Severance Season 2 Took Inspiration From A Heartbreaking Ancient Greek Myth

The season 2 finale of “Severance” ended with one hell of a moral dilemma: should Innie Mark escape with his outtie’s wife Gemma, or should he return to Helly to enjoy whatever remains of his life on the inside? In a pure utilitarian sense, it would be better if he left with Gemma. That way Outtie Mark could get her out of the building safely and explain to her everything that’s been going on. This is the best shot these characters have of taking down Lumon; it’s also the best chance they’ve got at keeping Gemma alive, considering she’ll be targeted hard by Lumon in the season to come.

Instead, Innie Mark turns around and chooses Helly, all while Gemma pleads with him from outside the door. It’s not clear how much of this situation Gemma even understands, since nobody has told her that Mark is severed. Still, it must sting to see her husband running off with another woman, especially when that woman is the daughter of the CEO who’s kept her as a lab rat these past few years. “Cold Harbor” is one giant, tragic roller coaster as far as Gemma and Outtie Mark are concerned, one that feels painfully reminiscent of another big fictional tragedy that was first told thousands of years ago: the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice.

In this Greek myth, a musician named Orpheus suffers the sudden loss of his true love, Eurydice, so he travels into the perilous underworld to bring her back. This is a near-impossible feat, but through his sheer grit and musical talent, Orpheus almost manages to pull it off. Hades, the god of the underworld, offers Orpheus the chance at a happy ending: he must walk a long route through the caves back to the living world; Eurydice will follow behind him, but the rule is that Orpheus cannot turn around to check if she’s there. If he turns around, she gets dragged back to the land of the dead forever. If he stays confident and keeps looking ahead the whole journey, she’ll get to stay and the two could live happily ever after. You’ll never guess what happens next…

Sadly, Orpheus can’t keep the faith for the entire journey home. Throughout the long walk he grows increasingly doubtful that Eurydice is behind him. When he is mere steps away from the finish line, he turns around and sees that Eurydice was indeed there. She’s sent back to the underworld forever, leaving poor Orpheus to live with the knowledge that he’d fumbled a baddie.

The grief is so bad it literally kills him, at least in some versions of the story. In other versions, he gets his head chopped off but stays magically alive. One particularly devastating (and relatively recent) portrayal of this version was in “The Sandman” comicswhere Orpheus’s head is left alive and conscious for literally thousands of years, given little to do but think about how he could’ve had it all.

My favorite version of the story is the recent “Hadestown” Broadway musical, which adds an extra class commentary that makes it sting even more. In this version, the people trapped in the underworld are the exploited working class, and Orpheus’s failure hurts even more because those workers were inspired by his words and likely would’ve used his success to jumpstart their own revolution.

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice has persevered over thousands of years because of how relatable it is. We’ve all felt the sting of a blown opportunity, of a lost chance at happiness. Losing hurts, sure, but it hurts even more when you totally could’ve won. That’s part of what makes the “Severance” finale so great: if Innie Mark had trusted his Outtie a little more, or if Outtie Mark had done a better job assuaging Innie Mark’s concerns beforehand, Innie Mark probably wouldn’t have turned back like Orpheus did. Outtie Mark and Gemma could’ve had their lasting chance at happiness, but they didn’t, and that stings so much more than if there’d never been any hope at all.

The parallels between “Severance” and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice were made most clear in this season’s Best episode, “Chikhai Bardo,” which detailed just how messed up Gemma’s situation has been throughout the past few years. This episode established that she’s been trapped in metaphorical hell throughout the entire show, and it’s Mark’s job to journey through Lumon’s mysterious caves (sorry, hallways) to lead her out.

But although Innie Mark’s last-minute decision to turn back has a ton in common with Orpheus’s mistake, it’s not a total tragedy — at least, from his innie perspective. Innie Mark simply doesn’t care about Gemma and Outtie Mark’s happiness that much; those people are strangers to him. The happy read on the season 2 finale is that Mark has made the romantic choice to prioritize his love for Helly over everything else, even if he knows that life inside Lumon will be messy at best going into season 3. Of course, that look of doubt on Innie Mark’s face at the end makes clear that he himself doesn’t fully buy into this optimistic interpretation.

You can argue it was selfish of him to leave Gemma there, but was it any less selfish than Outtie Mark’s lack of sympathy for Innie Mark’s plight? As Helly said earlier in the episode, “They gave us half a life and expected us not to fight for it.” The line doesn’t just apply to the Eagan family, but to Outtie Mark as well. He may have sympathized a bit with what his innie was going through, but Innie Mark was spot on when he said Outtie Mark only started to care once he needed something.

Even after Outtie Mark started to care about his innie, he still failed to see him as a complete person whose life was just as important as his own. Unlike Orpheus, it wasn’t doubt that was Outtie Mark’s undoing; it was his inability to appreciate his innie’s perspective. But whereas Orpheus’s story generally ends on that tragic note, Outtie Mark’s story still has at least one more season to play out. I have no idea how a peaceful solution between the two Marks could possibly work out by this point, but at least there’s hope that “Severance” won’t go too far down the mythic tragedy route. Maybe life for Gemma and Outtie Mark won’t be as bleak as it currently seems.