thinking about the progression of the concept of wholeness in severance. in season 1, lumon's wellness sessions involve having innies hearing facts about their outies. which serves as a kind of tacit acknowledgement that severance is indeed a wound. each fact as a pseudo-suture across the gap between severed selves. of course, in typical lumon minilove newspeak form, there is no actual wellness, or suturing happening. the framing of it as a rare treat mostly serves to remind the innies of their separation from, and subordination to, their outies. it’s more puncturing than joining. a controlled facsimile of something nourishing, like an egg split into sixths. the way the innies talk about their outies in season 1 also reinforces this relationship: a kind of yearning identification that emphasizes that there is something absent to yearn for in the first place. dylan’s fantasies about his outie’s life. helly thinking “my outie wouldn’t do that to me.” their hope that by reaching the outside world they’d be able to bridge the scission that defines their lives. someone will care, won’t they? the image of dylan straining across the doorway in season 1 finale is key. it’s the image of a stitch across two halves that don’t want to be whole.
i think it’s interesting that the show itself uses the language of “stitching” in reference to reintegration. petey in “in perpetuity” (1x03) says “it’s like having two different lives suddenly stitched together” and in “who is alive?” (2x03) reghabi promises mark that she “can sew together a version of [him] that loves [gemma] with a version of [him] that can—” with the rest left unsaid. the fact that both lines occur in episode three of their respective seasons creates even more of a parallel between them. there’s something suspect in this language. stitching parts of humans together suggests frankenstein and other horror. there’s no talk of healing, even if stitches can be used that way. the violent, mad scientist aspect of sewing and reintegration makes it feel closer to lumon’s seductive claims (via milchick) that one “must be cut to heal,” rather than a legitimate path towards healing. whatever that might look like. the physical imagery we get during mark’s reintegration is stuff like coughing, nosebleeds, a scalpel cut, an insertion—imagery of illness and injury.
the show uses the word “whole” several times too. milchick in “half-loop” (1x02) (and what a title, half of a rounded thing, roundedness being associated with wholeness, return) saying “the office feels whole” after helly joins. the anti-severance movement being called “the whole mind collective.” irving in “the you you are” (1x04) saying that “kier’s whole original vision saw us all working together.” mark s in “cold harbor” (2x10) saying that he and the other innies find ways “to feel whole.”
basically, there’s an ongoing tension around what wholeness actually looks like. the starting premise of the show is that severance is a problem, but what’s the solution? because clearly, it’s easy to talk about wholeness, and dangle wholeness, without actually desiring it. and easy to be tempted by things that sound like wholeness, but may not really be.
and season 2 brings this tension to the fore. in season 1, there seemed to be a straightforward path ahead. severance is bad, but if the innies just make everyone aware of how bad it is, they’ll be able to heal, right? replace the fake wholeness with the real kind, right? but the fakeness goes deep. this is the role of both mark’s ersatz reintegration quest, and his gemma reunion quest. the two quests being, of course, directly related. the idea of wholeness is right there in the word “reunion.” you’ve been separated from something, and if you get it back (“i have to have her back”) you’ll be one again, a union. (the show itself doesn’t use the word reunion/union, so to some extent i’m just talking to myself with this, but i do think about how a marriage can be called a “union”). except this quest was always doomed, because it’s an attempt to make the wrong thing whole. mark scout is not trying to reunite the halves himself, the severance of which is the fundamental problem the show exists to explore. if anything, by trying to reunite with gemma, he is exacerbating the problem. it is the ultimate attempt to return to an unattainable past, to avoid pain. and so it’s no wonder that the end result is that mark scout and mark s finish the season the opposite of reintegrated. they’re no longer simply severed from each other; they’re actively opposed.
(telling that rescuing gemma is not what the show rejects. if anything, restoring her from a photograph—an object of grief—to person status, fits perfectly with the show’s criticism of the various ways one can repress humanity. it’s reuniting with her that’s the issue.)
in this light, there’s something bittersweet in mark s telling mark scout that they find ways to feel whole, clearly thinking of his relationships, especially with helly. something bittersweet in mark and helly reuniting with each other in “cold harbor” (their hug, their joined hands) versus the way mark scout cannot reunite with gemma (their interrupted embraces). and in the innies “union”-izing at helly’s urging. on the one hand, these unions are triumphant. they’re a win against the dehumanization and passivity of severance. the movement towards wholeness that they represent reads as real to me, because of helly's "i'm her" and the dylan innie-outie rapprochement in the same episode. but they also reveal the size of the abyss remaining. the innie rebellion is a stripping away of innocence and fakeness with regards to wholeness. but as with any rebellion, there's the graduate question of what comes next.
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