[This contains major spoilers from the season two finale of Apple TV+’s Severance, “Cold Harbor.”]
In the Severance season two finale (spoiler alert!), Mark S. murdered Mr. Drummond. His finger pulled the trigger of a gun while shifting from innie to outie in Lumon’s elevator, and Outie Mark (Adam Scott) woke up to a fountain of blood streaming from Drummond’s (Darri Ólafsson) throat. Upstairs, Innie Mark had just finished a brutal fistfight with Drummond, which began with the security chief’s near-successful strangulation of Mark and ended with goat lady Lorne (Gwendoline Christie) throwing several key punches.
In the testing floor’s elevator lobby, Drummond’s blood spurted, then bubbled, then pooled around his dead body on the shining white tile. Outie Mark used his blood-saturated tie to circumvent a DNA barrier to rescue Gemma (Dichen Lachman), who in turn guided her husband back to the severed floor, where Innie Mark pushed Gemma through a doorway and then, to the lilting snare drum of Mel Tormé’s 1969 Oscar-winning song “The Windmills of Your Mind,” ran backward into the bowels of Lumon with his innie girlfriend, Helly (Britt Lower). The freeze frame at the end faded to a startling shade of (blood!) red.
Director and executive producer Ben Stiller says even he didn’t see some of this coming. “There’s something about the visuals of those white hallways,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “When you introduce blood into them, it’s that much more stark and shocking.”
What comes next? Stiller chats below with THR about how he prepared for an episode unlike the show had ever seen, how a Tropic Thunder connection helped him make it happen and where creator Dan Erickson might take it from here.
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Oh my goodness. Before watching this episode I was going to ask if you’d ever seen someone guess the exact right ending, but that now feels nearly impossible.
That’s the hope — that you can come up with something that nobody is really thinking about. But people have such crazy, very specific theories and obviously there are some that do have some truth. The whole Hadestown corollary… I thought that was interesting because that’s not something we ever really discussed, but I’m actually a huge Hadestown fan, and that myth is so ubiquitous. I do see that in the ending in its own way, but it’s not something we talked about.
The violence here was obviously a departure for you guys, even pragmatically. The color of the blood is so much more vibrant than anything we’ve ever seen from Lumon. Did the prep for this episode look different?
That was something we thought about. I felt like there was sort of a precursor to it in season one, when Reghabi hits Graner with a baseball bat. I knew we’d had violence like that [before], but I felt like this could be a moment that was hopefully a little shocking to the audience. It feels like everything is implied at Lumon, and then finally when it gets pushed to the limit, underneath there is a very ugly reality of what they’re doing there.
In terms of figuring out how to do it, we have a great stunt coordinator named Dean Neistat, who’s been on the show. But I also brought in a friend of mine, Phil Neilson, who I’d worked with on Tropic Thunder and is an amazing fight coordinator. The actors rehearsed the fighting, and of course the visual effects and special effects were something we’d never ever dealt with. It’s a little bit scary when you do something like that because you go, “OK, this going out of the norm of something we’ve done on the show.” But I also felt like the surprise of it and the excitement of it would be worth taking that chance. It felt like there was a reason for it.
When you started work on Severance season one, did you know this episode was coming? Did you know it was going to get this bloody?
No. It’s just always been a question of security at Lumon. How do they keep control over people? I guess somewhere in my head I thought, “well, at some point…” I never wanted it to be a show where everybody’s walking around with guns or anything like that. It’s not that kind of show. But there has to be some underbelly to this whole thing. So maybe down the line I thought we’d get here, but honestly I don’t think I knew it would go as far as we did.
This season did a lot more blending of imagery between corporate culture and religion or cult aesthetics. Did you look at anything for inspiration when deciding how to blend those two worlds?
At the beginning we looked at a lot of reference images and photography and things like that. But I feel like now this show comes from the experience of everyone who works on Severance — things we’ve watched and experienced. Dan Erickson is just so great with creating that stuff in terms of the lore and the history of Lumon and the Eagan family. When he comes up with stuff like that it’s always exciting. Dan said in the script that the painting [in the season two finale] would show every character we’ve ever seen on the show, and we have a really great artist on the show who does all the paintings.
So that painting in the finale is entirely real?
Yep, totally real.
Is the Kier animatronic real?
The mannequin is real. I got to operate it with a remote control. We have an amazing special effects person named Doug Coleman who created a remote control for that animatron. We wanted it to be the same Kier Eagan animatron from the Perpetuity Wing, and not to be too sophisticated. And Marc Geller, who is Kier Eagan — he’s in the actor in all the photographs and paintings and does the voice of Kier Eagan when you hear it on recordings — he came down the day we shot that and he did it live with Tramell Tillman.
Patricia Arquette and Jen Tullock with Adam Scott in the Severance finale. Apple
What’s the plan for the innies now? Are we looking at a severed floor stakeout?
That’s the question. I don’t want to give anything away. I think there’s a lot of questions that are posed, and that’s also what I liked about the ending moment in how Dan wrote it. When we go to that freeze frame and we go to red — which we haven’t ever had that color, the blood being the first time — but to me it’s sort of a shift of, okay, we’re going into another mode here. This is a lot darker and more dystopian than we’ve seen.
This finale feels like an inverse of the season one finale. First we had Mark proclaiming that Gemma was alive, and now we have Gemma discovering that Mark is alive. Is season three going to be Gemma’s journey back to Mark?
It’s a relationship that everyone is invested in. This ending leaves open that question: What’s going to happen? It’s ironic that Mark finally would get Gemma out and now his innie doesn’t want to go. I’m wondering, as a viewer, what’s going to happen with Gemma? And I think that does leave a lot of possibilities for season three in terms of where Mark and Helly go, where Mark and Gemma go. How will it all play out?
Are these Eagans after immortality?
I don’t know. All those open questions are what is kind of fun about the show. The Kier Eagan ideology is, a lot of it is about severing from your feelings, severing from your past. It’s that you don’t necessarily want to remember history. That idea is an interesting idea. Severing from your emotions, from your personal history… what does that do to you?
Do you know if Dan Erickson envisions a certain number of seasons for the story he’s created?
Yeah, he does. The hope is that we’ll be able to let people know what the plan is at some point in the future. Our desire is to get the show on a more regular cadence. It’s been challenging, with COVID and then the strikes, but that’s part of what I want to be able to do in the future, is let people know what we’re doing and what to expect.
Update: Apple officially confirmed on Friday morning that Severance has been renewed for a season three.
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All 10 episodes of Severance season two are now streaming on Apple TV+. Read THR‘s season coverage and interviews.
