This article contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of “Severance.”
When it comes to “Severance” sleuths, Dan Erickson is a man of two minds.
As the creator of the heady Apple TV+ series about office drones who surgically bisect their work and home personas, the 41-year-old showrunner is “honored” by the hordes of fans mining episodes for theory-fueling nuggets. But being responsible for many an imagination run rampant also carries its own anxieties.
“It is terrifying because I know how invested people are in it,” Erickson says. “I’m afraid of disappointing the barista at the coffee shop by ordering wrong and having them not like me. So the idea of a lot of people feeling like the show wasn’t what they were expecting it to be, it does take up space in my head — I’m not going to lie.”
In “Cold Harbor,” the Erickson-penned, Ben Stiller-directed Season 2 finale that dropped Thursday night, “Severance” addressed a slew of long-swirling mysteries. We learned that Mark’s (Adam Scott) macrodata refinement at Lumon was a methodical means of building consciousnesses for his not-so-dead wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman). The Cold Harbor room was revealed to be a final test for the imprisoned Gemma, who was asked to dismantle a crib and suppress the memory of her fertility struggles. The goats’ purpose, as part of a ritualistic sacrifice, was also divulged. And we met the bombastic Choreography and Merriment department, which helped Helly (Britt Lower) and Dylan (Zach Cherry) undermine Mr. Milchick’s (Tramell Tillman) authority.
End of carousel
That all unfolded amid Mark’s plan to free Gemma from her hellacious captivity. During an emotionally charged jailbreak, in which Lumon heavy Mr. Drummond (Olafur Darri Olafsson) met a bloody demise, Mark’s “outie” reunited with Gemma, and his “innie” guided her off Lumon’s severed floor. As Mark’s innie prepared to join her on the other side — almost certainly ending that persona’s existence — he turned around and saw Helly, took her hand instead and thwarted his outie’s love story in favor of saving his own.
During a video chat last week from Los Angeles, Erickson broke down the Season 2 finale’s most consequential moments and teased where a third season would go from here.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How does it feel to be openly discussing the season?
It’s insane. I feel like I’ve built my whole identity around being secretive and withholding and not telling anybody what I’m doing, so it’s quite vulnerable to be out in the open.
What were the overarching challenges of writing the second season?
It was far more difficult than writing the first season because it’s easier to pose interesting questions than to provide satisfying answers. You don’t want the show to feel too workmanlike, like you’re spending multiple episodes in a row just doing homework and ticking off boxes and answering questions. You still want to feel like there are surprises and turns and big emotional character moments.
What did you find dramatically rich about exploring the innies’ mortality and the ethics of essentially ending their lives by ending Lumon?
For the innies, the show has been about them coming to see themselves as individuals with value, as opposed to appendages of their outie or tools of a company. The first thing you see this season is Mark running to try to find Ms. Casey because he knows she’s his outie’s wife, and he feels it’s his responsibility to find her. And the very last shot is him turning his back on Ms. Casey. He has reached a point over the course of the season where he puts his own life on equal footing with that of his outie. His love with Helly, to him, is the same or even greater than what Mark has with Gemma on the outside.
What is Mark thinking when he makes that choice?
I don’t think he has any plan. I don’t think he has any understanding of how long they’re going to be able to stay down there. All he knows is that in this moment, he wants to stay there with her. We talked about different modulations of that, but ultimately it was in conversation with Ben that we landed on this shot of them running together and this feeling of abandon — but also this feeling of fear.
Fans have found parallels between “Severance” and the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice, and Persephone and Hades. This season ends with an Orpheus-like figure leading his Eurydice out of an underworld, only to doom their romance by looking back at the last moment.
Well, I did play Orpheus in a sixth-grade play, so it may have seeped its way into my subconscious. But it wasn’t something I consciously set out to do. Along the way we realized there was a parallel there, and then maybe we leaned into it in certain instances.
