Finale Review: Severance, "The We We Are" | Season 1, Episode 9
Forty minutes of pure adrenaline create a thrilling conclusion, so long as you don't expect much in the way of answers
[In addition to this review, I was also able to chat about the finale with friend of the Substack David Chen on his YouTube channel, which you can watch/listen to here.]
As a televisual experience, “The We We Are” is thrilling. Often wordless, it embodies the ticking clock on the Overtime Contingency: Dylan’s outstretched arms won’t hold forever, and with each passing moment the soundtrack grows louder, the show’s theme song building to a crescendo as each of the “Innies” reaches a pivotal moment of discovery in their time “above ground.” At less than forty minutes, the finale plays more as an extended scene than an episode, embedding us in this first—and maybe last—gasp at freedom for our heroes.
However, as a finale to Severance’s first season, “The We We Are” feels self-limiting, and points to the challenge of calculating the number of revelations necessary to sustain a “mystery show” as it moves forward. It specifically embodies the trend of streaming shows that treat the entire first season as a pilot, taking nine episodes to get to where a traditional broadcast pilot would have historically tried to get in an hour. By the end of this thrilling forty minutes of television, we’re no closer to learning what’s really going on at Lumon: we just have a better understanding of how we might get the answers we seek when the show returns for a (now confirmed) second season.
Skeptical as I am of the 7-hour pilot, though, I left the first season of Severance feeling like this is the best possible execution of it, and the limitations placed on “The We We Are” nonetheless create something that lifts the stories that came before it. It probably needed a few more substantive insights into what’s really happening on the severed floor to fully satisfy my narrative expectations, but its close focus on characterization and in the collective “we” of its title foreground character development in a context where these “people” are truly developing and growing before our eyes. I don’t know that I’m fully onboard with where the worldbuilding of Severance lands in this finale, but I’m excited about how it awakens and reorients its characters, and that has me excited for a second season so long as we’ve moved past the stage of half-reveals by then.