The second season of “Severance” still concluded with its longest episode. I have an idea. There are lots of spoilers.
Who are we by?
There is an ending that gives you what you want. There is an ending that doesn't give you what you want. There is an ending that gives you things you don't want.
Then there's the ending that makes you wonder exactly what you should want, which is what the “Retirement” season 2 finale did.
The first season of “retirement” gave us some clear interest in eradicating. We wanted Mark Scout to find his wife, Gemma, irresistibly at his death. And we wanted Mark S. and the rest of his Inney colleagues to find freedom, self-determination, and love. However, the finale reached the realization that the season was built. These two desires may at least be incompatible and not easy.
Two marks of the world's strangest Zoom conversation in the birth cabin have created conflict. The series shows them as twin protagonists who have been unfairly treated by Mighty Lumon Corporation. But as Innie Mark says with increased frustration, there is also a dynamic of power between them.
Outie Mark has more agents, more legitimate under the law, and more life on the planet. And as the conversation progresses, we look at him through his Inie's eyes. Is the sweet, sad, sad man we've come to know a bit self-righteous? A little cage? He tries to say the right thing, but there's a bit of a lip service vibe, as if he wants to pay compensation without actually sacrificing anything. It's like he approves the land for his brain.
I know Outie Mark has a heart. But can you blame Innie Mark for wondering if he's just giving Helly a kind and gentle version of Helly's fire from season 1? “You're not a person”?
Maybe there's a good solution. Maybe the reintegration will really work. Maybe both can share a co-tenant of one body. Or maybe Outie Mark is blowing smoke! The finale doesn't solve this – or many other things, but it makes us wonder. (Not to mention whose happy ending is important: Gemma puts it out, but what about the dozens of full Njimi that have been cultivated in her brain? Are they less realistic than Mark S and Helly R?
Innie Mark chooses herself, and Helly R escapes the mixed chaos covering Loomhole's Claxon, and like “graduate”, the uplift of his lover's face shifts to anxiety. After all, there is no specific future for them within Lumon. But sometimes you can't help in your own way.
–James Poniewozik
Agreed to the manager
The second season of “Retirement” ended with multiple innies who dramatically handled their half-life.
They include Mark S and Helly R, who abandoned Mark's wife and embraced an uncertain future running through the hallways together at the end of the chaotic finale. Dylan G. appears to have withdrawn his resignation plan and recommended team macrodata refinement. Even Lone, the melancholy goat queen, decided she had enough and beat Mr Drummond. (I hope we see a loan out in season 3. She has to have lots of questions.)
But there is a spare thought for a man who was charged with maintaining order and failing completely. (This show is so nutty.) The disappointing reflection in the Miltick's bathroom mirror was as heart-pounding as the rest of the episode was blapped with a red alert and he realized it was all wrong.
I moved partially in solidarity with my fellow middle managers, mainly because Tramell Tillman was the show's MVP throughout the season. Consider a small sample of what “retirement” asked him to do. One scene tells the story of Bonker's campfire, and the next scene erases Inie. Endures loaded critiques of his vocabulary and maintains chilly professional relationships with his children. And in the finale, they will be co-hosting a show-up of the animatronic statue and the major drum moves worth halftime, and flaunting a show-out laughing tribute show with the marching band.
Tillman was able to make all this work, giving himself all his own, conveying the bottled rage of a man who was rewarded with rudeness and racist micro-attacks from his Lumon boss, including statistics. (Again, nuts.)
Midkick gives Dylan his out reply to his request for resignation. “Like I'm officially overwhelmed because it can lead to an embarrassing emotional response to you,” he says. I'm also overwhelmed. But if Milchick is involved, I'm here for it.
– Jeremy Egner
My Outie is concerned
“Retirement” makes my brain work. This can be a problem.
My TV brain – calling it my Innie – understands that Mark S will remain in the office of Lemon Industry at the end of the season 2 finale. This makes sense and I understand that it is heartbreaking within the parameters of the show.
But my real world brain – a persistent outing – sees Mark's wife, Gemma, standing outside, and thinks that his decision is meaningless in the real world and that he loses the sympathy that it had for him. Unfortunately, unlike Mark, I can't turn it off.
I've been part of the show from the start because it calmed the creepyness of its execution. Mark and Helly's season-ending dash was exhilarating through Lemont's corridors, like the Maze Rats and the Romantics of the Louvre in Godard films.
However, when the emphasis is placed on novelty and style, sacrifices can be made, and bills will be paid as season two progresses. The elements of ritual cultivation-like oddity in Lumon's mechanics felt more artificial and frivolous than ever before after aborting the performance of the marching band and the sacrifice of the goats in the finale. The ultimate answer to what Lumon is doing – Mind Control? Digitalization of consciousness? – Not very interesting. What appears to be a hole in an original premise (why do everyone sign up for separation knowing that they have to leave every night?) has become even more troublesome. And with no John Tarturo's Irving and Christopher Walken's Bert, the finale missed two of the show's most engaging performances. Well, there's no waffle party for me.
– Mike Hale
The meaning of work
In the finale of Season 2's “Severance,” Mark S. completes the 25th Macrodata refinement file. The celebration continues, leading to a performance by a full marching band. The scene enacts a fantasy in which no matter how sinister, difficult and boring works are rewarded. The episode also claims that, perhaps for the first time in “retirement,” the work that the characters in the show have an important purpose and that is important.
Chilly, strange and tragic “retirement” is basically work in most office jobs, with work and paralyzed futileness (friendship, cheating, occasional egg bar society). In episode 19, Mark S's job was an empty exercise. Use trackballs to sort and group seemingly random numbers. (It's like the dullest grayscale version of Candy Crush Saga.)
The finale reveals that this seemingly pointless work has sharp, painful points, including Mark S.'s out wife, Gemma, currently trapped on the company's test floor. Or, as Harmony Kobel, former supervisor of Mark S. says. “The numbers are your wife.”
“Resignation” is always dependent on paradoxical things, but is it at least true to some extent? – The concept of work being both rest and hassle. Mark S.'s Outie agrees to the resignation procedure so that she does not have to lament her wife during work hours. (He also shows in his video conversation with Inni that it is probably the only way that it can work at work after her “death.”) The bonus is that his outs can eliminate the boredom of sorting numbers. Do you work on weekends? congratulations. All your Outie is weekend. The show has never claimed the work itself is essential.
The timing is obviously coincidence, but the finale arrives at the moment when thousands of federal workers are asked to justify their work. And that suggests that even unnecessary and seemingly extra-looking tasks may be absolutely essential.
But even if that applies to work, it doesn't necessarily apply to workers who may be given up at any time. It was discarded “like a skin shell” as Cobel explains in colorful ways.
– Alexis Soloski
