Severance‘s Views on Grief Are Raw, Real, and Dystopian All at Once
Grief was a key theme in Severance season one, but it was mostly confined to the outtie storyline. In season two, we’ve seen loss become a prominent presence in both segments of the show, provoking even the innies—who are not well-equipped to deal with complex emotions—to consider what death means to them.
In season one, we learned that Severance‘s main character, Mark Scout, decided to become a severed employee at Lumon Industries because he thought it would help him cope with the loss of his wife, Gemma, in a car accident a few years prior. We soon understand that Mark is still deeply affected by her passing, sobbing in his car before going into the office; he has come to appreciate the eight-hour break from his sadness while his innie is controlling his consciousness. He keeps a few photos of her around his home—since it’s Lumon-subsidized housing, and he took the job after she died, we can assume she never lived there with him—but the basement is still full of storage bins containing Gemma’s knitting supplies, candles, and other tangible evidence that she existed.
The knife-twist, of course, is that she’s alive. Audience members learned that shocking detail right along with innie Mark, who screamed out his discovery in the season one finale. [Update: Thanks to the reader who pointed out in the comments below that the audience actually knew that fact a few episodes earlier—when Mark taped together a photo of Gemma he’d ripped up in anguish.] His outtie’s spouse is in fact Ms. Casey, the counselor in Lumon’s Wellness Center. Gemma/Ms. Casey being the same person, and Gemma being alive at all, opened up mysteries galore for season two, especially when you think back on what Ms. Casey has revealed about her existence. As a severed employee, she’s only been awake for a handful of days. Total. And from what we’ve seen, she never switches into an outtie; instead, she remains at Lumon full-time.
Why would Lumon facilitate what appears to be such a diabolical and elaborate conspiracy? We don’t know yet. But in Severance season two, outtie Mark agrees to undergo a sketchy re-integration procedure after realizing there’s actually a chance his wife did not die in that car accident, and is instead hidden somewhere on one of Lumon’s lower floors. To him, a miraculous second chance with Gemma is worth the dangers of tinkering around in his already aching brain.
At the same time, innie Mark—who has no idea that he’s in the process of being re-integrated—tries to find Ms. Casey. He doesn’t share his outtie’s grief, but the strangeness of the situation tugs at him. We know, of course, that Ms. Casey has been remanded to the ominous-sounding “Testing Floor,” one of the duplicitous Ms. Cobel’s last acts as the boss of the severed floor. (Severance is now five episodes into season two, and Ms. Casey has yet to appear.)
It’s worth mentioning that one reason outtie Mark is initially hesitant to attempt re-integration is because he saw what happened to Petey, his former Lumon co-worker and a previous guinea pig for the procedure. Severance season one begins with innie Mark realizing his work bestie is no longer employed at Lumon. The innies have no idea what happened to Petey (it’s very hard to quit a severed job, and there’s no apparent reason why he would have been fired), and there’s speculation that something happened to his outtie. Petey’s absence offers our first taste of Severed‘s recurring idea that when a severed person leaves the job, it effectively means they’ve died. Their outtie might be perfectly well, but the version of them that their Lumon friends know simply blinks out of existence.
That’s why innie Petey’s “death” is harder for innie Mark than Petey’s actual death is for outtie Mark. The latter nonetheless feels duty-bound to attend the funeral of this man, a total stranger, who materialized one day spouting crazy-sounding talk about being Mark’s best friend at Lumon, and all the evils that the company is secretly engaging in.
When Ms. Cobel—who poses as “Mrs. Selvig,” Mark’s daffy next-door neighbor, in season one—also shows up at Petey’s funeral, it’s ostensibly as moral support for Mark, though of course she’s really there to rip the Lumon-implanted chip out of Petey’s skull. We still don’t know much about Ms. Cobel’s background, but we do know she’s a committed zealot when it comes to Kier Eagan, Lumon’s cult leader-like founder. We also know she feels great pain over something that happened in her past, most likely involving her deceased mother, and it’s at the root of her odd behavior both in and out of the office.
While Ms. Cobel’s enigmas await more exploration, Severance‘s most searing example of grief not involving Mark springs from the relationship between innie Irving and innie Burt. Despite working in purportedly rival departments—Irv’s in Macrodata Refinement, Burt’s in Optics and Design—the two men meet-cute in the hallway and have an instant connection. Their shy flirting is the closest thing to sweetness we’ve seen on Severance, and for Irv, a man plagued by waking dreams of being engulfed in terrifying black goo, his feelings for Burt are a startling revelation in a life previously devoted to counting numbers and being a stickler for the employee handbook. When Burt abruptly “retires” from Lumon, he gets a cheery send-off party, but his departure is otherwise as shocking and final-feeling as Petey’s.
Irv doesn’t take it well, and slips into a depression so consuming it guides his actions during MDR’s daring “Overtime Contingency” stunt at the end of season one. When innie Irv awakens in the outside world, he manages to dig up Burt’s address and heads to his house, wailing his name and pounding on his front door despite the fact that a) he glimpsed Burt with a man who sure looked like he could be Burt’s husband, and b) outtie Burt has no clue who Irving is. When Irv returns to Lumon in season two, he’s a broken man. Burt on the outside is unavailable, and Burt on the inside has vanished into memory.
Before long, however, Irv makes his own sudden exit. He’s fired at the end of episode four, and therefore the Lumon version of Irv is suddenly gone forever. For his MDR co-worker Dylan, this is more or less tantamount to murder, no matter how often he’s assured Irv’s outtie is alive and well and taking a nice cruise. Because Dylan makes such a big fuss about it, Mr. Milchick—the non-severed manager of the severed floor, promoted after Ms. Cobel’s departure—agrees that MDR can have a sort of funeral to remember him.
As with all Lumon ceremonies, the event is full of awkward touches; once a “bereavement kit” is prepared, there are personalized party favors and an edible centerpiece in the form of Irving’s head carved out of a watermelon. Dylan comes through with a speech as heartfelt as it is crass, and seems to find some closure in doing that, but Mr. Milchick’s underage assistant disapproves, thinking the ritual will confuse the innies into believing they’re on the same level as human beings.
With Irv now permanently in his outtie form—in the most recent episode of Severance, outtie Burt and outtie Irv met for the first time, an intriguing development—and MDR coming to terms with their status as a three-person team, the mystery of Gemma/Ms. Casey remains to propel the back half of Severance season two, at least as far as outtie Mark is concerned. There’s a wall of hurt he needs to carve into, and he’s ready to risk his life to find out why Lumon has been putting him through hell and exploiting his darkest despair.
New episodes of Severance arrive Fridays on Apple TV+.
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