Britt Lower's Favorite Severance Season 2 Reveal Was Exactly What The Show Needed

This post contains spoilers for "Severance."

"Severance" has been holding its cards pretty close to its chest, choosing to gradually unravel the nature of its mind-bending mystery. The show's season 2 finale (titled "Cold Harbor") is as anxiety-inducing as it gets, as Innie Mark (Adam Scott) fights to save his outie's wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman), from her imprisonment by Lumon. We obviously do not have all the answers yet, as there's a world of "what does that mean?" or "what happens next?" to be answered, but "Severance" has finally revealed what's truly going on at its core. These long-awaited answers feel even more compelling because the series examines every facet of these characters we know, including how the core four at MDR (MacroData Refinement) are really like outside of Lumon.

Season 1 had already set up a marked contrast between Innie Mark and Outie Mark, but revealing what Outie Irving (John Turturro) and Outie Dylan (Zach Cherry) are like added more nuance to the conversation. Then there's Helly R. and Helena Eagan (Britt Lower), who are so innately different that they should be treated as distinct characters, further complicating what the severance process does to a person's soul. Season 2 makes these Innie/Outie overlaps and distinctions amply clear, as it spends considerably more time with the Outie counterparts. So when we see Outie Irving still hold a fascination with Outie Burt (Christopher Walken), the lines start blurring, and we are left with more questions than ever before.

Pinpointing a favorite "Severance" season 2 reveal might be difficult because of how tightly interwoven the show's text is, but Britt Lower told Entertainment Weekly that she was especially intrigued by what the folks at MDR are like on the outside. 

"Severance" season 1 dropped its Helena Eagan twist right towards the end, immediately setting up her weird, uneasy dynamic with father Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry), who has only gotten creepier since then. The pressure to uphold the Eagan legacy while navigating repressed emotions was a huge contributor to Helena choosing to impersonate Helly. A lot of this stems from Helena viewing her severed self as a non-entity, as someone whose emotions do not matter because they're less human than the ones on the outside. (Regrettably, Helena is not the only one who feels this way; we see a tamer, subtler version of this twisted entitlement in Outie Mark in the show's second season.)

Lower explains that her favorite reveal is, in fact, the outer lives that we weren't privy to for a long time, which helps us better understand both halves of these severed characters:

"Just the human part of who they are on the outside. Like getting to see Dylan's family, getting to see more of how Irving is on the outside, and then getting a little glimpse of Helena's sheltered, isolated life with her father, and extrapolating from that what her upbringing must have been like and getting to have some more perspective on why she is the way she is."

Speaking of Helena's "sheltered, isolated life," it makes us wonder whether part of her impersonating era was driven by a genuine urge to connect with someone in a way that she cannot afford to do as herself. Helena's romantic/sexual sentiments for Mark are an obvious indicator of this, but a longing for warm friendship with him (along with Dylan and Irving) could have motivated her as well. Lower spoke to Vulture about this intense longing inside Helena:

"When she's [Helena] in disguise, she's embodying this part of herself she's lost touch with or never had touch with quite fully. I was really moved by getting to see Helly's perspective through her eyeballs. Helly has these really human connections with Irving, Dylan, and Mark, and they affect her so much. And then, by contrast, Helena's scenes with her father are so sterile. Hurt people hurt people, generations of lack of nurturing. I tried to come at both sides of them with empathy for being trapped inside the same company in very different ways."

The two halves of Helly will return in "Severance" season 3, which has officially been greenlit by Apple TV+.