Spoilers ahead!
Following the highly anticipated Season 2 finale of Severance, audiences finally got to see Mark reunite with his thought-to-be-dead wife, Gemma. However, instead of leaving the severed floor with Gemma, Mark refused to return to his outie self and instead runs away to who-knows-where in the severed floor with his innie lover, Helly.
This decision pulled an array of reactions from audiences, however, one conversation stood out. In the subreddit, r/severance, specifically, fans appear to be making jokes about justifying why Mark “pulled” either women in the first place by making suggestions about the actors in certain photos. This one, titled, “Outie Mark was right,” shows a picture of the actress, Dichen Lachman (Gemma), behind the scenes. Another one, entitled, “I get it now, iMark [innie Mark],” shows a picture of Britt Lower (Helly R./Helena) from behind during the Grand Central Station pop-up. They are both authored by the redditor, JollySimple188.
The debate, “Helly vs. Gemma,” has been an ongoing battle since the beginning of Season 2, when the prospect of Gemma and Mark getting back together was viable. While the majority of fans were rooting for the freedom of Gemma to conclude since Season 1, the question of whether or not innies have a right to love was introduced in “Attila,” throwing another ethical dilemma in the audience’s face. While the question, indeed, complicates the main story, getting caught up in the “Helly vs. Gemma” dichotomy distracts us from the real ethical issues of the antagonist, the Lumon company and their use of slavery, and reveals some of the audience’s internal misogyny.
Up until now, we now relatively little of Gemma than we do of Helly (distinct from Helena Eagan). After all, we have stuck with Helly since her birth in the first episode. Throughout the series, we get to know Helly as determined, doesn’t-take-your-bullshit, yet kind and “never cruel.” Unfortunately, we do not see much of Helly’s processing of the fact that she is actually a part of the family that runs Lumon. Much of Brit Lower’s performance in Season 2 was as Helena Eagan. Yet, the show introduces the implication of how much of an antagonist she could be.
As for Gemma, her only time to shine and opportunity for the audience to get to know her as a character is in episode 7, “Chikhai Bardo”. From this episode alone and from Dichen Lachman’s stunning performance, we get to know Gemma as also witty, devoted to the people she loves, quietly rebellious, and carrying the weight of her and Mark’s failure to conceive. The last time the audience sees Gemma is when she has finally left the severed floor and returns to the outside world. Having such a strong foundation in character building from “Chikhai Bardo,” we can only expect great things from Gemma in Season 3, who will no longer be just a symbol of Mark’s past.
Despite the many codes of these women being strong-willed and individualistic, the audience, and perhaps the writers, are beginning to interpret the two, especially after the finale, as being second personifications of Mark’s innie’s and outie’s wills, respectively. We have seem to have forgotten that both women have consented to have a relationship with our main character. We must remember this more than ever with Helly, who chose to pursue Mark, even though she helped Gemma escape the building in the last episode.
When focusing on this imagined cat fight, we also forget the other ethical violations playing out through the show. We are already missing the issue that had us rooting against Lumon in the beginning: the innies are subjects of the outie’s wills. In bringing up Irving and Burt’s love story from Season 1 into Season 2, where their relationship seemed to have booted Burt from the severed job (or so Lumon and Atilla say), we see how in choices of a collective, not just (straight, white, male) individuals, innies can have power over their outies. “Atilla,” where outie Burt’s husband suggested that Burt be severed so part of him could go to heaven, and Gretchen’s plot with innie Dylan, where she continues to meet with innie Dylan to supplement the shortcomings of outie Dylan, suggests the reverse as well: individuals outside Lumon can coerce or work with outies to effect the lives of the innies by keeping them alive. It also reiterates how much the people in the world of Severance think of severed people as two individuals much more than they realize.
We see how much racism plays a part in this world as well. They address the prevalence of sexism as well. In “Sweet Vitriol” Harmony Cobel reveals that she invented the severance procedure and received threats should she fight against Lumon stealing her credit. The episode itself also offered a mirror onto our own presumptions concerning Cobel from before: to us, she used to be a bat-shit crazy, brainwashed, micromanaging mess. In introducing this system, the slavery of Gemma makes sense, as they also weaponize the trauma of her miscarriage as the “Cold Harbor” experiment, introduce the ethical issue of scholarly-subject relationships when Lumon (Drummond) knows of Dr. Mauer’s fondness for Gemma.
Lastly, there is another dimension to this discourse when fans share behind-the-scenes photos of Lachman and Lower as trading cards over Reddit. When fans divert from the source content as a point of discourse, the conversation becomes about the actors as bodies, not the character developments that innie and outtie Mark fell in love with. Severed or not, method or not, actors are not their characters. That is a tenet of their job.
The cliffhanger was absolutely the cherry on top to green light a next season for Severance, but with the audience’s expectation, in jest or otherwise, of the story turning into a romance distracts from the fact that there is a larger, unsolved mystery at the heart of this story from the beginning. In remembering the complexities and unknowns of the other characters, Mark may have just called his last shot.