Structurally, “The After Hours,” Severance Season 2 Episode 9, does the sometimes-laborious, often-tricky work required of a season’s penultimate chapter: it sets the table for a massive fucking season finale feast. Narratively, though, the episode is a veritable treachery of racheting tension – there’s more of roller coaster than of repast about this. Or, to draw a more Severance-y comparison: it’s “What’s For Dinner?” on the streets, “The We We Are” in the sheets.
Nonetheless, it’s the unexpected conclusions of “The After Hours” that I’m unable to look past. It’s a testament to this season’s hyperabundance of plot that Severance can afford to bring so many stories to an end before starting in on whatever grand calamities “Cold Harbor” has in store. Which, while no doubt impressive, is also either cold comfort or no comfort at all.
Schrödinger’s Throuple
It was probably inevitable that Severance would at some point give us the spectacle of a severed person’s partner cheating on them with them. And I shouldn’t describe Gretchen’s (Merritt Wever) relationship with innie Dylan (Zach Cherry) as if its consummation is a foregone conclusion when it hasn’t happened – in the Biblical, Fourth Appendix, “Woe’s Hollow”-by-the-space-heater sense – yet. But now, when Gretchen visits Dylan at work, she goes with her hair down. The poor woman, left to run a household and raise three children largely on her own after severance robbed her outie husband of the helium that keeps his innie inflated, wants someone to really want her. Even more: Gretchen wants her husband to feel about himself the way his innie has made her feel about herself.
So who among us would not react as she does when Dylan tells her “I just like – want to hear about all my offspring, and…stare at your face” and accede to his request for a sequel hug? Who, upon hearing the quiet wonder in Dylan’s voice when he says “I wish we could really be together. Like, all the time,” would not feel moved to lean from hug into kiss? And then to kiss again? And which of us would not feel compelled, when confronted with their spouse’s familiarity, their rote responses and material yearnings, and with the ceaseless needs of the beautiful children still so very dependent upon both of them for sustenance, for direction, for everything – which of us would not at first refuse to summon the energy and clarity necessary to explain such physical manifestations of such long-adrift emotional necessity and simply announce that we never even met at work in the first place? Try to ever explain “I cheated on you with you.” The heart is made of chambers.
And so I really shouldn’t have been surprised when Gretchen, trying to do right by her husband, tells Dylan that she kissed Dylan because Dylan reminds her of the Dylan she fell in love with when their lives were simpler and all their burdens quaint. Nor should I have been surprised when Gretchen immediately ignored and obeyed Dylan’s request that she stay away from Dylan, lest things enter even more “dimensions of fucked” – how can she do right by her husband if she doesn’t break it off with him? And yet I somehow was not surprised to see Dylan reach into his pocket and pull out an engagement ring fashioned from the dual-color paper joint where the Lumon snack packaging meets. Irving was Dylan’s favorite perk when Dylan realized there was more to his existence than pencil erasers; Gretchen is his favorite now that he understands what makes for genuine happiness. The ring straddles both worlds, the Dylan who came before and the one there after: an object made meaningful by its creator, though its recipient denied it life.
Empathy for the Devil
In light of last week’s episode, it’s impossible to see Miss Huang’s (Sarah Bock) arc in “The After Hours” as hers alone. Although we know very little about this character and have never seen Miss Huang beyond the severed floor, we learned and extrapolated more than enough about Harmony Cobel’s (Patricia Arquette) childhood and the Wintertide Fellowship to understand that Miss Huang is now the latest victim of Lumon’s multi-generational abuse and trauma. She was never just an object of curiosity, nor solely a punchline (which doesn’t stop “Why are you a child?” “Because of when I was born” from being one of the funniest exchanges of the season). But now that we understand her purpose within Lumon, those punchlines become far more bittersweet, if not just bitter. If Severance‘s central question will always be “Who are you?”, then Miss Huang’s variation, put perfectly by Gretchen in Episode 3, is “Who is that child?” The product of unchecked cultish devotion, that’s who. It’s only now, as Season 2 draws to a close, when we can say for sure that the young woman is not an uploaded consciousness or a Gemma clone or a cyborg or a figment of someone’s imagination or any other wild theory come to life.
Severance is such a mysterious and spooky show that getting immersed in it means allowing yourself to be overrun by farfetched possibilities like these. The reality is far simpler and far more heartbreaking. Eustace Huang is just a child. Her mind is as subject to Lumon’s dogma and Milchick’s (Tramell Tillman) bossery as it is to flights of fancy in the form of a Kier Eagan ring toss and to the unexpected regret she breathes life into by apologizing to Dylan’s innie. And now, for reasons she might not understand for years and couldn’t give voice to anyway, her industry is being rewarded: her bed is being shipped from her room in her parents’ house all the way across the mighty Atlantic Ocean to Svalbard, the Gunnel Eagan Empathy Center, and the next stage of her Lumon journey. Because nothing builds empathy like isolation.
