Rewind Review: Severance, "In Perpetuity" | Season 1, Episode 3

In the lead up to the second season premiere of Apple TV+’s Severance, I’m sending subscribers my reviews of the first season, which were the first I wrote for the newsletter.

Review: Severance, "In Perpetuity" | Season 1, Episode 3

The end of “Half Loop” certainly hinted strongly that “Mrs. Selvig” was a bit of performance from Harmony Cobel, but I was surprised when “In Perpetuity” answers the question so clearly. Once Mark leaves for work the morning after he moves Petey into his basement, and “Selvig” finishes her performance de-icing her front steps with a hair dryer, Cobel emerges to head to work, and makes a detour to Mark’s front door to inspect the gift left on his doorstep and pilfer through his things. It’s no longer a question: Harmony Cobel has not been severed, and she is acutely aware of both the outside and inside worlds Mark operates in.

Episodic MediumMyles McNutt

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The end of “Half Loop” certainly hinted strongly that “Mrs. Selvig” was a bit of performance from Harmony Cobel, but I was surprised when “In Perpetuity” answers the question so clearly. Once Mark leaves for work the morning after he moves Petey into his basement, and “Selvig” finishes her performance de-icing her front steps with a hair dryer, Cobel emerges to head to work, and makes a detour to Mark’s front door to inspect the gift left on his doorstep and pilfer through his things. It’s no longer a question: Harmony Cobel has not been severed, and she is acutely aware of both the outside and inside worlds Mark operates in.

In the short term, this creates a tense moment for a disoriented Petey, but I was surprised to see them “resolve” this mystery so early. But when Cobel returns to her office at work to find Lumon spokesperson Natalie—who Mark had seen as a talking head on cable news defending the company against criticism—the show’s decision to give us her point-of-view makes more sense. She is technically a threat to Mark: she has a key to his house, is fully aware of his sister and brother-in-law, and would clearly move swiftly to remove a threat if she knew what he knows. But she’s also clearly subject to the silent dread of “The Board,” and more willing to acknowledge the mess of Petey’s disappearance than they are. She sees the clear signs of reintegration; the Board won’t even acknowledge reintegration is possible.

I saw a tweet from someone that said Patricia Arquette is playing at least four characters here, and that’s essentially true: there’s the Moira Rose-esque Mrs. Selvig character, the Harmony Cobel who throws mugs at Mark, the Harmony Cobel who interacts with the Board, and then whatever Harmony Cobel is left to operate as an agent of her own accord when she isn’t being watched (if there’s ever a time when that is true). While “In Perpetuity” resolves the mystery of whether Mrs. Selvig is an act or just a particularly nosy neighbor, it nonetheless retains the uncertainty over the “real” Harmony Cobel. She is overseeing people whose identities are fractured by a procedure, but to do so she’s fractured her own identity for reasons that admittedly are still a little unclear: has she been surveilling Mark the whole time? Or did she move in more recently when the situation with Petey became a potential concern?

The deeper mysteries of Lumon remain as vague as ever: we know the Board is very concerned about Macrodata Refinement’s quarterly performance, but even Petey was no closer to finding a clear picture of what the company does, or its history. As Irving spurs a field trip to the Perpetuity Wing, a run-in with Optics and Design gives us a sense of the mythology that has sprung up among the “Innies.” Why is Optics and Design only two people? Why is Dylan so aggressive toward them? Without having a clear sense of how long Lumon’s severance program has been running—something that none of them have any conception of—the idea of a coup is hard to pin down, and unless we get more insight through our own perspective on Harmony’s job we’re as much in the dark as the team are.

Irving may have another run-in with Burt, and he may have a lot of emotional investment in their trip down Eagan memory lane in the Perpetuity Wing, but this episode is primarily interested in Helly and Petey’s struggle to escape the maze of the Severed Floor. We still don’t know why Helly chose to undergo severance, or why Lumon was so keen to have her, but it’s expressly clear she is not going to be allowed to leave, and Inside Helly is not on board. It’s unclear how common or uncommon this is: it seems logical that there would be instances where people (they are still people) would wrestle against this history-free existence, but Mark notes that a resignation request has never been turned around this quickly before, and the pressure around Petey’s disappearance may be tied to a larger crisis within Lumon that may itself be linked to concerns about the impact of the procedure that they’ve consistently overlooked. For now, Helly isn’t going anywhere despite her valiant and bloody effort, and her time with the “Compunction Statement” in the Break Room is perhaps what happens to everyone, even if they don’t remember it.

