and Helly happening during the season, and then on the outside, Mark is trying to get over his wife’s death — and then we’re going to find out that his wife is still alive. But it is a disconcerting sort of start to that journey. But I should actually get promoted.” So I think part of that is also trying to get back in their good graces and make them understand, I’m not just a crazy person over here, I’m right. And that’s where it comes in with the hallway paintings and his trove of Lumon files that he seems to have collected. So I think she is angry and petulant and wants to punish them and is hurt and all of these things. That’s the big question, what is special about Mark? And is it actually that there’s something special about him or is it more about Gemma, and he was sort of pulled in? It’s that idea that it’s happening over the course of an hour or so. And the first thing he sees when he comes to in the outside world is Cobel. But she looks different and he can’t quite put his finger on it and doesn’t really have time to. Tramell Tillman: Listen, these are high stakes, OK? He is willing to bet the house for this. Innie Mark has pieced together that Gemma is actually Miss Casey and is still alive, but he knows she has been fired from Lumon and sent down to wherever that elevator takes her. There’s a question of sort of who was targeted first: Was Mark targeted because of his relationship to Gemma, or was it the other way around?

There are still lingering concerns about the baby goat department, the Lumon Board, and the Eagan family, though fans have some solid theories about the ...

Later in the series, Dylan requests a crystal cube with the new MDR group photo engraved on it as his prize for being Refiner of the Quarter. He takes it to the waffle party, and then carries it to the security office and sets it down before enabling the overtime contingency. Helly set that Lumon gala ablaze, Mark's sister Devon wants to take his story to the press, and Outie Burt and Outie Irv are about to meet face to face. When the overtime function is enabled, Irving's Innie wakes up in his Outie's house and uncovers a box of his father's U.S. Navy memorabilia in his closet. When Dylan broke into the security office to enable the overtime contingency, we got quite a bit of insight into Lumon, its employees, and other ways that those severed chips can be used. In Episode 7, we learn that Mark's wife Gemma — who supposedly died in a car accident shortly before he started at Lumon — is actually Ms. Casey. Cobel and Milchick know this, and that the two don't remember each other as severed Innies, but right before the finale ends Mark's Innie sees a photo of Gemma and connects the dots. The Eagan family and philosophy doesn't just run Lumon. Cobel's shrine proved that for some it's essentially a religion, and we come to learn that the Eagan presence overlaps with education, medical facilities, banks, and more. Just when you think her existence can't get any bleaker, Milchick sends her down a dark hallway (the same hallway Irv's Outie paints) and she takes the elevator down to (what I believe is) the department Petey told Mark about; the "one where you don't get to leave." Perhaps the most noteworthy item here is a breathing tube/hospital bracelet that bears the name "Charlotte Cobel" and the birth date "3-17-44." Fans wonder if Charlotte was a family member, such as Cobel's mother. Later that night, Milchick enabled the overtime contingency and woke up Dylan's Outie in hopes of getting the card back, so you know those cards have to be important. We finally got to see some of our favorite Innies in the outside world, but the finale ended on a major cliffhanger and left fans with a slew of new questions. Vocal egg-hater Ben Stiller mentioned in a Twitter A&A that the egg bar was "necessary for the story," and perhaps that's just because Irv needed something soft to smash inside the handbook. One leading theory is that MDR is teaching Lumon how to potentially manipulate emotions of severed people (!!!). Kier Eagan's statue explained "the four tempers" that define human beings are woe, frolic, dread, and malice.

Mark (Adam Scott) and Helly (Britt Lower) stand in front of the Mark and Helly, plotting. Apple TV+. You may not have ...

