The season 2 Severance finale left us all screaming at our TVs, and we cannot wait to see what’s to come in season 3. Show creator Dan Erickson spoke exclusively with Closer at PaleyFest at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood about what fans can expect in the show’s next season, which recently got the green light at Apple TV.
“We do have a set ending in our mind that has basically stayed the same, but my inner executive does come out at time,” Dan, 41, told Closer.
“I think that there’s things like, I always knew that Milchick was going to be a fun character, but it wasn’t until the lines started coming out of Tramell Tillman‘s mouth that I was like, ‘Oh, Milchick is going to be one of the best characters of all time, and we need to find a lot more for him to do. So there’s stuff like that that happens along the way,’” he said.
When asked if he was scared to have to live up to fans’ expectations as the show keeps getting better and better, the writer and executive producer said, “It terrifies me and I think it should. I was terrified. Keeps you on your toes. I was terrified when we wrote season 1. I was terrified when we wrote season 2, and I’m terrified now and I will remain terrified until we finish this show in 2066.”
The Severance season 3 finale saw Tramell’s character, Mr. Milchick, lead an enthusiastic marching band performance on the severed floor after Mark S. completed Cold Harbor.
“He’s a puzzle, and I’m enjoying the mystery and I just want to know more,” Tramell, 39, told Closer of his character at the event.
Mark S., played by Adam Scott, faced the most difficult conflict of all after some challenges during the reintegration process forced him to literally fight with himself — a moral dilemma between his innie and his outie. In the end, innie Mark decided to choose Helly R. over outie Mark’s wife, Gemma, after rescuing her from Cold Harbor.
The hallway scene between Mark, Gemma and Helly will likely be etched in our memories forever as one of the most heartbreaking and shocking moments in TV history. Dichen Lachman, who plays Gemma on the show, said she “had a feeling” Mark was going to choose Helly all along.
“I had a feeling, like an instinct, that that would be coming down the road for them,” she told Variety in a March 22 interview. “I only saw the episode a few weeks before we started filming those final ones, but I knew that hopefully if everyone was invested in Episode 7, as much as we wanted them to be invested, people would find themselves torn beteeen whether he goes with Gemma or whether he goes with Helly.”
“And I mean, I hope that that’s how people feel because that’s the conundrum, right? Episode 7 was our opportunity to get the audience to feel and understand that relationship between Mark and Gemma and why he would have ultimately gotten severed in the first place because the grief was unbearable,” she added. “And then ultimately why he has the garage brain surgery to go and save her. It had to feel like a really lived-in relationship that felt real.”
