The Two Marks

In my post yesterday about the Severance finale, I made passing reference to a particular scene which I argued was reflective of the show’s political nature. Today, I wanted to say a little bit more about the conversation between Mark Scout and Mark S. that takes place entirely through alternating recordings on the same video camera.

Let’s state the premise up front: two people with presumably, or at least potentially, conflicting interests engaged in a conversation which takes place across a terrain of differential power and privilege—if you wouldn’t call that politics I don’t know what you would call it.

Mark Scout talks to Mark S. from within all the power and privilege he assumes is his by right. He doesn’t view Mark S. as a person to whom he has granted even half a life with any of the agency that entails because Mark Scout doesn’t actually view Mark S. as a whom in the first place. What becomes very clear, both to us and to Mark S., is that Mark S. exists to do what Mark Scout wants him to do.

Yes, Mark Scout promises Mark S. that as soon as Gemma is free, he will complete the reintegration procedure. Problem is, Mark S. has no idea what that means for him, and anyway he never agreed to reintegration. No one asked him, and it’s evident to Mark S. that it never even occurred to Mark Scout that he might have the right of consent. It’s evident, too, that Mark Scout in fact does not know how reintegration will go for either them and, worse, didn’t really think about it.

One of the ongoing threads over the course of the problematic Dollhouse, which I’ve been rewatching, is the idea that the Actives are not simply blank versions of their original consciousness, but people in and of themselves and in their own right. Or, this is expressly discussed when it comes to Echo if not so much also for November, Sierra, or Victor (let alone Whiskey). In the end, some degree of reintegration of Caroline’s original consciousness occurs, and the only reason any of Echo remains is because there’s something special or unique about Caroline’s neurophysiology.

Still, in addition to Actives sometimes glitching and flashing on memories of their original consciousness, they’re clearly their own people, if somewhat deliberately simplified ones, accumulating their own experiences and therefore their own personalities with completely different interplays of nature and nurture as compared to their pre-wipe selfs.

Most of the Actives were recruited out of lives of trauma, with the promise that—somehow, in some hand-wavy manner—their contracted five years as Actives would help them move past that trauma. This should sound familiar because it’s precisely why Mark Scout signs up for the severance procedure.

(Tangentially, anyone who watched Dollhouse effectively spent all of Severance waiting for something like this season’s “Chikhai Bardo” from the moment Dichen Lachman’s Ms. Casey stepped onto the screen.)

What’s never truly considered either by Mark Scout or Caroline Farrell is that wiping or suppressing their own consciousness doesn’t mean what’s left somehow is merely an automaton. What’s never considered by either of them is any sense of responsibility—both to and for—the resulting new person who emerges from their respective procedures. Responsibility to and responsibility for: this, too, is the stuff of politics.

By the end of Severance’s second season, it seems pretty evident that anyone who wasn’t already there probably should be considering the idea that the protagonist of the show isn’t Mark Scout, but Mark S. At the very least by what he shows of himself in his conversation with Mark S., Mark Scout instead now sits firmly among the many antagonists of Mark S. It’s worth noting that over the course of Dollhouse’s second season, Echo, too, comes to dislike what she’s been learning about her body’s original personage.

It’s simply a truism for those of us out here in the unsevered world that we have both a responsibility to and a responsibility for one another, with all of the complications entailed when it seems as if those interests are irreconcilable—or, more often, when the forces opposed to our solidarity try to convince us of such. This is the fundamental stuff of politics.

Severence through its divergent conversation between the two Marks extends that political truism to the technological implications of the severance conceit itself. Navigating how, or even if, these tangled responsibilities can be untangled (despite likely remaining intertwined, just as they are for us) perhaps will form the implicit politics of the coming season three.