This article contains spoilers for the Apple TV+ series “Severance.”
When we left Mark S. and Helly R. in the final moments of the final episode of the second season of “Severance,” the bedraggled lovers were frozen, midmotion, while running down the blinding white nowhere hallways of Lumon Industries, like Paul Newman and Robert Redford at the end of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
Running down hallways leading nowhere is what Lumon’s severed workers — their “innie” worker personalities severed from their “outie” lives off the clock — have done for two seasons in the brilliant, unsettling series on Apple TV+. The couple’s season-finale sprint, set to the 1960s lilt of Mel Tormé crooning “The Windmills of Your Mind” (“Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own / Down a hollow to a cavern where the sun has never shone”) was about as perfect an ending as this show could have conjured. Holding hands, our heroes face an unknown world of more hallways, forever without sunlight. What future do they have? We don’t know. Will the nefarious corporate banality of Lumon Industries be dismantled from within? We haven’t found out.
The devoted fan (including this one) is left with many unanswered questions, as well as that greatest of adult freedoms: the space to think through multiple meanings for ourselves, with no answers imposed on us by the storytellers.
This is as it should be. And this is how it should conclude.
In that final freeze-frame shot, this devoted fan thought the series was concluded. Bravo! What a compliment to trust an audience to tolerate uncertainty. But the next day, when a third season was announced, this devoted fan felt a little betrayed.
Many are cheering. I think it’s a pity. I know this is a strange way to respond to a TV show I love, and I don’t doubt that the creators of “Severance” have another season in them. But what if they left it unmade? Not because the creators of “Severance” can’t find more to say; no doubt they can. Maybe they can make the enter-the-marching-band absurdities even bigger, the hinted-at underpinnings of Lumon Industries even more chilling, the sci-fi elements creepier and the psychological musings even more woo-woo. Yet the originality of the series is embedded in those hallways we don’t understand and those fleeting symbols we can’t quite decipher. The genius of the show lies in the very obscurities the audience loves to dissect.
But that’s the way we take our popular culture now: Enough is never enough. Do viewers really want their favorite shows to go on without end, continuing to manufacture ingratiating resolutions and treating us like cranky children who want to hear the same bedtime story over and over again? Many of us might wish that “The White Lotus” had ended after Season 2 and the death of Jennifer Coolidge’s character, Tanya McQuoid. “Ted Lasso,” which seemed to end succinctly after Season 3 in 2023, just announced it will be back for Season 4. Even the exalted series “The Wire” lost its tautness in its fifth and final year. (It happens in movies, too. Exhibit A: “The Godfather Part III.”) Never mind that for a show’s creators to explain more is to ruin the excitement of conjecture. There is timeless wisdom in the rusty showbiz adage of always leave ’em wanting more. Teasing the plot further for the sake of stringing an eager audience along is to risk becoming lost. (Or “Lost.”)
Yet as an audience, we apparently can’t bear to live with the tension of ambiguity. Are we really those petulant, dully literal guys? The entertainment-industrial complex sure seems to think so, feeding us sequels and prequels and reboots and sure things renewed for one more season until every shark is well and truly jumped.
Will I watch the third season of “Severance”? Of course I will. I’m an unsevered human with hope integrated into my circuits. And when an extended narrative works — I’m thinking of “Downton Abbey” or “The Sopranos” — it’s a rare and glorious experience.
Still, remember the uproar about that “Sopranos” ending? Nearly two decades ago, after six seasons and 86 episodes, the saga signed off with a breathtaking jolt: The world was closing in on Tony Soprano, and the huge population of fans who had been following his mayhem for years were pleasantly queasy with the understanding that something bad was bound to happen to him soon. But what? And when?
We waited. We knew we were watching the last episode, and we waited, and … in the stunning final minutes, the screen cut to black.
What precisely happened to Tony? We don’t know. More than that, we’ll never know. And more than that, we shouldn’t know. That’s art.
There are many who, nearly two decades later, still resent the violent originality of that choice. They’re many of the same people now saying they absolutely need to know what is going to happen to Mark S. and Helly R. I’m here to say that nothing about Season 3 of “Severance” will ever be as satisfying as where they — and we — are now, with a perfect ending and a story full of questions that’s faded to black.
