brendan halpin

This whole post is going to be rife with spoilers. So if you haven’t finished Season 2 yet, come back when you do!

I really enjoyed Season 2. One of the things that I found most compelling was the way the innies were pretty much all better people than their outies. (With the possible exception of Irv, who was great in both places.) Absent the failures, toxic families, and traumas that fuck us up, maybe we’d all be better people like Hellie and Mark and Dylan! And Burt, for that matter!

I appreciated that they let us figure that out without hitting it too hard.

The season should have been 9 episodes rather than 10. The Gemma/Harmony episodes could and should have been combined. I get why they did each one, but they really broke the momentum of the story.

Something else weird—they acted like Mark was going to reintegrate, and that lady dug into his head, and it definitely started happening, and then it just kind of…stopped? Like, why? I certainly don’t need everything explained, but when you have a guy go, “Let’s do it. Now,” and then somebody does the thing, you have to give a little space to why it doesn’t work. As it was, it just seemed like they forgot about it, which, why include it in the first place, then?

My suspicion in both cases is that Apple wanted 10 episodes, and so even though they had 8, maybe 9 episodes of story, they padded it out to ten.

I loved the ending, and the symmetry was great. Rebellion against Lumon at the end of Season 1 and rebellion against their outies at the end of season 2. I was initially bummed to hear that they’ve ordered Season 3. Because what’s the compelling question at this point? I mean, certainly there’s more to reveal about the world, and what exactly Lumon does, and things like that, but we know pretty much all we need to know about the characters at this point, and the characters are what made the show compelling. I don’t want to see the scene of “here’s what Dylan and the marching band do to Milchick.” I don’t want to see Hellie become her terrible outie again. Season 2 ended perfectly, but I guess everybody’s making too much money to call it quits. But the good thing about being a viewer of series TV is that the series ACTUALLY ends when YOU say it does. Just because they make more doesn’t mean you have to watch more!

I didn’t hate the ending of Roseanne because for me it ended when I got bored of it in, like, season 3. I didn’t hate the end of St. Elsewhere because I had long stopped watching, and I wish I’d stopped watching Arrested Development at the end of Season 3 when it ended perfectly instead of tuning into the sour, unfunny season 4.

So guess what? They can make as many seasons as they want, but as far as I’m concerned, Severance is over, and the ending was perfect!