The music dance experience is officially canceled—but Severance returns. After three long years, the macrodata refinement crew is back on our screens. Follow along each week as we break down each episode of Severance Season 2. In the process, we’ll try to piece together what the heck is going on at Lumon Industries.
Crunching the Numbers
You’re not alone if watching last week’s Season 2 premiere had you feeling a bit like an innie who learns it’s been five months since their last visit to the severed floor. It’s been … how long? Who are all these people again? What, exactly, is going on? (For us outies, it had been three years since our last check-in.)
Fortunately, this week’s episode took us back to the immediate aftermath of Season 1—that is, the minutes, hours, and days that followed Mark S., Helly R., and Irving B.’s jailbreak in cahoots with deskmate Dylan G., in which the three innies spent 39 minutes in the middle of their outies’ lives, sowing havoc that we learned last week swiftly turned into a PR debacle for Lumon Industries.
Enter Helena Eagan—Helly’s outie—as this season’s primary villain. Following the revelation that she is the heir apparent to the Kingdom of Keir, Helly spent her time on the outside insisting to pro-severance movers and shakers at a swanky Lumon gala that she and her fellow innies are being tortured. Then Milchick sawed through Dylan’s favorite belt downstairs, and the innies’ actions came home to roost.
Season 1 established that Helena is not exactly a friend to her innie self. Helly repeatedly tried to convince her outie to let her resign from Lumon, going so far as to attempt to take her own life—only for Helena to send her right back into the office every time. Now we see Helena—stung, no doubt, by her father calling her a “fetid moppet” (?!)—attempting cleanup.
Milchick is dispatched to fire Dylan and Irving, while Ms. Cobel is offered a spot on the newly formed Severance Advisory Council. But none of this goes as planned. Cobel demands an apology, then says she’ll need time to think about the new gig. And as we saw last week, Mark S. breaks bad and demands that the Lumon board bring back Helly, Dylan, and Irving, which it eventually does—though not before Dylan’s outie is forced to take a long, hard look at what leaving Lumon would be like.
During his unemployment, poor Dylan went to interview at Great Doors, psyching himself up for ye olde door business only to be shut down by his interviewer, Mr. Saliba, after admitting to having been a severed employee at Lumon. “They make their doors in-house,” Saliba says of Lumon. “It’s fucking hubris.” (Can we get some more Adrian Martinez in this world? Please and thank you.)
“We need a certain kind of person here, Mr. George, not a certain kind of two people,” Saliba continues before ushering Dylan out of the office. “I mean, what do you think this is, a carpet factory? You want to circumcise your brain, that’s your business. But it doesn’t mean I have to hire you, and, personally, I think it’s abhorrent.”
Mark is, once again, considering resigning from Lumon on his own—but Milchick (presumably with the help of Lumon security chief Drummond, who listened in on Mark’s lunch with his sister when he outlined his plans) manages to woo him back with a raise and a basket of tropical fruits. “They convinced you to stay,” Cobel deadpans later on. “Was a pineapple involved?” (Lumon sure seems to have a fruit fixation.)
As for Cobel: We see Mark’s sister, Devon (sister of the year, decade, and century?), and her husband, Ricken, the world’s most emotional brother-in-law, try to make sense of Mark’s innie’s appearance and a subsequent visit from Milchick that rather transparently was intended as damage control. “We have no punishments at Lumon,” Milchick tells a distrustful Devon, who pushes Mark to look further into the Gemma mystery.
Ricken, meanwhile, has a solution for the ex–severed floor head whom he and Devon knew as a fraudulent lactation consultant named Mrs. Selvig. “Perhaps Cobelvig would be a helpful nomenclature?” he suggests.
Yes. Done. Hello, Ms. Cobelvig.
Unanswered Questions
What’s a mystery box show without them?
Who is Dylan’s wife (and is she Gwendolyn Y.)?
Perhaps I’m still reeling from the second season of The Old Man, which turns heavily on Alia Shawkat’s off-camera phone calls with Jeff Bridges’s and John Lithgow’s characters. But after Dylan’s failed interview at Great Doors, he chats briefly with his wife on the phone—and her voice sure sounds, to me at least, like Shawkat’s. The season premiere teed up Lumon’s as-yet-unseen on-site suites for innies to spend time with their outie families. Could that be Gwendolyn Y.’s music? Either way, you don’t cast Shawkat if you’re not going to use Shawkat.
Relatedly, what will happen to Gwendolyn Y., Mark W., and Dario R.?
We learned in the premiere that Mark S.’s attempt to beg the Lumon board to bring back Helly R., Dylan G., and Irving B. to the macrodata refinement team was successful some five months after their innies broke out. Over two episodes, we’ve barely seen the trio that briefly replaced them: Gwendolyn Y., Bob Balaban’s Mark W., and Stefano Carannante’s Dario R.
