Severance Season 2 begins and ends with Mark running. However, while watching this season as it aired on the 2025 TV schedule with my Apple TV+ subscription, I didn’t realize how perfectly it bookends itself. Now, the show’s creator, Dan Erickson, has explained the meaning behind the two scenes, and I’m emotional.
Now that we’ve had time to process the emotional Severance Season 2 finale, Dan Erickson is giving us more to chew on. In a letter published on Deadline with a copy of the Season 2 finale script, the creator wrote about why that finale scene of Mark and Helly running away from Gemma “scared” him. He explained:
The other moment that really scared me was the final one, because I knew we had to get it right. In a season that starts with Innie Mark bolting from an elevator to find his Outie’s wife, we’d long known that his final act would be to turn his back on her, prioritizing his own life and love over that of his ‘real’ self.
It hurts! At the start of the season, Mark runs around the halls of the severed floor by himself looking for Ms. Casey (AKA his outie Mark’s wife Gemma). Then, at the end, when he achieved the goal he was running toward at the start of the season, he immediately ran away.
That final scene by itself is painful, because Gemma is clearly devastated by Mark’s choice, and outie Mark will also be torn up about it. However, at the same time, this moment shows how innie Mark has asserted his autonomy and acted for himself and the other severed people on the floor.
As Erikson said, it was both “triumphant and agonizing,” and thinking about it in conjunction with that opening scene only adds emphasis to those feelings. Explaining all of that further, the show’s creator wrote:
It had to be both triumphant and agonizing, and communicate the complexity of the journey he, Helly and Gemma have been on. I wrote a bunch of versions with a lot of dialogue, but in the end, we realized that the whole story could be told on the faces of these incredible actors. I’ve never been so proud to have written a scene that mostly just consists of people saying ‘Mark.’
It truly is a remarkable moment that’s unforgettable. To see Mark run away from the person and mission he’d devoted so much time and effort to was incredibly emotional. And it’s moving in a lot of ways.
On one side, it’s tragic to see him turn his back on Gemma, especially after everything outie Mark went through to get her out. On the other hand, seeing innie Mark do what he thought was best for him and run back in an effort to save all the other severed folks was equally emotional, but in an almost triumphant sense.
It was a major step that fully solidified the growing conflict between the innies and the outies, and the implications of Mark’s choice here will likely be a major point of Severance Season 3. It’s also a hard pill to swallow, because no one is in the right or wrong here. Both versions of Mark have good intentions and are trying to save themselves and who they love. However, in the grand scheme of things, both can’t get their way, and that makes me emotional.
Then, you add on the evolution of everything between the first time Mark ran through the halls in Season 2 and when he ran back into the halls in the finale, and it gets my thoughts going and makes me very emotional in a complex way.
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