Review: Severance, "Cold Harbor" | Season 2, Episode 10

“But, what would that mean exactly?”

Severance notably ended its first season without any answers regarding the central mysteries of the Severed Floor. What macrodata was Macrodata Refinement refining? What motivated Lumon’s work in the first place? What was up with the goats? The Overtime Contingency was thrilling and offered tangential reveals—e.g. Helly is Helena Eagan—that excited our curiosity, but it left the vast majority of the audience’s questions unaddressed.

Although I can’t find the link at the moment, Dan Erickson explained at the time that this was by design, a note from Ben Stiller to effectively blackmail Apple into greenlighting a second season. In that respect, it was a success, and Severance’s reputation only grew in its lengthy absence—it returned a blockbuster, with season two beginning as Apple’s most-watched series ever. But the narrative consequences of that choice have hung over the entire season thus far, with three years of speculation needing resolution. It was fine to finish the first season with these questions largely unanswered, but the second season would need to make meaningful progress if the show is going to have momentum into what will clearly be as many seasons as Erickson and Stiller want to make.

A few weeks ago, “Chikhai Bardo” gave us the most substantial glimpse yet into the mysteries of the Severed Floor: the macrodata being refined was directly tied to Gemma’s various “tests,” with MDR seemingly constructing the rooms where Dr. Mauer was conducting his experiments. And as Mark and Mark S. reach an impasse in their camcorder dialogue in the opening moments of “Cold Harbor,” Cobel steps in with a clearer explanation: each file was a new Innie being created for Gemma. Mark S.’s purpose at Lumon was to create these new Innies, and Gemma’s was to test them, and once the final “test” is complete Lumon will be done with both of them.

This is the launching point for “Cold Harbor,” as Mark S. runs out of the birthing cabin and swears that he’ll ignore Cobel and his Outie entirely if he doesn’t wake up on the Severed Floor. And while it sets up a heist of sorts that matches the thrilling uncertainty of the Overtime Contingency, I need to stop for a second to argue that there is something inherently frustrating about the climax of the second season only just getting to the core mysteries that drove the first. It’s not a question of whether the answers we get are satisfying or not—even if I’d say it’s a bit deflating to learn that everything we’re seeing is just a further testing of the severance technology, the reveal is still rich in thematic resonance. The problem is that I have a huge number of related questions that were raised in the second season that the show had zero interest in addressing, a problem that nagged at me throughout this finale. As striking and compelling as it was on a moment-to-moment basis, there were so many moments where I had followup questions that I now fear we’ll be waiting until the end of next season to answer.

This might not be an issue for every viewer, and it’s true that stopping a runaway train of a finale to delve into some exposition would have been its own problem. But what became an issue for me was how the unanswered questions started to bleed out into moments that should have been thrilling, the lack of clarity stopping the episode for me even if the plot kept moving. There is a surplus of interesting ideas floated in “Cold Harbor,” and the conflict it sets up for a third season seems rich with potential, but I can’t help but feel like this all could have been just as true even if we had gotten more clarity on this season’s reveals as opposed to forcing us to wait another two years for answers.