We cannot ignore what happens to us at work, even if we’d like to, and even if our overseers do their best to facilitate the idea that our work lives are separate from the rest of our lives. It’s a narrative that puts the brutality of work front and center, and through stories, we can learn that what seems impossible is not. A union cannot solve every problem workers face, but it wins us a seat at the table to determine at least some of the conditions of our working lives. (TV writers are represented by the Writers Guild of America West; as an editorial employee of Vox, I’m represented by their sibling, Writers Guild of America East.) There’s a reason the saying “an injury to one is an injury to all” has stuck around in the labor world, and Hollywood writers are especially good at using their collective power to secure better conditions for everyone in their industry. “You’re not a person” — the message Helly’s outtie tells her innie — brutally epitomizes the loss of dignity and humanity we endure in the workplace. Severance is a road map of organizing, a revolution in progress, and it begins and ends with caring about your fellow worker, who in turn cares about you. In Severance, Helly, newly severed and rebellious, represents the audience surrogate and an unadulterated reaction to all this, and perhaps what everyone’s reaction should be to spending their days doing pointless tasks for the profit of others: rage, repulsion, and determination to escape. Macrodata Refinement is a perfect example of a job that doesn’t really need to be done, and one brought about by Severance creator, writer, and showrunner Dan Erickson’s real-life temp job entering data. There seems to be a direct correlation between how necessary your job is and how low you are paid and indecently you are treated. While the workplace sitcom has been a staple of TV for decades, no show about work has captured quite so accurately how damaging work can be in real life. Entire sectors of the economy are based on a large pool of low-wage workers, aided by state governments run in large part by business owners. With no personal memories and no context of the outside world, attempts to understand their jobs and surroundings are childlike and naive.

Welcome to Right on Cue, the podcast where we interview film, TV, and video game composers about the origins and nuances of their latest works.

And it’s a place that Mark ( Adam Scott) and the other three members of his department will have to navigate, as they work to figure out what their real lives are like and discern what they’re actually doing for Lumon. That’s the eerie premise of Apple TV+’s latest series, Severance, a Ben Stiller-directed corporate satire that imagines a company that allows its employees to undergo an experimental procedure to cleave their memories in twain. In a world where so many people have learned to start working from home the last couple of years (and many still do), the phrase “don’t take your work home with you” has become ever more dubious.

As for Severance, this is a deeply weird, extremely brilliant series concocted by of all people, Ben Stiller. It is not a comedy. At least not outright, though ...

Helle – We learn that Helle is actually Helena Egan, daughter of the current head of the company, and she has severed herself in order to prove a point that severance is a good thing that anyone can undergo. Mark – Learns that Outie Mark’s wife is still alive, and exists as Miss Casey at Lumon. We learned that last week, but Mark himself learns it this week when he sees a photo of her for the first time. You slowly start to realize how horrifying this is over the course of the series, and yes, there is some extremely good commentary in here on the state of corporate life and how workers are treated. If one version of you never has to deal with work, the other version of you that the severance process creates, only exists at work. The story follows a company, Lumon, who uses the practice of severance on certain employees. Oh, and Apple managed to have the Oscar Best Picture winner on its service this yeartoo, with CODA.

While season one may be over, you still can enjoy a bit more of the Apple TV+ show Severance with these Lumon inspired wallpapers.

Share your thoughts in the comment section below. After nine episodes, Apple just ended season one of Severance. The show is based on the premise of a mysterious company called Lumon Industries, which features a severed floor wherein workers cannot recall their personal memories. Parker has created some nice wallpapers inspired by the show.

Adam Scott missed out on a screening of the finale of his hit show "Severance" because he was stuck in Costa Rica recovering from COVID-19.

“If you aired that on TV no one would get a shot ever.” He went on to thank the show’s director, Ben Stiller, and creator, Dan Erickson, along with a host of other people. “I am stuck in Costa Rica with good old COVID.”

'Severance' director Ben Stiller, creator Dan Erickson on the season one finale cliffhanger and season two plans for the Apple TV series.

“Hopefully they can at least see their story told here and see some of their struggles voiced and understood.” It’s fun to think about how the events of this episode change the world and change the game for all the characters and how they’re now going to have to contend with that.” Erickson added of their current conversations about what comes next, “You start to see what people are reacting to, what they’re liking. Don’t tell me, I don’t want to spill the beans,” she joked on the carpet, after explaining her initial conversations with Stiller and Erickson about the project. At a Los Angeles finale celebration for the show on Friday, the cast and creator answered some of them, while hinting that there will be plenty more to come. The sci-fi show, starring Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, Britt Lower, John Turturro and Zach Cherry, follows a company that surgically divides its staff’s work and personal lives, which begins to come undone throughout the first season.