Severance woke up and chose mess

I am against the idea of love triangles in pretty much anything. Yes, I appreciate a good trope as much as the next person, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a trope more weary and overworked than this. You can always see it coming from a mile away, and every time it elicits a beleaguered sigh: oh, this again.

This is the reaction I expected to have when I saw what was happening in Severance—and I was so wrong. Because Severance isn’t settling for tired triangles. Severance is going completely off the goddamn rails, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

I have to engage in some serious conspiracy boarding to even begin to explain this, so shrbhbgspoilersbspgnjf.1 Mark is a “severed” Lumon employee, meaning that his memories of his work life are completely cut off from his memories of his outside life. This is pretty helpful since he’s still trying to numb the ache of his beloved wife Gemma passing away in a car crash. Outside Mark drinks the pain away, and Inside Mark2 is stationed in Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement Department, where he is assigned to manage his three compatriots: old mainstays Dylan and Irving, and newcomer Helly.

To condense basically an entire season, stuff happens, like extremely weird “wellness sessions” with Ms. Casey, finding inexplicable goats in the basement, and Christopher Walken just having a grand old time. Despite the bleak Lumon crypts and flirtation attempts featuring larvae3, Inside Irving and Christopher Walken start “““fraternizing,””” and you also see some sparks between Mark and Helly.4

But to throw a massive fridged-wife-sized wrench into things, we learn that Ms. Casey is actually Gemma, and she and Inside Mark don’t remember each other at all… unless? But she apparently gets her memory periodically wiped! BUT SHE’S NOT DEAD, which is all that Outside Mark really wants at this point. But Inside Mark just kissed Helly in the elevator in the penultimate episode, completely oblivious to Outside Mark’s continued heartache over who Inside Mark knows as Ms. Casey.

This propels us into the season finale, which treats us to the great escape of Inside Mark, Helly, and Irving by way of Dylan staying behind to keep a switch flipped that activates their Inside selves outside of Lumon. Finally, Inside Mark realizes that Gemma and Ms. Casey are the same person, barely getting enough time to operatically yell SHE’S ALIVE!!! before Dylan can’t fend off Evil Lumon Grunt Mr. Milchick anymore and has to deactivate Inside Mark. And over in Inside Irving’s world, he gets to spend the finale learning how to drive (busting stereotypes everywhere) and finally making it to Christopher Walken’s house, only to find… he’s happily in a relationship with another man. Love loses, but Inside Irving did not risk it all just to give up now, and the season leaves him frantically banging at Christopher Walken’s door as he’s also deactivated.

So… that’s a lot.

Let’s start with a simple question regarding Mark and Helly. What kind of geometry are we dealing with here? It could be a love triangle if you think Outside and Inside Mark are the same person, which is debatable at best. If you think they’re completely separate people, it could be a love square, but you’d have to square that with how the Marks just happen to occupy the same body. And that’s completely leaving out Helly—what’s Outside Helly’s romantic life like? So far, all we really know is that Outside Helly sucks. (And is basically Lumon royalty??) Maybe she’s got an equally terrible boo and they’re happy being terrible together!

As far as things stand now, there is no clean, conventional way to resolve this besides taking someone off the board—in Gemma’s case, for real this time. But they can’t kill Gemma twice, Mark is the main character of the series and Adam Scott is one of their main selling points, and getting rid of Helly would be tremendously dumb because she’s one of the best parts of the whole show. No matter what happens, short of divine intervention or a throuple, any solution is going to be at least a little unsatisfying. To be clear, this doesn’t feel like a mistake or like the writers backed themselves into a corner. Quite the opposite: writing an almost uncashable check like this was clearly intentional, and gutsy as all hell. Either they stick an impossible landing or they’re willing to deny us the satisfaction of a neat conclusion.

And that’s not even where the mess ends, lest we forget what’s going on with Inside Irving. How the hell is that going to resolve itself? Again, there’s no satisfying outcome that makes sense! The season ends as Outside Irving presumably wakes up banging on some random guy’s door. It’s impossible for them to remember each other, especially if Inside Mark and “Ms. Casey” don’t remember each other. (Unless?) And even if they do, there’s someone else in the picture here! So is Outside Irving just going to leave? Will his drive historic on the suburban Fury Road have been for nothing? …Throuple?

Usually, all of these gnarled knots would feel tedious, like we have to untangle everything before getting to the good stuff. In Severance, however, this is the good stuff. Yes, I still care about just what is happening within Lumon, what those goats mean, and what the “scary numbers” actually are. I still love the taut plotting and extensive worldbuilding. But when it comes to relationships, Severance has turned the most tired of tropes into a feat of byzantine, high-wire drama.

I could definitely eat my words next season. Maybe everything implodes. Maybe that uncashable check bounces hard. But the beauty of risk is… the risk. Even if the payoff doesn’t quite land in the future, it’s worth having truly no idea what comes next now. I’m tired of seeing a clean solution coming from miles away, of treading water until everything works out exactly how I thought it would. Give me a monstrosity of love non-Euclidian geometry over that any day.