Severance

The innies have a big day out in the exhilarating Severance season 1 finale. Here is everything you need to know about that shocking ending.

Since Burt is the only person he feels he can trust, he heads over to the address that his outie has marked on the map. While all of these emotionally loaded things are happening at the same exact time, strongman Dylan gets intercepted by Milchick, and the entire experiment gets terminated. He races up to the door and pounds on it, shouting “BURT! BURT!” Unfortunately, Burt doesn’t answer in time to get to chat with Irv’s innie. Unfortunately, Irv finds out that he doesn’t seem to have a family or friends or any sort of social support network on the outside. Innie Irv wakes up and starts to go about the business of snooping through his outie’s belongings. The initial mission that the innies agreed to was to find someone they could trust and tell them everything. An unflinching look at society’s insistence on maintaining a “work/life balance,” Severance introduced us to the idea of the “severance” process, or the process of implanting a chip into one’s brain in order to surgically separate work and life memories. Severance wasn’t going to leave us hanging without first serving up some jaw-dropping reveals, and they disclose the true identity of Helly’s outie in the first few moments of the episode. Full of tension, anxiety, and cliffhangers galore, the fantastic Severance season 1 finale is sure to go down in the history books as one of the best season finales of 2022. In the finale, the innies stage a daring attempt to find out more about their lives in the real world. Ok, all joking aside, the last 10 minutes of this episode are “I-forgot-to-breathe” good. And Helly, ah, poor Helly, no one in her outie’s world is trustworthy, least of all her outie self.

The 'Severance' season finale provided a whole lot of answers in a heart-pounding tightrope walk of an episode — read our recap.

She stops Helly just as she’s about to go on stage and threatens to make her work friends suffer if she speaks ill of the company, but Helly is undeterred. They’ll all be Kier’s children.” When she’s called to give her speech, Helly recites the Lumon apology pledge in the bathroom mirror: “All I can be is sorry. “Why he put me in there.” She explains that his wife died in a car accident: “He hoped you’d be spared from the pain.” Cobel finally gets through to Milchick, telling him that the overtime switch has been flipped. Helly escapes to the bathroom to process all of this, where she’s interrupted by her father, who just hates “what that ‘Innie’ tried to do to you.” She has a big speech to give, and he recalls how, as a kid, she thought everyone should get a severance chip, and now they will, “because of you. As Helly makes her way through the party, we see it’s an exhibit dedicated to her life at Lumon: “Helly: A Severed Story.” There’s video of “Helena” talking about growing up as an Eagan and reciting the Nine Core Principles before bed every night. I think it brings us together.” Mark, meanwhile, gushes to a confused Ricken about how much his book changed his life and fends off a concerned Cobel… but when he leaves her, he says, “Thanks, Ms. Cobel,” which sets off alarm bells in her head.

There was almost another episode, creator Dan Erickson reveals, until Stiller had a bright idea.

There’s a sense of what Lumon is trying to do and the role that our main characters are going to play in that, and where it all will culminate. We want to be sure that we're honoring what works about the show and what people have fallen in love with. We want to reward people for their enthusiasm and for caring so much about where it's all going to go. Ultimately, we wanted this cliffhanger episode to be the moment where we finally get to hit the ground and go, go, go. We wanted to reward the viewers with something visceral, where you're in the perspective of the characters and it's confusing and scary. Within Lumon, we're going to see more of the building, and we’ll see more of the outside world, too. How did you find the balance of tone and the tension in that episode? We have to set the boundary that much firmer, because the boundary has been muddied. I love that we're living in a time of rethinking the structure of labor. Are we making an office show right as offices are going extinct?” What was crazy and surprising was just how much the pandemic re-contextualized the question of work-life balance, and what you owe or don’t owe to your work. I would think a lot about the person I wanted to be and the career I wanted to have. In those hours on the job, I was resentful of not being in a grander place in life, but there was a sense of escape to it.

But like anyone who loved the end of 'Lost' season one, Scott knows the power of delayed gratification.

“The discipline it took them to wait until that moment to get that camera to go down that hole and looking up at the actors…it was incredible,” Scott says. “And just how I think I leapt up from the couch and just screamed, ‘No!’” And Irving, having embarked on the year‘s best workplace romance with Burt (Christopher Walken) before Burt is forced to retire, finds Burt out in the real world for the first time—seemingly happy at home with his husband.

Following the first season finale of the Apple TV+ series Severance, “The We We Are,” a look back at all the clues the show has given us about Lumon ...

Maybe the second season of Severance is about the person sent there next in order to help Kier come back. (I am very aware that my “Adam is Javi” theory from Yellowjackets did not pan out!) Maybe I’m taking a leap forward in interpreting lines like Mark’s “We’re people, not parts of people” and Helena’s “I don’t think severance divides us. - The little 2-D animated version of Kier Eagan says “I love you” to the person who successfully sorted all their quarterly MDR data, and that’s what the cult is looking for, right? … In this theory, the larvae eventually eats and replaces you.” So sort of like the horror movies The Brood and Possession, in which host/original bodies are replaced by duplicates? That transference of consciousness and the manipulation of people’s bodies is what I think Lumon has been working on this whole time with the severance procedure, with the end goal of bringing Kier Eagan back to life. “The We We Are” ends on a cliffhanger for the MDR team once Milchick breaks through the door and tackles Dylan, ending the Innies’ rule-breaking excursion.

"Severance" creator and stars on the finale's very big Eagan twist and where the show will go for Mark, Helly and Lumon gang in Season 2.

And when he arrives at that party, he is finally ready to move on from severance and from Lumon and also ready to move on from Gemma and heal a bit. Stiller: There is this growing connection between Mark and Helly happening during the season, and then on the outside, Mark is trying to get over his wife’s death — and then we’re going to find out that his wife is still alive. But it is a disconcerting sort of start to that journey. But I should actually get promoted.” So I think part of that is also trying to get back in their good graces and make them understand, I’m not just a crazy person over here, I’m right. And that’s where it comes in with the hallway paintings and his trove of Lumon files that he seems to have collected. So I think she is angry and petulant and wants to punish them and is hurt and all of these things. That’s the big question, what is special about Mark? And is it actually that there’s something special about him or is it more about Gemma, and he was sort of pulled in? It’s that idea that it’s happening over the course of an hour or so. And the first thing he sees when he comes to in the outside world is Cobel. But she looks different and he can’t quite put his finger on it and doesn’t really have time to. Tramell Tillman: Listen, these are high stakes, OK? He is willing to bet the house for this. Innie Mark has pieced together that Gemma is actually Miss Casey and is still alive, but he knows she has been fired from Lumon and sent down to wherever that elevator takes her. There’s a question of sort of who was targeted first: Was Mark targeted because of his relationship to Gemma, or was it the other way around?