The music dance experience is officially canceled—but Severance has returned. 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
In the opening minutes of Episode 6, “Attila,” Mark is sitting with Reghabi in his home, unpacking the visions of Gemma he saw at the end of last week’s installment. It’s the first time that Mark has seen his absent wife as Ms. Casey, her estranged Lumon form, and it rattles him (for good reason). He’s had no choice all this time but to try to accept Gemma’s death (or numb himself to it), but the reality that he might not have to anymore is beginning to sink in. “Bargaining,” Mark says to Reghabi. “You know what that is?”
“What do you mean?” she replies.
“Well, it’s one of the stages,” he explains, referring to the stages of grief. “You think about all the things you’d do, all the ways you’d change to get that person back. You’d drink less. You’d listen more. It’s dumb, but you do it anyway.”
“It’s normal,” Reghabi says reassuringly.
“Yeah,” Mark replies. “But for me, it might actually happen.”
It’s easy to forget what a wild emotional roller coaster Mark has been on ever since Gemma supposedly died in a car accident. His pain had become such a burden that he tried to sever himself from it, if only from nine to five, bargaining with grief itself by trading part of his body and mind for temporary reprieves. And that deal is now on the verge of paying off in the most unexpected of ways.
In Episode 6, Mark and Reghabi take a huge, risky step in speeding up his reintegration process to hasten Mark’s true reunion with Gemma. But before we get into all of that high drama, let’s recap what precedes it during an especially chaotic workday at Lumon Industries.
Everyone on the Irving-less MDR team is deep in their feelings in “Attila.” Even the ever-stoic Mr. Milchick is going through something right now, as he really takes his first performance review to heart. (More on that later.) It’s a tough day at the office for just about everyone, and—once again—very little macrodata is refined. At the same time, a week after Valentine’s Day, love is in the air on Severance.
For much of the second season, and dating back to Season 1, every member of MDR has had their own romantic storyline. And things are getting very spicy in and outside of the workplace, leading to numerous potential HR violations—not that innies have HR reps—and a Lumon Triforce of love triangles.
For Mark S. and Helly R., things have been … complicated lately. They shared their first kiss just before the Overtime Contingency Protocol was triggered at the end of Season 1, and Mark almost worked up the courage to kiss her again in the hallway during Episode 3. Then, Mark and Helly had sex at the ORTBO. (It was a pretty big deal; lots of mushy things were said both before and after the act.) Except that wasn’t Helly; it was Helena Eagan pretending to be her own innie.
Mark responded to this disturbing discovery by giving the real Helly the cold shoulder once she returned to the office. (As unfair as this was to Helly, we should cut Mark some slack. After all, he pretty much has the emotional intelligence of a 2-year-old.) And as Milchick very kindly reminded Mark at the end of Episode 5, Mark has yet to inform Helly of what happened between him and Helena.
In this week’s episode, Mark finally tells Helly the truth. As they stand huddled in a bathroom stall discussing what to do about the secret map to the testing floor that Irving left behind for Dylan, Mark confesses in his own, impressively awkward way: “Helly, we shared vessels.”
Of course, since they’re not a pair of cargo ships, Helly has no idea what he’s talking about. “What’s that?” she replies.
“Well, we … we had, uh, sex,” Mark wills himself to say in a whisper.
The conversation starts off funny but quickly turns devastating thanks to the continued brilliance of Britt Lower. Helly thinks Mark is referring to himself and Ms. Casey at first, but as he elaborates, it finally dawns on her that he’s talking about him and Helena. Mark tries to explain himself, telling Helly how he thought it was her he was sharing vessels with. But to Helly, the reality is simple : “But it wasn’t me,” she says before taking a walk through the office to process it all.
Body ownership has always been a central theme in Severance, and more often than not it’s been explored through Helly’s character. The severance procedure and what it does to innies is essentially a form of human trafficking, a crime committed by Lumon but abetted by every outie—whether they fully realize it or not. (Helena, of course, realizes this all too well.) In Season 1, Helly decides that she wants to quit Lumon almost as soon as she starts, but Helena denies her “request” just as quickly. She attempts to smuggle messages to her outie, and even threatens to use a paper cutter to chop off her fingers unless she’s allowed to record another resignation request. And Helena returns a filmed response with equal aggression. “I am a person, you are not,” Helena says in Season 1, Episode 4. “I make the decisions, you do not. And if you ever do anything to my fingers, know that I will keep you alive long enough to horribly regret that. Your resignation request is denied.”
Helly goes as far as to hang herself in the elevator shaft, but she still finds herself back at work days later. She has no freedom of choice in her life, her death, or her own body. And now she’s learned that Helena has invaded what little she did have—her identity—in order to use it to get to Mark.
“What sucks is that she got to have that, and I didn’t,” Helly says to Mark after she’s had some time to reflect. “That she used me to trick my friends. Used my body to get close to you. That she dresses me in the morning like I’m a baby. That she controls me, and this company, and all of us. It’s disgusting.”
As violated as she feels, Helly understands that Mark was also a victim in Helena’s deception, and she decides to take control of her body while she can. Rather than having Mark describe to her all the lurid details about what happened between him and Helena, Helly tells him that she wants to make memories of her own. (What a forward young woman she is!) So they find themselves a deserted office space and use the plastic wrapping covering the vacant desks to pitch their own tent (so to speak) to, uh, share vessels in.
As Mark and Helly sneak off together to find baby goats, Dylan G. and his outie’s wife, Gretchen, meet again in what has become their (sort of) private visitation suite. Across the second season, we’ve witnessed Dylan distance himself from the rest of the MDR team, often opting not to help his friends so as not to risk this special new perk that he has yet to inform them about. But we’re also beginning to see Gretchen distance herself from her real husband as she gains a greater understanding of innie Dylan’s (limited) autonomy, and the ways that he differs from the man she married.
