Review: Severance, "What's For Dinner?" | Season 1, Episode 8
Forcing us to sit with THIS cliffhanger for a week is the best kind of cruelty
A few weeks ago, I complained about “Hide and Seek” as a half-finished episode of television: cliffhangers have an obvious narrative value, but they depend on the feeling that there was some type of resolution or revelation in the episode that preceded it, and that was absent in that case.
“What’s For Dinner?” is inherently flirting with the same criticism, built as it is around the anticipation of a moment that you can sense from the word go—and the episode’s runtime—will be put off until next week’s finale.1 But whereas “Hide and Seek” was embedded in the season’s rising action, Severance has clearly signaled that we have entered the climax of this chapter of the story, and with that comes a heightened energy to a situation that we know will not be resolved before the cut to black.
Not shockingly, that cut to black comes just as Dylan manages to stretch his arms far enough to flip the switches and activate the Overtime Contingency, waking up his coworkers in the world a…