Petey, meanwhile, is demonstrating that it truly might not be possible to reintegrate. It’s clear that severance is not truly permanent: he’s clearly managed to merge his two selves, and was able to hide it long enough to be conscious within Lumon and work on a map of the premises that Mark discovers when changing out the group photos. But the side effects are expanding, not contracting, and he loses any and all ability to distinguish between the two worlds as he wanders through the town. Yul Vazquez’s performance is great, but it’s also a showcase for the production design, editing, and special effects teams blurring the lines between the two worlds with a chaotic energy. By the time Mark arrives at the gas station, he realizes that whatever is happening to Petey, he doesn’t want any part of it, but whether he’ll be able to resist taking one of the calls from “Them”—the people responsible for his reintegration—on the phone he left behind is a different question.

As the team tours the Perpetuity Wing, Irving is quick to share all of the knowledge he’s accumulated, but Helly rightfully points out that it’s unnatural to be so ignorant about yourself in the process. Severance gains a lot of its weight from the choices people make in terms of what they want to know: the Inside versions of themselves are conditioned not to ask questions, but they still speculate, and Petey at the very least found some way for his outer self to manifest those questions into a drastic action that has set the entire team on edge. Mark, meanwhile, listens to what Petey has to say, sees the cable news hit about a case of a worker becoming pregnant at work after being severed, and makes a clear declarative statement the next morning: he doesn’t want to know. He may be drinking himself to sleep every night, but the idea of another eight hours a day missing his wife—who we confirm died in a car accident—is worse.

The more Severance tells us about its eponymous procedure, the more that seems doubtful, but that’s something that each of the characters needs to learn for themselves. “In Perpetuity” moves that question forward by adding Cobel to the group of characters making choices, and continuing to emphasize that Petey’s disorientation is not the only way these worlds will keep blurring together as the unnaturalness of what severance achieves pushes back against this process.

Stray observations

• “Neighborhood never really filled up”—again, the scale of Lumon’s severed operations is hard to gauge. If four states are trying to ban it, we’re clearly at a messy stage in its attempted deployment, so maybe things never scaled the way they imagined?
• Lumon clearly really enjoyed the opening title sequence to the Netflix original Orange Is The New Black, based on the Perpetuity Wing.
• Petey assures Mark that the teens of the WMC aren’t the ones who reintegrated him, so I’m curious to see where “they” originate from in terms of the political/cultural debate unfolding. Part of me feels like this wouldn’t be a true labor dystopia if the people trying to fight severance weren’t just capitalists vying to replace it with something else.
• The Perpetuity Wing is such a great bit of world-building, because it’s valuable information about the Eagans and their self-mythology but we also can’t trust any of it—while we have seen the visage of Kier in the lobby, implying there is an “outside” story there, the rest of the history could easily be a giant fiction designed to best fill the empty minds of the severed.
• Does every operating group have a Milchick and a Cobel, do we think? Curious if we ever get a similar encounter between upper management as we did between the two teams.
• Speaking of Milchick, it feels safe to presume that he is—like Cobel—not severed, but his agency as a lower level employee seems even more fraught, so I’m interested to see if we get any insight there eventually.
• “History lives in us, whether we learn it or not” is way on the nose for a Jame Eagan quote, but I suppose they’re not aiming for subtlety while trying to program the Innies to their philosophy.
• I don’t know if the break room was as terrifying as it was built up to be in Petey’s recording, but the production design and lighting of that set was stunning. 
• So I had presumed that this was filmed in and around New York, but the gas station sign listed “1.10” as the price of gas, which implies it was a Canadian gas station or this is a very different economic climate in the show’s dystopia? I have questions, is what I’m saying.