As we head into next week’s season finale, I’m starting to better understand the frustration some viewers feel with Severance’s pacing in its second season. We’re nine episodes in and not a lot has happened. There have been several character-driven episodes in a row and not much movement on the main mystery, and we’re one episode away from the show going on hiatus once more. Given the three-year gap between seasons one and two, I can understand the worry that we’re going to reach the end of this season without having learned that much. But the season’s penultimate episode, “The After Hours,” felt like a necessary bit of housecleaning so the show would be free to focus almost exclusively on its overarching mystery and how protagonists Mark (Adam Scott) and Helly (Britt Lower) are faring. That means we spent a lot of time with the rest of the ensemble, wrapping up numerous storylines with a series of devastating conclusions. I’m a bit bummed we didn’t get full episodes dedicated to these characters like the one Patricia Arquette’s Harmony Cobel got last week, but god, the conclusion of Severance’s slow burn old man love story between Irving (John Turturro) and Burt (Christopher Walken) has sent me on an ongoing emotional spiral I haven’t recovered from.
How do the makers of Severance expect me to function after watching these two men get to the precipice of running away together and escaping Lumon’s clutches, just for Burt to emphatically and repeatedly tell Irving that they can’t? I’m getting ahead of myself. But the image of Irving and Burt’s outies standing forehead to forehead in a train station is burned into my brain. As for how we got here, it turns out that yes, fans’ theories that Burt’s outie was actually an undercover agent working for Lumon were correct. As he explains to Irving, he has been working with the corporation for many years, helping to disappear enemies of its interests. Now that both Irving’s innie and outie have been investigating the company’s corruption, the man who his innie fell in love with is in Burt’s crosshairs. He’s been given orders to deliver Irving somewhere to be discreetly dealt with, as he’s done to many of Lumon’s enemies over the years.
While I sympathize with those who feel that Severance’s greater mysteries have been moving a bit too slowly, I do wonder if some viewers have gotten so fixated on the question of what the main cast is doing on the severed floor that they’re losing sight of these micro mysteries which help build out the world through the lens of the people in it. In Episode 6, “Attila,” Burt, Irving, and Burt’s outie husband Fields all pontificated about whether or not innies and outies had distinct souls that could ascend to Heaven independent of what the other personality had done. People rightfully assumed Burt was working with Lumon, but what could he have done that would make him so sure he wouldn’t see the pearly gates that he’d bisect his brain in the hope that some part of him would reach Heaven while the other burned for eternity? It turns out that helping Lumon whisk away anyone who slighted it weighs on a person.
But now, he’s met with the person this innocent version of himself fell in love with, and he’s been ordered to drop him off somewhere for the company’s nefarious purposes. After years of following Lumon’s orders, he finally hesitates, and instead of dropping Irving off where he was told to, he takes him and his dog Radar to a train station, gives him a one-way ticket, and tells him not to say where he’s going. Burt can’t know where Irving’s stop is, because as long as he doesn’t, the man his innie fell in love with will be safe.
If that weren’t devastating enough on its own, Irving’s own confession had me curled up in the fetal position on the floor. Before he gets on the train, he tells Burt he’s never been loved before, not really. But at his old age of 60-something, it’s painful for him to know he felt it once and can’t remember it, and he wants Burt to give them a chance to feel that connection in this life. The scene mirrors one from season one, in which Burt and Irving’s innies decide they can’t engage in “fraternization,” and Irving says that he’s “not ready” to break Lumon’s rules. Seeing the roles reversed and Irving begging Burt to give them a chance to get on that train together and see where things go generates the kind of devastating angst you rarely find outside of AO3.
Irving says he wants to remember the love they felt for each other on the severed floor, but I imagine it would break his heart to know that version of him passed on the opportunity to love and be loved. In the end, all either version of Irving has is the image he’s formed in his mind of what a life with Burt could have looked like. Severance has always been for the yearners, but I can’t lie, I was hoping and praying for a shot of Burt walking up to Irving on the train and escaping Lumon’s clutches alongside his innie’s love. But it never came.
If this show had come out 10 years ago, the version of me I was then probably would have been miffed that the queer love story ended so tragically when Severance is about to release a season finale spotlighting its straight leads. But the longer I’ve lived, the more that queer love stories like Burt and Irving’s resonate with me, stories that capture the reality that most relationships don’t end well. Statistically, more of us deal with heartbreak from disinterested partners, meeting the right person at the wrong time, and finding we wasted a lot of hours being too scared to take the next step, than with happily ever after. The greatest, most passionate love stories often end with someone on a one-way trip to god knows where. I imagine we’ve seen the last of Irving in Severance, and it’s fitting that Burt was the one who ensured he got a second chance. Wherever he gets off that train, I hope he doesn’t waste the time he’s been given the way he did on the severed floor.
