For two seasons, Severance has had a reputation for being – among increasingly many other things – a mystery box show, a puzzle show, a cliffhanger show. “Cold Harbor” disintegrates all of those labels. This episode grabs the concept of narrative and wraps it in an ebullient bear hug. It is a full-throated song of praise for the absolute joy to be found in storytelling, in all its bonkers capacity and capacity for pure bonkritude, when the story is rooted in character. It is a madcap conclusion to a madcap season that with every new episode expanded its characters and its setting and its mythos and its toolbox until it was able to give us a finale so overfull of set pieces and beauty and not just reveals but conclusions that you find yourself wondering in the moment how the thing manages to work at all and can appreciate only in retrospect that the word “craftsmanship” does, in fact, apply. “Audacious” is the only appropriate word for it: “Cold Harbor” is a thoroughly audacious episode of television that, in showing us the face of possibiity, cements Severance‘s place as the most purely human show on TV.
No More Killing
Throughout Severance Season 2, motherhood has been an active sub-theme and gossip mill (thanks, creepy new opening credits!). Over the back half of the season, though, it’s become one of the show’s dominant thematic elements. The last four episodes don’t just feature but center four different characters who’ve either had their parental agency stolen by Lumon or who are themselves the objects of that theft. In “Chikhai Bardo,” we learn that Gemma (Dichen Lachman) and Mark’s (Adam Scott) struggle to conceive a child is central to the mystery of how exactly Gemma came to be a Lumon prisoner. “Sweet Vitriol” is as much about Harmony Cobel’s (Patricia Arquette) mother’s loss of her daughter to the Eagan cult as it is Harmony’s reckoning, decades later, with what she herself has sacrificed to the same corrupted purpose. And in using Miss Huang (Sarah Bock) to suggest what the beginning of Harmony’s journey looked like, “The After Hours” asks us to imagine her parents’ horror at the sudden Eustace-shaped void in their lives.
Where motherhood appears most vividly in “Cold Harbor” isn’t with any of these characters, but with Gwendoline Christie‘s Lorne, who we haven’t seen since “Who Is Alive?” all those merry weeks ago. When this episode gives us a perhaps unexpectedly straightforward answer to the age-old question “What are the goats for?”, it’s through Lorne that we understand how the straightforward answer can still be the most terrifying one. The goats are a blood sacrifice. Lorne, as the head of Mammalians Nurturable, is responsible for raising them. And for conveying them to the altar when called. And for ending their perfect little kid lives. We don’t know how many goats Lorne has had to sacrifice in Kier’s name; we don’t need to know. Her exhausted face is its own answer even before she asks Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) how many more she has to give.
And it’s here that Severance gives us a break. Of these four characters across these four episodes, Lorne is the only one to both understand what is happening to her and to question it – and then to wrest control back for herself. Her utterly brutal and utterly beautiful beating of Drummond is almost an even more defiant than murdering him would have been. The last Lorne sees of her tormentor, Mark is leading him away. The last we see of her, Lorne is completely at peace, cradling Emile (!) the Goat (!!) and with a look on her face as tranquil as that of any new mother. There’s no reason for her to believe that anything will change fundamentally just because she saved this one goat, no reason for Lorne to doubt that Drummond will be back or that someone else in Lumon’s endless hierarchy will just come along and replace him and the sacrifices will begin anew. (Recall that, as of the end of “Cold Harbor,” Lorne doesn’t know that Drummond is dead, killed by hilarious mishap.) But those problems are problems for another time and thus neither problems nor yet anything at all. What matters is the act: for once, life wins and Lumon does not.
Mammalians Unnurturable
It’s hard not to notice, amid all this defiance, the turbulence in Lumon’s animal kingdom. The most active metaphor for innies was children in Severance Season 1 and adolescents in Season 2 but they’ve also been compared to barnyard animals and slaves and unmentionable sub-humans by none other than the heiress apparent herself, Helena “I am a person. You are not” Eagan.
Naturally, then, someone else gets stuck in the cage after the innies abandon it. Poor Mr. Milchck (Tramell Tillman) spends roughly half of Severance‘s longest episode and (what starts off as) Lumon’s most glorious day literally trapped in MDR’s bathroom – first by Helly, whose outie’s cardio is really paying off, then by the combined forces of Helly (Britt Lower) and Dylan (Zach Cherry) and a vending machine sure to be voiced by Conan O’Brien in the stop-motion recap Lumon tries to gloss over the Second Macrodat Uprising with in the Season 3 premiere. The red blare of Lumon’s Master Alarm allows Milchick a moment of reckoning, after which he frees himself through sheer force…only to be greeted by something far more insurmountable: Dylan, confidence restored, backing up his second “Fuck you. Mr. Milchick” in as many seasons with the very same innie band that Seth was leading, verved as hell, just moments before.
Milchick has always been Severance‘s most physical character, and it’s never more obvious than when he’s trapped. He’s as lithe and in charge of his physicality when dancing as his attacks on the vending machine blocking his escape are violent and desperate – and all the while the band plays on without him. In Milchick’s final shot of the season, he surveys the room full of innies like a predator long accustomed to patience.
Elsewhere, the dehumanization of Mr. Drummond feels like a pretense dropped at long last. “Frolic” tattoo notwithstanding, the man oozes a quiet danger. “‘Wary’ is the word I’d use,” Carson Wells says of Anton Chigurh; the same is true here. Which doesn’t do a thing to blunt the shock of the violence that Drummond unleashes upon Mark. The terror comes from the absence of anything recognizably human in Drummond’s eyes as he chokes Mark out on the floor. Except, that is, for naked rage, signifying in this instance something both deeply human and in-: an uneclipsable guiding star, a light leading us back to one of the many imbalances fundamental to personhood.