The finale answered one of the show’s foundational mysteries: We learned that, as Harmony Cobel [Patricia Arquette] tells Mark, “The numbers are your wife.” What informed that reveal?
I loved the idea that this whole time that Mark has been sitting there looking at this mysterious sea of data, that he was actually staring into the mind of the woman that he’s mourning on the outside. That was the emotional seed that was important to me. He’s finding her tempers, and he’s able to recognize them because, on a deep level, that transcends severance. He knows her, he understands her, and he can see the pieces of her soul and identify them. He’s able to use them to build these new versions of her, and the reason that it works is because he loves her so much.
Is it a guiding principle that, whatever the technical explanation, character and emotion are what ultimately matter most when answering these questions?
Absolutely. I mean, the whole show started because I was just going through some stuff and found myself wishing on one hand that I could disassociate from my workday, but also noticing that when I was at work, there was a comfort to that, because I was sort of shielded from some of the painful stuff I was going through on the outside. That was a case of the technological stuff being born out of an emotional moment, so I try to stay true to that with every new thing that we add into the show.
In a “Severance” first, the finale gives us a back-and-forth conversation between an innie and outie. How long had you wanted to do that with Mark?
I’d always wanted to write that scene, going back to the start of the show, because I thought it would be so fascinating to get them face to face, as much as is possible. It’s a moment where outie Mark’s selfishness, or his dismissal of his innie, is laid bare. Until that point, innie Mark maybe is giving his outie the benefit of the doubt. But I think he realizes in that moment that he really is being used, and that his outie may be pretending to care about him. At the end of the day, his outie is trying to serve his own needs, which is understandable because he wants his wife back.
What was the significance of the Cold Harbor test for Gemma?
We had a version of the script that was a bit more overt in terms of what exactly was being tested, but I think it’s clear that this crib that you see her taking apart in that room is representative of a very raw and a very visceral pain that she experienced on the outside. There’s always a sense of trying to see what will transcend the barrier.
Let’s talk about the Choreography and Merriment department. Where did that idea come from?
Myself and [writers] Mark Friedman and Beau Willimon were talking about what celebration would be brought in. At some point, somebody was sent a singing telegram — I think it was a man dressed as a frog — and it got us thinking about a musical performance. Then somebody brought up that there’s a scene in “Citizen Kane” where a marching band comes in, and they do this weird little bespoke performance, and it just felt right. It’s big and it’s loud and it’s chaotic, but it’s also a bunch of people moving in unison in sort of a grid, which felt very Lumon.
What excites you about where the story leaves Milchick and Dylan?
We’re leaving them in a moment where I think the balance of power has shifted somewhat. The whole thing with Lumon has always been that a company is like a human being — meaning when it’s severed and when the pieces are separated, it’s weaker, and when the pieces come together, it’s stronger. We have the possibility of these different departments beginning to see that they are the same, and they could be stronger together. That’s something that we’ve been building toward, going back to the forbidden romance of Burt and Irving.
Speaking of Burt [Christopher Walken] and Irving (John Turturro), they weren’t in the finale. What can you say about their futures?
I think I would be mysteriously disappeared if I said anything.
Fair enough! Even though the show hasn’t been renewed for Season 3, it’s been confirmed that you’re back in the writers room. Where are you in that process?
We’re still fairly early in the process, but we’re crafting the story. We’re not breaking the entire rest of the show, but we are discussing the [third] season with the end point in mind, and with a fairly solid sense of how many seasons we think it’s going to be.
What are the questions you hope the audience is asking, and the questions that interest you as a storyteller moving forward?
At the center of it all are the emotional questions. What is the fallout of innie Mark’s choice? Will they continue to move toward [Mark’s] reintegration? Do we want them to? What does that mean for the identity of each of them? Also, I think people hopefully are curious about what these tests were with Gemma and what the greater ramifications of those are. What was Kier’s vision for the company? What is the company ultimately planning to do? These are the things that we’re discussing, and I hope other people are discussing.
