‘Severance’ Season 2, Episode 6 Review
The latest episode of AppleTV+’s mind-bending sci-fi show gets back on track after a week fifth episode.
What this episode really focuses on is the relationships the refiners have with other characters. Dylan and his wife (or his outie’s wife) are clearly getting closer, and she sees something in him she can’t see in his outie. He’s a success here, in a stable job, and not always looking for the next thing to fix his interest on.
Then there’s Irving, who’s reviving his relationship with Burt, except here there’s someone who could get hurt, Burt’s husband Fields.
As for Helly and Mark, they are the most complicated, not least because Mark S is trying to find out what happened to his wife Gemma, but also because Helena was pretending to be Helly to infiltrate MDR.
This raises quite a few questions about the moral and ethical dilemma of severance. If these are classed as only one person, then technically it could be seen as acceptable that Dylan’s wife prefers his innie’s personality, but what if they aren’t? Burt said his pastor told him that innies have their own soul, which would mean they are separate individuals, and they must have separate lives, separate rights, and be allowed to make their own choices.
This is a huge obstacle now that Mark has undergone reintegration. If he recovers from it, sooner or later, he’s going to have to make a choice between Gemma or Helly, and considering that innies even show some hatred for outies, that could be bad.
This was an improvement on last week’s episode, which felt slow and pointless. It was still slow, and didn’t deliver any big surprises or revelations, beyond Mark’s progress with reintegration, but kept things going with the emotional stories of the MDR team.
Even so, the series does feel like it’s stalling, and starting to lose track of what made it so interesting to begin with. The first season was so interesting because this whole idea of a separate workplace identity was intriguing, and Lumon was such an unusual company. Now, we know what they are like, we’ve gotten used to these two different groups of people. But what we haven’t got is any answers to the big questions, or even clues as to what they might be. What does Lumon do? What’s their history? Is Gemma dead? If not, why did Lumon make it appear so?
I’m hoping there will be answers coming at the end of this season, at least enough to keep us invested until season three, but I can’t shake the feeling it might have built a mystery box it has no idea how to open.
