Watching Severance can be a suspenseful experience - are we sure the creators know what they’re doing? Those of us who came of age as viewers in the era of Lost and cable drama’s consequent embrace of J.J. Abrams’ Mystery Box storytelling have been burned before, having credulously invested ourselves in series that over-promised and under-delivered. So why do we keep watching?
Not unlike Lumon’s severed floor, television as an artform has always been a starkly compartmentalised affair. But in the age of streaming, with drama series billed as “long movies” - our unit of measurement the season rather than the individual episode - we are more conscious than ever of the dissonance inherent to our experience as viewers. It’s the tension that lies between our hopes of encountering coherent, meaningful storytelling and television’s other priorities - to function as a semi-renewable commercial asset, to remain supplely responsive to crosswinds of audience reaction and corporate strategy, and ultimately to compel attention at nearly any cost. It sometimes takes time to tell apart television that is merely good at being television - at keeping the shell game going long enough to separate a fool from his money - from television that maintains an integrity unto itself despite its competing interests.
What a relief, then, to see Severance fall into the latter category. Even if at moments one might suspect the road is being repaved mid-journey - the fallout of last season’s finale makes for rocky terrain the first few episodes back - this second season has managed to toe a respectable line between titillating left-brained Reddit sleuths as to the Meaning Behind It All, and deploying the more open-ended psychodramatic abstractions that make the series uniquely compelling.
This season, the already-bisected world of the show has become increasingly cross-hatched as the creators trace ever-finer gradations between the innies and the outies - in Burt’s hope of redemption in at least one of his divergent afterlives, the muted tragedy of Dylan’s intra-marital affair, or the splintering of Gemma into single-use sub-identities. (If Helly has remained frustratingly ill-defined, meanwhile, the show has managed to make hay of the fact that not everyone is able to tell her innie from her outie.) Given that the currents arcing across these membranes - often eroding those borders in the process - are what power Severance as a show, developments such as Mark beginning to reintegrate (even if this proves less than fully realised) demonstrate the self-assurance of a series that is not hoarding its resources for a rainy day.
Not that the show isn’t prone to unintended ruptures; one interesting case this season being in the domain of representation. Severance has a creditably diverse cast - perhaps all the more so for the fact that so little is made of it. Part and parcel of its achronistic setting - the technologies and design philosophies span the late-20th century to the near future - is a lack of social stratification that would date it in recent political history. No eyelid is batted over Burt and Irving’s sexuality, for example, nor do there appear to be any steep acclivities preventing women or people of colour from wielding power within Lumon (despite the worldview implied by its Great White Man mythos). This season’s sudden interest in Milchick’s status as a black man within the corporate structure therefore feels jarring - what does it really mean to be non-white, non-male, or queer in Severance’s universe? While post-racial world-building may feel heartily progressive to its audience, it also forecloses meaningful discussion of discrimination within the series itself.
Which is to say, can we be so sure we know what we want as viewers? When it comes to the series’ central mysteries, for example - while we might be tantalised as to Macro Data Refinement’s real purpose or whatever the deal might be with the goats - how gratifying do we really expect the answers to be? (I’d vouch I’m not alone in finding this season’s “Sweet Vitriol”, which revolves entirely around lore-mongering in Cobel’s hometown, the series’ weakest outing to date.) It’s a question that takes us into the central contradiction of the mystery genre (something Abrams and his ilk understood too well); that while we may believe we’re watching in order to sate our curiosity, really we’re watching in order to feel the pleasure of being mystified.
In this way, mystery television resembles a treadmill - both powered by us and for our own use - that aims to mediate between the answer-seeking part of ourselves that draws us onward, and the part that is hesitant to arrive, aware that our knowing will extinguish our fascination. This is a dynamic at significant odds with such series ever coming to a satisfying close, if furnishing long-promised answers will only jolt us from that suspension, as from an urgently preoccupying dream.
Severance might not be over but arguably it should be, precisely because of how adroitly it orchestrates these tensions in the closing stretches of its second season. While the creators demonstrate their savvy by answering certain questions without spilling into banality or absurdity, the very final moments - Mark S. turning on his heels, away from the newly-freed Gemma to run Lumon’s corridors with Helly - are aimed at the heart rather than the head. Instead of seeking to blow our minds, this moment pursues the irrational; articulating the nexus of competing desires at the core of its characters - and the core of why we watch this particular brand of television. While we might think we want sunlight and order, really we come to series like Severance because we want to get lost in the labyrinth.