You Can Make Your Eyes Kind But Can You Make Them Not Cry
As my partner-in-nonsense Sam has noted, it’s tough to envision a scenario where we see Irving (John Turturro) in the season finale at all – “The After Hours” ends with him leaving town on a train. One that goes, in Burt’s (Christopher Walken) words, “as far as you can go.” And Irving boards the train after trying for what, by his own admission, was likely the very first time in his whole life to get someone to love him back. After declaring his own love for that someone. And after spending the better part of what may well be their final day together wondering whether Burt intends to play Silvio Dante to Irving’s Adriana La Cerva.
In addition to serving as a thesis, “Who are you?” functions as an always-challenging three-word refrain for character and viewer alike. Irv’s two-word counterpoint – “I’m ready” – is, given its use in a goodbye scene and its gentle, almost childlike repetition, so much harder to bear. (And succinct enough to pacify Mr. Drummond.) Burt’s resolve against it is a sun setting on Irving’s hope and casting shadows across his own still-unspoken history: the devilish life that led him to severance as a means of salvation, the visible toll that that life has taken on him.
There are still too many unanswered questions about Irving for Severance to be done with him. A farewell this total makes it difficult to remember what those questions are. We’re all leaning on Radar extra hard right now.
Killing Time
If I have a more-than-fleeting criticism of “The After Hours,” it’s that the episode’s Cobel-affiliated storyline does display all the classic characteristics of Waitin’ Around Syndrome. (Screen Speck devotées will recall that Severance Season 2 Episode 8, “Sweet Vitriol,” suffered a far more advanced case, although for somewhat different reasons.) Having more or less locked themselves in a box from which Harmony offers their only escape, Mark (Adam Scott) and Devon (Jen Tullock) arrive at the unmarked roadside meeting point before her, and so they wait. Then Harmony arrives, tells them nothing they didn’t already know except that innie Mark’s current file is called “Cold Harbor” – a fact about which we, the viewers at home, still have almost no concrete information – and forbids them from trying to access Mark’s innie until dark, and so these three very uneasy new allies…wait.
While they’re waiting, Mark does have an unexpectedly frank and human telephone conversation with Mr. Milchick. So that kills around three minutes. But: given this episode’s otherworldly propulsion and narrative control in every other story (to say nothing of Mark’s barely controlled anger at and frustration with Ms. Cobel, and of the anger and frustration that Devon has somehow managed to forget about), I can’t help wonder exactly how these characters passed the entire day. Did they hide in separate nooks and crannies, invisible from the road? Did they share hours of uncomfortable silence? I doubt they played I Spy, though boredom does strange things to people.
And of course I neither want nor need the show to present a minute-by-minute accounting of what happened before nightfall. I bring up this logistical vacuum to point out a missed opportunity for earned exposition and rather welcome explanation, both of which would have been justified by that rarest of televisual gifts: character development. Mark’s already pointed out that he and Devon “told [Cobel] everything, and she told [them] shit.” Cobel has only ever lied and misled Mark’s innie; under the guise of Mrs. Selvig, she’s done the same to his outie as well as to Devon. Mark is reintegrating and is not far removed from a coma. His wife has been a Lumon prisoner for years. He and Devon have every reason to demand answers to some very specific questions. Harmony Cobel is one of the very few people in the world equipped to answer them. And they have literally all day to talk.
Again: I’m also by no means asking for an expository volcano. I don’t want all of the answers; I don’t even want most of them. No one will ever accuse Severance of playing its cards too far from the chest. This situation, though, is a perfect storm of a character-based need for answers and a plot-based occasion to address them. (Also, it’s not as if Harmony’s typically obfuscatory speaking style ever makes for clear and obvious answers.) Yes, Mark is very upset; yes, Devon is doing her absolute best to keep this wonky group together; nonetheless, I don’t understand why, after Harmony tells Mark that finishing Cold Harbor will result in Gemma’s death, Mark doesn’t then ask, “But what the fuck does that mean?”
The reason he does not is, unfortunately, because Severance wants to save the big reveals for the big season finale. Which is fair enough. But withholding for next week does weaken this week – and that, given how unified all the other elements in this episode are, how marvelously they hum and click, is a real fly in the ether.
Grade: A-
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