It Starts On The Page (Drama): Read ‘Severance’ Season 2 Finale Script “Cold Harbor” With Foreword By Dan Erickson

Editor’s note: Deadline’s It Starts on the Page (Drama) features 10 standout drama series scripts in 2025 Emmy contention.

After a nearly three-year wait, Apple TV+’s Severance returned for a second season to quickly become the streamer’s most watched series ever with a regular presence on Nielsen’s Streaming Originals chart during its run and even break into the overall Top 10.

With its second season, the science fiction corporate work thriller from creator Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller put the work-life balance debate — and goats — back into the spotlight. It continued to follow the Lumon Industries employees who had undergone the “Severance” procedure, which bifurcate the brain so that it is possible to operate with two separate selves, an Innie — or work self — and an Outie — an outside world self, with neither remembering what the other half does.

The hour-plus Season 2 finale “Cold Harbor,” written by Erickson and directed by Stiller, took the lid off what exactly the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) team led by Mark (Adam Scott) is actually doing when they sort through their “scary numbers.”

Severance’s first season received 14 Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Drama Series, Writing for Erickson, Directing for Stiller and Lead Actor for Scott. It also won WGA Awards for Drama Series and New Series, in addition to an individual nomination for Erickson.

Here is the “Cold Harbor” script with an intro by Erickson, in which he reveals the finale’s original title and the two scenes that were most challenging to write.

There was a not-insignificant period of time during the development of the Severance Season 2 finale where I was convinced the title should be ‘Innie Sandwich.’ It made perfect sense to me: Mark is his Outie on the surface, his Innie on the severed floor, and his Outie on the testing floor below. This ‘sandwich’ is the arena he must navigate in order to save his wife and attain the peace he’s sought throughout the series. Also maybe it’s a callback to the sandwich Devon made him in the pilot or something.

Ultimately I was convinced to change the name to ‘Cold Harbor,’ which in hindsight was probably the right call. This is illustrative of how Severance benefits from the collaborative process, with many people working together to create something insane that also somehow works. For this episode, we wanted it to feel as distinct as possible from our Season 1 finale. Where that chapter was short and tight, this one would be big and epic and move wildly between tones and contain a full marching band if in any way possible.

The first sequence is one that I’ve been excited and terrified to write since the show began. I knew Innie and Outie Mark had to face off at some point, and with their needs and resentments both coming to a head, this was the time to do it. The challenge was to make an interesting scene out of a man filming videos to himself on a deck, and here again I had to rely on the skill of my collaborators. We had to sort of build the language of that sequence as we were shooting it, between the performance, editing, direction and writing. We probably rewrote this more than any scene we’ve ever done, and I think if you listen closely in the final cut, you can hear me typing feverishly on my laptop just offscreen.

The other moment that really scared me was the final one, because I knew we had to get it right. In a season that starts with Innie Mark bolting from an elevator to find his Outie’s wife, we’d long known that his final act would be to turn his back on her, prioritizing his own life and love over that of his “real” self. It had to be both triumphant and agonizing, and communicate the complexity of the journey he, Helly and Gemma have been on. I wrote a bunch of versions with a lot of dialogue, but in the end, we realized that the whole story could be told on the faces of these incredible actors. I’ve never been so proud to have written a scene that mostly just consists of people saying “Mark.”

The episode that takes place between these two scenes is wild, often psychotic, and my favorite chapter of the show so far. Between Milchick and Kier’s vaudeville routine and the elevator murder oopsie, it’s a lot of disparate flavors, but I think it’s held together by the emotional core established in that first and last scene. You could say these moments serve as bookends for the episode, but personally I prefer to think of it as a sandwich.

And Erickson

Read the script below.