BEWARE, there are spoilers here for a number of shows, including Severance, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and Lost.
This might sound a little harsh because I do think Severance, which can be watched with an AppleTV+ subscription, is a brilliant show, but it’s starting to run the risk of tripping down the same path of shows like The Walking Dead, Game Of Thrones, and Lost. Those shows almost crumbled under the weight of their constant cliffhangers and ever-sprawling stories. I am worried about Season 3 and whether we’ll get satisfying conclusions about everything.
Just How Big Is This Conspiracy?
With each season, the story of Severance gets bigger and bigger. It’s no longer about a small group of macrodata refining innies doing Keir’s work on the severed floor. Now we have Gemma and her dozens of innies (plus her outie). We have Helly R. fighting with her outie doing the bidding of her father. There is an entire cult built around Keir that seemingly has its fingers in every section of the economy and the culture, not to mention entire towns dedicated to the company. Just how big is this show going to get?
The Walking Dead, instead of staying with one group of survivors and telling their story, continued to add locations, characters, and situations until the whole thing just sprawled way too far. I bailed out when Rick (Andrew Lincoln) was seemingly rescued by a helicopter from a well-outfitted group of mysterious people who were maybe some kind of government agency in Season 9. I dunno, I didn’t stick around to find out what happened. It had all grown too unwieldy and I was done.
Now that Severance has fully embraced adventures outside of the Lumon headquarters, how far afield do they plan on taking us? The “bottle episode” aspect of Severance was its greatest trick and now that those mysteries have been answered I’m concerned the show can’t recapture the magic. The mystery was small, but now it’s huge, and getting bigger. Is Lumon going to be like the Widmore Corporation in Lost with its tentacles in everything and no oversight from anyone? Just how far does the conspiracy spread? How can two people trapped on the severed floor stop it? The mystery may be lost.
Sometimes A Story Just Needs To Wrap Up
Shows don’t need to air forever, some of the best shows tell their story, wrap up, and the creators and actors move on. Shows that just get more and more sprawling, with characters moving further and further away from each other are complicated to wrap up in a satisfying way. When they are always asking more questions than they are answering, or asking bigger and bigger questions, they rarely stick the landing.
Even worse, dragging them on and on like this often ruins their legacy completely. No one loves Lost as we did when it started. The passion was lost (no pun intended). The same applies to The Walking Dead. The cliffhangers meant nothing, and fans didn’t trust the show to ever wrap up in a satisfying way. This has never been more true of a show than Game of Thrones (which has its own connection to the Severance finale). I don’t want to see this happen with Severance.