There was almost a huge change to the Severance season two finale ending.
Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen!
The finale for the second season ends with Mark S. (Adam Scott) changing between his innie and his outie as he heads between different floors at Lumon.
Keep reading to find out more…
A brief synopsis, if you need to get caught up: Mark’s outie ends up reuniting with his beloved wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) – who also has multiple innies and vacillates between them as she’s being saved from the bowels of Lumon.
Mark and Gemma end up making it back to the severed floor, where Mark is now back as his innie and Gemma becomes one version of her innie, Miss Casey. At this point, they have no conscious memory of their romantic history, apart from what Mark’s outie has told Mark’s innie.
Innie Mark gets her to the hallway door, where she’ll revert back to her outie, Gemma. He gets her to go out the door, but when it’s his turn to walk through and become outie Mark, he sees Helly R. at the end of the hallway behind him.
Innie Mark is in love with innie Helly, whose outie is one of the head honchos at Lumon, Helena Eagan.
Innie Mark is then faced with a choice: step outside of the severed floor and reunite his outie with Gemma, or, stay severed and be with Helly inside Lumon’s severed floor, leaving Gemma in the outside world alone.
Mark chooses Helly, and they run off together in the severed floor.
Now, the show’s creator, Dan Erickson, revealed the season 2 finale originally had a different ending in his head.
The Wrap asked Dan if the season 2 finale was always going to be a choice between Gemma and Helly.
Dan responded, “Kind of the whole time. That was something that was built-in from the conception of this season, although it’s funny — I hate to keep telling Ben Stiller that he was right and I was wrong, specifically about finales. But in Season 1, I remember I was like, ‘It should be [Mark] writing ‘She’s alive,’ but then it gets cut off before he finishes.’ And Ben was like, ‘No, no, no, no, he’s going to yell it.’ I was like, ‘All right, let’s see how it works.’ And then it was one of the best moments I’d ever seen on TV.”
He then said about the season 2 finale, “Similarly here, I had come up with a version where Helly was not there, and Mark makes the decision to go back and finds her later. Ben — goddamn it — in his wisdom, was like, ‘It’s going to be such a moment if they’re both there.’”
Dan continued, “It’s not even because it’s a choice between these two women, but because we had built up how much each of these relationships define Mark’s identity. The relationship with Helly is a signifier of his whole innie life he’s built and that he’s worked toward, and Gemma is someone whom I think he has great empathy for, but she’s not his person. So he’s choosing his life over this life that he’s always felt beholden to, which is his outie’s. That’s really the journey of the season.”
He added, “The very first thing we see him do this season is he runs out of the elevator and almost instinctively goes to find Ms. Casey, as opposed to going to find Helly and his other friends to see if they’re OK. That’s because he doesn’t value himself on the level that he values his outie at the start of the season. By the end, he does. That first scene and that last scene feel like a question and answer to each other.”
If you didn’t see, one of the most popular Severance fans theories has been debunked.
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