Severance has wrapped its second season with an explosive, emotional, and utterly bizarre finale, which we will rehash from top to bottom in our next podcast. For now, we want to unpack one of the central questions surrounding the series: What constitutes a person? There will be finale spoilers.
If you’ve been listening to our podcast recaps this season (thank you), you know we’ve been debating the merits of the show’s pacing and aesthetic, but while we were watching the finale last night, we realized that, while we love the show (T more than L) our real problem with Severance is that, for us, the show sometimes works against its core conceit; that the Innies are actual, fully realized people with agency and rights separate to their Outie. That idea is a bit hard for us to accept when talking about a personality with an existence as limited as the Innies’, who owe their creation to a brain chip in their head. Nothing about their existence tracks with human development or experiences. Prior to their escape attempts, none of the people in Macro Data Refinement had ever seen the sky, experienced extreme cold or heat, walked on an uneven surface, fallen asleep, or even experienced a childhood. They’d never seen a baby or a disabled person or had to run an errand. If they experience any sickness or pain, it’s brief and ends instantaneously. They poop out things they never ate. They make virtually no choices. They don’t know what the Equator is and they will believe you instantly if you tell them they’re looking at the tallest waterfall in the world. In fact, you can tell them any sort of lie at all and most of them don’t have the tools at their disposal to question any of them. All of their experiences are so truncated and limited that it would be impossible for a fully developed person to emerge from them. More to the point, the show kind of supports this because a lot of them don’t act like fully realized people. Some of them are little more than automatons for the entirety of their existence; all of them are deeply weird.
Now, you can make two comparisons here and the show has implied both of them at various times: The Innies are children and/or the Innies are brain-damaged or developmentally disabled individuals. Both of those interpretations lend the Innies a tremendous amount of sympathy and support from the audience. The problem is that they’ve constructed the story around something that has a much more direct real-world analogue (albeit an extremely rare one) than childhood, developmental issues, or brain damage: Dissociative Identity Disorder, more commonly known as split or multiple personalities.
The brilliantly staged and acted conversation between the two Marks made it extremely clear that Outie Mark doesn’t truly think his Innie is a real person and Innie Mark reacted to that with the kind of petulance and oppositional defiance you’d get from the average teenager. But when Mark S turned his back on his Outie’s wife and grabbed Helly R’s hand to run through the hallways of Lumon, it was honestly difficult for us not to see it as the actions of — at best, a brain-damaged child with no life experience; at worst, an alternate personality taking over a person’s body against their will. Neither of those interpretations lend themselves to the idea that Mark S is in the right. He’s scared and in love, sure. We feel for him, but so far, the show has made it pretty clear that Innie existence is artificial. Did anyone come away from Gemma’s story thinking that each of her 25 personalities have agency or rights? If they don’t, why does Mark S?
To be clear (and fair), the argument with some of the Innies is that their “life” in the hallways of Lumon, the experiences and connections they make there, add up to enough building tools to construct a fully separate person. The thing is, no one in the real world would argue that a person’s alternate personality somehow deserves agency and individual rights as a separate person, let alone a life of their own. And besides, Helly R’s entire existence has lasted no more than a couple of months, yet she awoke as a fully realized personality.
If nothing else, consider this: Does Mark S have the right to use Mark Scout’s body to have sex with someone he not only doesn’t want to, but actively hates, while preventing him from being with his wife? Of course the flip side of that question is, Does Mark Scout have the right to consider his needs over his Innie? Severance wants us to wrestle with that question but we never truly have. The answer is 100 percent yes. Mark Scout is a person. Mark S is a personality. Mark Scout has a life. Mark S is a very limited program in a poor simulation of life.
Severance is a tragedy because Lumon has created these stunted half-persons with real emotions, living lives of captivity and restraint, with no true means of release or freedom. We find ourselves rooting for their pain to end, but we have yet to think that any of the Innies should get to have their own life. It will be interesting to see if the show winds up making the same point in the end.
EDITED TO ADD: There’s been some pushback on the idea that this is a central question of the story or even if it’s up for debate at all, which took us a bit by surprise. Show creators Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller have been quite open in interviews about this core conflict and the questions it raises and we should have included some links or quotes to make our point:
“These two characters are at odds because [outie Mark] getting his wife out is going to basically end innie Mark’s whole existence. And isn’t he a person? And isn’t Helly a person? It’s this inevitable confrontation that has to happen between the two of them.”
“I think there’s no easy answer to that question in terms of what it transcends, and it may be different for different people. In the case of Irving and Bert, we see that there is something that transcends, whether it’s some sort of instinctual memory of the love that they had, or if it’s just that they are both intrinsically, the same people as their innies, and that they would tend to be drawn to each other. There, we see [that] it does seem to cross over,”
“The hope is that the audience is, in some way, split or feeling like some people are like, ‘Yeah, I’m Team Innie Mark’ and, ‘I’m Team Outie Mark,’” Stiller said. “It’s a real conflict.”
“Outie Mark’s motivation is very pure — he wants to be with Gemma — but he’s missing the fact that he’s created this other part of himself that he doesn’t want to accept.”
“That’s what I love — you don’t know. You don’t know how you’re supposed to feel.”
“My kneejerk was to think about it as two different characters, but then as we were diving into it we realized it was important that it feel like the same guy: maybe different sections or halves, but very much the same person,” Scott says. “Almost like how you behave differently if you’re visiting home with people you’ve known your whole life or at a party where it’s all complete strangers. You have these different sort of personas, we all do, that we switch in and out of depending on our surroundings.”
But especially in Season 2, when Mark seeks “reintegration” of his severed halves, it “becomes more complicated, almost like a math problem. One of them has 40-odd years of life experience and everything that goes with a really full life, with sorrow and joy and memory of childhood, and is sort of weighed down by all of that. The other part of him, the innie, is for all intents and purposes 2⅟₂ years old. He’s more naive, and his belief system is still developing.“
“I feel like that’s what we were hoping, that you could take one character’s side or the other and really think about where we’re coming from to justify the choice. I feel like that’s what’s interesting, when the filmmakers aren’t telling you what’s interesting and what you should feel or what you should do… I think there’s an argument to be made on either side for Innie Mark or Outie Mark.”
And finally, there is the heavily lampshaded reference last episode to The Twilight Zone episode “The After Hours” about a mannequin who walks out of a department store and forgets that it’s not a person.
All of this is quite overtly baked into the show and we should have included the references.
#Severance director Ben Stiller on the fan reactions being split: “There are arguments to be made on either side” pic.twitter.com/X1HuC8vcCj
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) March 24, 2025
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