How did ‘Severance’ season 1 end? All about the Cliffhanger ending

Warning: Resignation season 1 spoilers ahead!

Resignation‘s first season ended with many unanswered questions.

The critically acclaimed psychological office thriller – which was created by Ben Stiller and includes a star-studded cast led by Parks and Recreation‘ Adam Scott – received 14 Emmy nominations for its first season. The series, which returned for Season 2 on January 17, is named after the fictional severance procedure in which employees at the company Lumon receive a chip implant to separate their work from their real selves.

IN Resignationinnys and outies refer to an employee’s self at work and their self outside of work, both of whom know nothing about each other’s lives despite occupying the same body. While many employees get the procedure to forget about their problems outside of work, it turns out that they have no freedom when working at Lumon and are regularly punished, wondering how their outies are while their insides are miserable.

Scott leads the cast as a grief-stricken Mark Scout who opts for severance so he can forget the pain of losing his wife for eight hours a day, five days a week. But at the end of the first season, he and his colleagues realize that the resignation procedure is not easy, and there may be more sinister motives behind Lumon.

So how did Resignation season 1 end? Read on to find out more about the cliffhanger ending and how it will affect Season 2.

How did Resignation season 1 end?

After Dylan (Zach Cherry) learns that his outie has a child and Helly’s (Britt Lower) frequent attempts to resign are rebuffed by her outie, they hatch a plan with Mark and Irving (John Turturro) – their colleagues at refining macro data – about taking over their outies as their insides.

While consuming their outies’ bodies, the inies plan to let people know that they are being held hostage in Lumon, are frequently punished, and are miserable at work.

When Dylan activates the overtime alert, Irving, Helly and Mark have about an hour as their insiders in the outside world. Mark wakes up at his sister’s house during her husband Ricken’s book launch event. In one of the episode’s biggest twists, he finds out that a woman from work named Ms. Casey is actually his outie’s wife Gemma, who he presumes is dead.

When Helly wakes up, she discovers that she is Helena Eagan, daughter of Lumon’s CEO Jame Eagan – who is a descendant of founder Kier Eagan – and she is about to give a pro-resignation speech at a gala. The news comes as an even bigger shock as her innie, Helly, has been miserable at work and even tried to quit and kill herself.

When Irving’s innie awakens, he discovers that he has a US Navy background and lives in an apartment with his dog Radar. He is also surrounded by his own paintings of Lumon’s test floor corridor, suggesting that his subconscious still remembers parts of his innie’s life.

When their supervisor Milchick (Tramell Tillman) enters the security room to stop Dylan, Mark’s innie shouts “she’s alive”, referring to Gemma, Helena tells a crowded room of people that resignation is a prison, and Irving knocks his colleague. /lover Burts (Christopher Walken) dies. Milchick successfully stops Dylan as Mark, Helly and Irving become their outies again and the season ends full of excitement.

Stiller explained to Rolling Stone in 2022, which is why they decided to leave viewers on a cliffhanger.

“Originally we were going to go ahead and answer more questions, but I felt really strongly that there’s something about the mystery of the show that you want to live in. It’s the balance of answering enough questions, but not too many.” he said. “We decided on this because it was kind of the most emotionally resonant.”

Why did Mark, Irving, Dylan and Helly make a plan to quit work?

Mark, Irving, Dylan and Helly planned to explore the outside world as their inside because they felt trapped at work sorting numbers all day with no idea what the data meant.

They were often punished by being sent to the break room, where they had to continually repeat the same excuse. Mark is also frequently harassed by his boss, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), and sent to the break room.

Irving’s innie loves the company, but he too becomes suspicious and wants to go through with his colleagues’ plan to tell the outside world about Lumon after his love interest, Burt, is forced to retire. Dylan wants to help with the plan after learning that his outie has a child.

For her part, Helly has the most challenges adjusting to the abdication as she tries to quit from the start and her many, even violent, requests to abdicate are rejected by her Lumon heir, who tells her that she is not a real person.