This episode confirmed that they were apparently given the boot. But they won’t all go quietly—Mark W. broke a fucking lease in Grand Rapids for this job, for crying out loud! He will sue! In this episode, we learned that one of the three came from abroad (presumably Dario, whose English skills are, er, a work in progress) and that the other two were “laid off from 5X.” 5X could be a department, or it could be the name for Lumon’s Grand Rapids office (or at least its severed floor)—which would make Dylan’s hypothetical marriage to Gwendolyn less likely. Surely we’ll be seeing more of all of them soon.
Why is Burt spying on Irving?
In “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig,” we see Irving step out of his apartment building to make a call at a nearby phone booth (suspicious!) while Burt secretly watches him from inside his car (even more suspicious!). Irving’s outie doesn’t know what his innie learned about Burt—namely, that Burt is already in a loving relationship (nor does he know that he and Burt had a simmering romance on the severed floor). But he does still have a map with Burt’s full name scrawled alongside his address. Did outie Irving make contact in a way that caught outie Burt’s attention? Maybe, given Irving was pounding on his front door in the final moments of his innie jailbreak—but then why would Burt have Irving’s address? Wouldn’t Irving’s outie self have come to and seen only a stranger (be it Burt or his partner) and presumably made his apologies and gone home?
One of the big reveals of the Season 1 finale is that Irving’s outie had been researching Lumon, compiling documents about the company and its severed employees, and going out of his way to hide his findings in the false bottom of a locked storage chest in his apartment. The secrecy in particular suggests that he might be working with the anti-severance activists we saw in Season 1. Is he the activists’ mole inside Lumon? If so, is it possible that Burt is also involved in anti-severance activism and that there is a preexisting (and, presumably, non-romantic) relationship between outie Burt and outie Irving?
Reddit Theory of the Week
“Do you know something about Gemma?” Mark demands of Ms. Cobel in the closing moments of the episode, just before Cobel drives off in a rage.
She does, of course, know something about Gemma. Back in Season 1, we saw Cobel scheduling bonus wellness sessions for Mark with creepy in-house therapist Ms. Casey. We now know that Ms. Casey is Gemma—Mark’s wife, who he believed died in a fiery car wreck more than two years ago, a loss that prompted his decision to go through with the severance procedure.
On the one hand: How could he be wrong about Gemma’s death, given he was the one to identify her body? On the other: As a satisfied Cobel looked in on Mark’s session with Ms. Casey in Season 1, she remarked to a skeptical Milchick that they didn’t recognize one another. That means Ms. Casey is not an eerie doppelgänger—this really is Gemma Scout, Mark’s very much still living wife.
Which is to say that their interactions were, at least in part, a test of the efficacy of severance. Before the car crash, Gemma taught Russian literature. Perhaps she did have some innate skill at talk therapy, or her innie self trained up. But what seems more likely is that her presence on the severed floor was a test.
That leaves two possibilities. One: Lumon is adding grievously wounded people to its severed workforce, presumably without their knowledge or consent. Or two: Gemma faked her death and willingly signed up for the experiment.
If the first of those two possibilities is true (which seems likelier, given that everything we know about Gemma’s life and marriage before the crash seems to have been positive), is her outie being held against her will? Granted, this particular possibility seems like too dark of a plot line even for Severance.
Here’s another option. Remember Petey’s attempt to map the severed floor in Season 1? One corner of his map was marked with question marks and the phrase “some people might live here.” If you’re severed but live full-time on the severed floor, your theoretical outie self would be none the wiser. What if Gemma has no idea that she’s severed at all?
Employee of the Week: Helena Eagan
How far is Helena willing to go to cover up Season 1’s innie breakout? Pretty far, it seems.
Once her outie self returned, it appears that she and her Lumon team launched immediately into damage control, seizing all video evidence of her innie’s plea for help and issuing a video statement claiming that the outburst was the result of mixing alcohol with “a non-Lumon medication for an arm rash.” But she’s not the only one she’s willing to see take a hit: “Let Kier guide your hand,” Helena tells Milchick—effectively dispatching him to fire Dylan and Irving and to keep Mark in line.
Still, there are signs that Helena might not be the menace that Helly has long believed her to be. Helena watches a recording of Helly and Mark’s last innie interaction before the breakout, chuckling to herself as Helly suggests that they might be married in their outie lives. She looks less pleased when she sees Helly leap out of the elevator to give him a kiss—though maybe this is the dawning realization that her innie is, in fact, a person.
Design Porn
Severance isn’t just a story; it’s an atmosphere. Each week we’re highlighting our favorite looks captured by the show’s eerily gorgeous production design and cinematography.
“You remind me of me, Dylan,” Saliba tells him as the camera sets up to show the pair looking bizarrely like one another, down to their glasses, beard, and suit cut, as door after door sails by in the background.
