This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Severance, “The After Hours,” which is now streaming on Apple TV+.
For the last two weeks, Severance has set aside events on the severed floor to provide backstory on Gemma, and then on Harmony, with mixed results. The Gemma episode was frequently dazzling, but also a bit muddled in what it was and wasn’t managing to convey, while Harmony’s hometown visit felt like too long a detour from other stories, and more compelling characters.
“The After Hours” has some pacing issues of its own, particularly in how the season keeps straining to save whatever Harmony intends for the two Marks to do until next week’s finale. But it also takes us back to Lumon headquarters, to the severed floor, and to elsewhere in town, to provide a chance to check in with everyone else prior to the finale. And in the process, it’s an excellent table-setter for whatever Severance has planned next.
Though it’s unclear which characters will be involved in that plan, since “The After Hours” also seems to be writing several characters out of the narrative. At various points in the episode, Ms. Huang completes her fellowship and prepares to be relocated to another Lumon facility, Dylan resigns out of despair over never getting to live the life his outie has, and Burt encourages Outie Irving to get out of town before Lumon can hurt him. And both Helly and Milchick decide that they have no more fucks to give with their superiors, in a way that would get either of them fired if only they weren’t so valuable to whatever the plan for Cold Harbor is.
Obviously, many of these people will be back, whether in the finale or whenever we get a third season. Severance didn’t bend over backwards to bring back the whole MDR team at the start of this season just to say farewell for good to Dylan, Irving, or anyone else. (Well, maybe Ms. Huang is done, now that she’s served her purpose of dramatizing what Harmony’s own childhood may have been like as a Lumon child fellow.) But in the moment, “The After Hours” feels like it’s trying to clear aside lots of other business — and give many of the supporting characters some emotional closure or catharsis for the season — before diving into Mark, Gemma, and Cold Harbor.
Apple TV+
And whatever’s to come for each of these characters, most of them are given some emotionally potent material here, particularly involving Milchick being on the giving or receiving end of bits of emotional abuse. Helly explodes at him in very satisfying fashion. She points out that calling her “Helly R” is ridiculous when they both know her real last name, and she isn’t acting afraid of him in the slightest, because she knows that he ultimately has to answer to her evil alter ego. Milchick has an extremely petty final moment with Ms. Huang, making her destroy her beloved ring-toss toy. He insists it’s a necessary sacrifice before she goes on to her next position — ordering her to abandon a last remnant of childhood right before she, like Harmony, is taken from her family for the greater glory of Kier — but also very clearly enjoying it. And later, he finally decides he’s had enough of Mr. Drummond’s racist microaggressions — the condescending white man objecting to this Black man using fancy vocabulary that should be above his station — by inviting him to eat shit, but with the more Milchick-ian turn of phrase, “Devour feculence.” At another moment, perhaps, such insubordination would get Seth tossed out on his ear, but Cold Harbor is precarious, Harmony is gone, and it doesn’t appear as if there’s someone else prepared to oversee the final day of it. So Drummond has to just, well, devour the feculence, and continue to do so when Milchick smugly — and in words simple enough for even this oaf to understand — points out that Outie Mark’s refusal to come back to work isn’t his problem at all, but Drummond’s. Hurt people hurt people, and the family-led nature of Lumon often makes the entire place feel like a large, dysfunctional, abusive clan — especially on an evening where Jame Eagan himself startles Helly(*) by appearing down on the severed floor, surrounded by the work he stole from Harmony Cobel.
(*) Of note: It seems like Helly is working very late, no doubt reluctant to ever give up control of her body to Helena. We’ve seen what happened when Helly tried to quit, but we’ve never seen how Lumon tries dealing with the opposite: an innie who refuses to leave work.
Speaking of complicated family dynamics, the Dylan/Gretchen/Dylan love triangle finally comes to a (crisis) point, where Gretchen tells Outie Dylan about kissing Innie Dylan, then tells Innie Dylan that she told Outie Dylan about it. No one is happy about this. Outie Dylan is embarrassed to hear his innie described as “how you used to be,” and bluntly but accurately accuses his wife of using “my own body to cheat on me.” But if Innie Dylan has Gretchen’s heart for the moment, there’s not much he can do about it. He gets down on one knee and proposes marriage with a paper ring, but even he knows it’s a symbolic gesture. Gretchen isn’t going to bring the kids down to the severed floor so they can all live together, and he can’t leave. So what’s the point of any of this? After an unhelpful conversation with Helly — who has responded to Helena’s theft of her identity by becoming so vehemently anti-outie that she can’t even feign sympathy for the impossible position Gretchen is in because of what Lumon did to her husband — Dylan decides, as Helly did last season, that no life is ultimately better than this terrible half-life to which he’s been sentenced. So he files his resignation papers — at a moment when his outie seems a lot more likely to grant the request than Helena was when Helly tried it.
Apple TV+
We see Dylan standing at the elevator doors at the same time that Ms. Huang is in the circular driveway preparing to be ferried to her new life in the Gunnar Eagan Center, and while Irving has boarded a train out of town, courtesy of Burt’s warning. We get confirmation that Outie Burt has been in cahoots with Lumon all this time — while lying to Fields about it for much of that — though he insists he’s never killed anyone directly, but rather drives them to places, and just doesn’t ask about what happens to them once they arrive. Burt and Irving’s apparent farewell conversation touches on one of the rare benefits of severance, where a fundamentally bad person like Burt was able to let an innocent part of himself enjoy a brief period of unburdened happiness. Because both the innie and outie versions of Irving have been working against Lumon of late, Irving’s in danger. And even if Innie Burt is no more, Outie Burt is protective enough of his alter ego’s happiness that he will put himself at risk to protect Irving. Another great, if relatively brief, showcase for Christopher Walken and John Turturro.
As for Mark, it continues to be frustrating that he and Reghabi began the process of reintegration way back in this season’s third episode, and other than occasional flashes of innie life to Outie Mark, or vice versa, he hasn’t progressed. For that matter, Harmony bringing up Cold Harbor and not being pressed for an explanation of what it’s meant to do felt very much like that exasperating moment in Lost Season Three where Ben promised to answer any one of Jack’s questions with complete honesty, and Jack couldn’t be bothered to ask anything that the Lost audience cared about knowing. Obviously, characters on TV shows do not have the same agenda as the people watching these shows, and all that really matters to Mark is Gemma. (Jack on Lost, coincidentally, just wanted to know if his ex-wife was happy.) But because the season set up the reintegration idea so early, then slow-walked it this much, and because the season has placed so much of a narrative burden on Cold Harbor justifying everything that Lumon has done, the seams are showing more than they usually do on Severance.
Yet having said that, the moment when Innie Mark emerges in the cabin, and Devon asks him to recall the last thing he said to her back at the end of Season One, I got goosebumps. Some of that is just a testament to how potent memories of that episode still are three years later. And some of it is that when Severance worries less about the mythology, and about asking questions it may or may not be able to answer, and just focuses on the emotional nightmare at the center of its premise, it doesn’t need to do anything fancy to be riveting.
One episode left this season. Will we find out what Cold Harbor is? Will the two Marks be able to work together to save Gemma? Will Dylan or Irving return? And can this finale be as superhumanly tense as the previous one?
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