This article contains spoilers for Severance season 2 episode 10.
The first season of Apple TV+ sci-fi drama Severance featured no shortage of scenes that seemed designed in a Lumon laboratory to live forever on the internet. None of these moments, however, went more acutely viral than the Macrodata Refinement Team’s “Music Dance Experience.”
In the canon of the series, the Music Dance Experience or “MDE” is a reward that Lumon Industries grants to a refiner upon reaching 75% completion on a file. But really it’s a reward to us, the audience, who get to see Mr. Milchick (Tramel Tillman) cut a rug to some defiant jazz as the rest of the team sashays awkwardly around him.
Given how successful the first MDE outing was, it was all but a certainty that Severance season 2 would seek out another musical arrangement. Well, it took awhile but “Cold Harbor,” the concluding episode of the season, finally gives Mr. Milchick a chance to cut loose once again.
What’s the reward for 100% completion on 25 files? Forget a Music Dance Experience, Lumon’s got a whole gosh darn marching band for this occasion! Upon completion of his 25th and final file, Mark S. (Adam Scott) is “treated” to a visit from his floor manager, Milchick. After some uneasy repartee between Milchick and an animatronic Kier Eagan (this show is so weird), the man we now know as Seth calls in the “Choreography and Merriment” department. In marches a whole parade of trumpeters and trombonists, who blare the “Ballad of Ambrose and Gunnel” as Milchick conducts them around the MDR floor.
As we noted in our breakdown of the season 2 ending, it’s pretty wild that there has apparently been a whole-ass marching band training somewhere within the walls of Lumon’s cavernous corporate campus this whole time. Wouldn’t that hurt the goats’ ears? Won’t somebody please think of the goats! Regardless, the sudden introduction of a marching band for the finale is keeping with the show’s surreal tone. And more importantly, according to series creator Dan Erickson, it just seemed like a fun thing to do.
“It just felt right,” Erickson tells Den of Geek. “Part of it was that it was funny to us. Usually, if you’re watching a marching band, you’re up in bleachers and looking down. The fact that Lumon would bring them in to perform in a building that has a ceiling that’s barely tall enough to fit them, we just thought that that was fun.”
While a marching band stomping around an office seems like a uniquely Severance creation, Erickson points out that the trope has not only been done before, but it was executed in one of the greatest films of all time.
“There’s a scene from Citizen Kane where a marching band comes in and performs for Charles Foster Kane. It’s just so weird and strange. There were a lot of considerations but I don’t know what a marching band is a metaphor for necessarily,” he says.
Though interesting and odd as all hell, Mr. Milchick’s introduction of the Choreography and Merriment team is far from the most important reveal of the Severance season 2 finale. Just like the season 1 ending, “Cold Harbor” is a propulsive, exciting episode of television that concludes on an uncertain note. Given the bloody events of the finale and the Graduate-esque moment of bittersweet happiness Mark and Helly find themselves in, how much more storytelling runway does Severance have? Erickson doesn’t provide official estimate of how many more seasons remain but does reveal that their plans for the show’s future have “tightened up a bit.”
“I think we have a pretty good idea of how many seasons we want to go, which I’m not going to say just yet,” he reports. “We’re really trying to be intentional in how we approach this as a whole story, and looking at it in terms of chapters and timing out the different reveals and story beats.”
Depending on how many more seasons Severance goes, we may be looking at a full orchestral music dance experience.
All 10 episodes of Severance season 2 are available to stream on Apple TV+ now.
The post Severance Season 2 Finale’s Musical Moment Has a Surprising Inspiration appeared first on Den of Geek.
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