Lower told Vogue in 2025, that she believes her character is “essentially trapped by the same company in both circumstances, but in different ways.”

“I started the process of differentiating the two characters with what was the same — which is that these are both strong-willed parts of this person,” she said. “They are both fiercely loyal. They also share the same body, and that body carries the trauma and joy that they both experience on the inside and the outside.”

How did the inies get into the bodies of their outies?

Earlier in the season, Milchick awakens Dylan’s innie in the outside world to find out where he hid an optic and design ideographic map while he was at work. Milchick explains to Dylan that Lumon can awaken employees’ insides outside of work when required using a process called “overtime alertness.”

However, Dylan’s child, whose existence was unknown to his innie, unexpectedly runs into the room. When Dylan next wakes up, he’s at work distraught over having a child he’ll potentially never meet, prompting him to tell his co-workers about the overtime.

The plan to briefly escape their inner lives is set in motion after Mark’s outie receives the former security chief’s key card from a former Lumon employee, Reghabi. The former corporate scientist had been trying to help Mark’s beloved colleague Petey reverse the process of resignation – called reintegration – and encourages Mark’s outie to take the card to work so his innie can use it.

When Dylan gets a waffle party for being Refiner of the Quarter, he stays after work and sneaks out to the security room using the key card to use the overtime, waking up Mark, Helly and Irving as their insides to the outside world. .

Where did the budding relationship between Mark and Helly go?

Despite Mark and Helly’s first interaction resulting in her hitting him with a stapler, the two eventually develop a budding romance. While Mark is Helly’s boss and first has to stop her from trying to escape, she begins to understand that he is really trying to help her enjoy work.

Helly’s anger at being forced to stay at work helps radicalize Mark and makes him realize that not everything is as it seems at Lumon. The two go for a walk to discover more about the company and therefore begin to develop chemistry.

Before the four co-workers execute their escape plan, Mark and Helly realize that they may never be at work again, so she runs out of the elevator to kiss him. But soon after their first kiss, Mark’s innie finds out that Lumon’s wellness advisor on the floor, Ms. Casey, actually is his outie’s supposedly dead wife, Gemma.

“For me, a through line of this series has always been about Mark trying to mourn his wife. But then we find out that his wife is alive,” Stiller shared Vanity Fair in 2024. “At the same time, I think we’ve kind of developed a relationship with Innie Mark and Helly on the inside that feels like it’s going somewhere. So there’s a natural tension that grows there between Outie Mark’s interests and Innie Mark’s interests.”

Which questions did Resignation Leaving season 1 unanswered?

After Dismissal’s cliffhanger season 1 finale had fans a lot of questions. When Mark woke up in his sister’s home, he was talking to Cobel, his menacing boss, who outwardly poses as his seemingly unassuming neighbor, Mrs. Selvig.

Realizing that Mark’s innie has taken over, she drives to try to stop Helly’s innie from speaking at the pro-resignation gala. Season 2’s trailer reveals that Cobel has been fired but is still involved in the story as Mark’s outie learns the truth about her dual identity.

Helly is horrified when she wakes up at the pro-resignation gala to learn that she is not only an Eagan, but is about to become the face of resignation. At the end of season 1, after Helly speaks out about the prison that is the procedure, it is unclear what consequences she will face.

Around the same time as Helly’s rousing speech, Irving knocks on Burt’s door. Before he can answer, the inies and outies have switched back. Season 2 may show the interaction between the two seeming strangers who shared a romance on the inside.

Perhaps the biggest question from Resignation season 1 is why Mrs. Casey/Gemma is alive in Lumon but presumed dead in the outside world. One possible clue is that when Ms. Casey is fired, Milchick says she will be sent back to the test floor, indicating that she could have been kept at Lumon all along.

Mark’s sister Devon also meets a woman in a maternity home, who later has no memory of meeting her when they run into each other in a park. Devon researches her and learns that her husband is a pro-resignation senator, indicating that the procedure may extend beyond the workplace more than anyone knows.