Severance: Season 2

Even with Season 2 wrapped up, it still left many of its foreshadowed threads unresolved. And the catharsis of resolving the foreshadowing built up over time fell short—at least compared to Season 1. That said, it does have the merit of showing, from a wider range of perspectives, what might happen to a severed person. As a drama it was less entertaining, but it gave me more to think about. Let me wrap up the impressionistic criticism here. In any case, it is a drama worth enjoying. More than that, what I want to think about is cooperation. If even two personalities using the same body (separated, of course) cannot cooperate with each other, how could two personalities using different bodies ever cooperate? I cannot help but conclude that the characters’ approach in the show (especially that of Mark S.’s outie) is fundamentally wrong. To Mark S.’s innie, reintegration is nothing more than the annihilation of a personality. Down on the severed floor, the innies regard resignation as a de facto death and mourn it. In such a situation, how could Mark S.’s outie ask his innie to die? The ending of Season 2 is only natural. Because no other ending could have been expected, it wasn’t even shocking. If anything, I think it would have been better to portray human beings helplessly dragged along by fate (as in Greek tragedy). At any rate, the human world is miserable—and would it not be all the more so at Lumon?

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