Mr. Fantastic
I would like to submit that the 22 minutes of “Cold Harbor” that begin when Mark finishes refining the titular file; continue with a larger-than-life animatronic statue of Kier Eagan (Marc Geller) congratulating Mark and introducing Mr. Milchick to the tune of what’s best-known worldwide as the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls’ intro song and then Milchick and the Kier statue not only roasting each other in spotlights like they’re a 50s lounge act but going off script so Milchick can better insult fake Kier’s height; and then somehow expand to encompass
- a) Choreography and Merriment, a completely new division of the Severed Floor made up of a literal goddamn marching band;
- b) Milchick leading the band in a completely new arrangement of the infamous Kier Hymn and then a completely new song, “The Ballad of Ambrose and Gunnel,” which objectively fucking slaps harder than page 197 of The You You Are; and then also
- c) Milchick dancing so much life into these songs that his movement makes the already-legendary Season 1 MDE seem almost – almost! – like a daydream fading gently into dusk and his body rolls would befit a reptile sex king;
on top of which we also get “See you at the Equator”; the answer to what the goats are for; Dylan’s muscle show-worthy vending machine rescue; the entirety of the Mark-Drummond-Lorne fight, wherein Queen General Gwendoline Christie simply destroys her large male opponent as only she can; the name of the most adorable goat on the planet; and finally Mark’s impossibly bloody and brazenly hysterical involuntary manslaughtering of Drummond while on the elevator transitioning from innie to outie so that his outie regains consciousness as a whole-ass blood geyser spews forth upon him from the ruined carotid artery of a gigantic choking mystery man who outie Mark has never met and now will never ever know because the sequence ends when the elevator doors open and Drummond’s corpse pitches forward onto the floor of the Testing Floor with the horrible thud of a discarded object coming to rest indefinitely and then the elevator doors try to close but Drummond’s feet are in the way, stuck there forever in the path of the mindless doors like a banana peel in a rubber chicken factory – I submit that that is the most batshit insane sequence of events ever put to film for narrative purposes.
And I would like to further submit that the #1 reason for this sequence’s stunning success is Mr. Milchick himself. You will never convince me that Lumon has a Cold Harbor protocol for him to follow. There is nothing in any Lumon manual, paperback, or Founder’s Appendix anywhere that tells a Severed Floor Manager precisely what to do in the event that a macrodata refiner completes their 25th file and subsequently Best Day Evers humanity. The most deranged and flashiest set pieces in this sequence – the Kier roast and the marching band (that beautiful miraculous marching band) are one-hundred percent Milchick’s idea, arranged and executed entirely by him. The man has verve and wiles for fucking days. For centuries. And he would have put them to flawless use on Cold Harbor Day if it weren’t for this meddlesome innie revolution boiling over. It is impossible to root for Milchick in capacity as devoted Lumon employee, but it’s likewise impossible to root against him. I for one hope he either winds up siding with the revolution or simply getting out of Lumon another way if only because his talents are simply spilled lineage in the stagnant sink known otherwise as the Severed Floor. Seth: you deserve a place to shine.
Garden of Forking Red
This season of Severance was always going to end with Mark’s innie freeing Gemma, turning around, and going back to Helly. The innie of “Hello, Ms. Cobel” would have walked into the stairwell with his outie’s wife, yes. But not the Mark of “Cold Harbor,” who has a full season’s understanding and uncertainty to draw upon. Severance Season 2 is the innies’ adolescence. That means the merest little bit of perspective mixed in with the rebellion and recklessness that lead you to hold hands with the only love you’ve ever known, the one who your heart tells you is the only love you ever will know, and run back into the fire that forged you.
And so it was also inevitable that Gemma’s arc in Severance Season 2 was always going to end in unbearable agony. If part of why innie Mark goes back for Helly is because he’s realized that the possibility of his eventual freedom is meaningless if he can’t share it with his person, then there’s also a measure of cruelty in his freeing Gemma. He gave her her life back but withheld the person who makes it worthwhile. I don’t for a second believe that Gemma won’t return to the other people who’ve been grieving her for two years. (For one thing, the only two security-type figures we’ve ever met at Lumon HQ are both dead.) The notion that Season 3 might bring with it a slew of scenes between Devon (Jen Tullock) and Gemma gets me so excited – but not excited enough to forget that Gemma without Mark is Mark without Helly.
It is, in other words, an impossibility. And what makes Severance so impossibly good is its ability to present and scale impossibilities. The thing driving the show is not its admittedly cool central premise; that’s just the vehicle Severance uses to explore the baffling scale of identity and self-identification. Instead, it’s an ability to bring that exploration to life in these characters. Severance is a marriage of character and plot device that can’t help but present its audience with practical paradox upon existential paradox until the two become as inextricable from each other as a severance chip from the person it divides.
Red is the color of love on Severance, which is why we see it so rarely and why it appears more frequently and intensely in “Cold Harbor” than not just any other episode, but every other episode combined. Season 2’s final shots, though, complicate its application: beyond Mark and Helly’s romance is Gemma’s growing desperation and the specter of her coming rage. And the growing enmity between Dylan and Milchick. And Lumon’s inevitable response to the innies’ polyphonic insubordination. Lovestruck Mark is covered head-to-toe in blood shed by violence. For all its mystery and caginess, Lumon has never been able to hide the fact that it is a sinister place. From this point forward, the red in the air will also signify Severance‘s turn toward fury – never far from love in any case, and here primed for a full and terrible expression.
For now, though, we remain frozen in delight. Stories don’t end; we choose to stop telling them. May Severance long regale us.
Grade: A+
Severance Season 2 Grade: A+
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