While it was strange at first for Gretchen to see a version of her husband who doesn’t even recognize her, it seems as if she’s starting to appreciate this unusual opportunity to essentially meet him again, without the baggage and complications of the real world. “I sometimes wonder if you’re just not happy,” Gretchen laments, as she describes all of the phases that her husband has gone through.
She’s still adjusting to the concept of her Dylan being distinct from this Dylan, who treats her with the sweet innocence of a boy with a crush, and whose childlike wonder doesn’t infringe on his self-assuredness or competence. “I wish we could really be together,” Dylan tells her. “Like, all the time.”
“I mean, we are,” Gretchen responds. “Aren’t we?”
“You and him are,” he says. “But I’m not.”
It’s all incredibly sad on so many levels. Even that little shrug that Zach Cherry does as he’s delivering this line is heartbreaking:
Through moments like these, Gretchen is beginning to see what it must be like for Dylan to be able to live only vicariously, through the stories that Gretchen tells him about their “offspring” or what she and his outie have done together. But to turn this somber moment into a memory that will likely fuel the rest of his work week, Dylan requests a hug, which escalates into kissing (as Miss Huang probably watches through some hidden camera).
The wildest part about all of this, though, is how Gretchen lies about it when outie Dylan asks her how it went. She takes a second to respond to his question, and then tells her husband that Lumon canceled the appointment. Gretchen even says, “I didn’t see him … you,” catching herself from distinguishing Dylan’s selves as separate people. Is this the start of an affair? Is Gretchen pursuing a throuple?
Speaking of complicated entanglements, “Attila” offers one more. Outie Irving returns to Burt and Fields’s home, with an actual invitation for dinner this time. Although these versions of Irving and Burt hardly know each other, there’s an immediate spark between them, along with what appears to be a mutual fascination in each other due to their knowledge of their innies’ relationship. Fields, played by the great John Noble, is jealous and resentful of their connection even before he watches his husband delight in the company of their dinner guest.
Before Fields kills the whole vibe by asking whether they thought their innies had sex in the office, the married couple share the story behind Burt’s decision to get severed. Between all of the laughs and goo-goo eyes that Burt and Irving make at each other across the table, Burt also explains the origins of his and his husband’s pet nickname for each other, “Attila,” as something they came up with as an extension of “hon” (or hun) 10 years ago. But Fields corrects him, attaching some juicy context to his assertion. “It wasn’t 10 years ago, it was 20,” he says. “Because I remember we were having drinks with your Lumon partner. Quite startled him.”
Burt’s warm demeanor fades as he shoots a sharp look at Fields. “Didn’t the first severed office open 12 years ago?” Irving asks amid the awkward silence.
Burt confirms that this was the case and tries to change the subject. Yet as Irving leaves their home at the end of the episode, Burt takes an extra step to try to ensure that Irving didn’t make too much of the comment. “He’ll be embarrassed tomorrow,” Burt says of Fields. “You know, he … he gets fuzzy. Like saying I worked at Lumon 20 years ago, which is, of course, before severance even existed.”
As Irving walks to his car, the episode—whose title also draws attention to this little snafu—ends with Burt looking very shady on his doorstep. He has a solemn expression as he watches Irving leave, and he pauses briefly before closing the door again. Burt may have been an employee for Lumon, but it seems like his connections to the company may run much deeper. And with Irving and Burt agreeing to see each other again some time, with or without Fields, Severance may soon provide new insight into the company from a perspective outside of the office.
The two halves of the sixth episode are split almost evenly between life in the office and the outside world, mirroring the existence of a severed employee. The switch comes after Mark’s nose starts bleeding (mid-makeout session with Helly) and they go to Miss Huang to have him checked out. While Mark is getting his blood pressure taken, his reality begins to blur and overlap with his outie’s, a phenomenon that has been occurring ever since he reintegrated. One moment he’s sitting with Miss Huang, and the next he’s in his basement, being examined by Reghabi. The sudden transition was Mark experiencing another crossover memory, Reghabi tells him, and a recent one. “You’ll feel gaps in time until it all comes back together,” she explains.
To accelerate this process, the former Lumon surgeon wants to try to flood the severance chip lodged in Mark’s skull, a procedure that carries only a slight chance of him hemorrhaging. (We all saw what happened to poor Petey in Season 1.) Although Mark gets fed up with the whole process and storms out of his house to grab dinner, a strange and unsettling interaction with Helena—who surprises him at the Chinese restaurant—changes his mind instantly.
Reghabi proceeds with her plan, ripping her way into Mark’s noggin to overload the chip with a mystery fluid delivered through a disturbingly long needle. As soon as she succeeds, seemingly without complications, Mark’s memories begin to cross over with greater speed and intensity. Just as he’s starting to freak out and grab his throbbing head, Devon arrives at his house, and Mark disregards Reghabi’s orders to ignore her. Episode 6’s big cliffhanger comes as Mark loses control of his motor functions while flickering between almost indiscernible flashes of Gemma and Helly, just before crashing to the floor in a seizure. With Devon—and Reghabi, emerging from the basement—rushing to his aid, Mark’s sister is finally being clued in on how he’s been trying to infiltrate Lumon. How’s that for a rude introduction?
Unanswered Questions
What’s a mystery box show without them? Here’s what we can’t stop thinking about.
Who is Burt, really?
We’ve already covered a lot of ground with this question, so we won’t dwell too much more on it, but this is the biggest mystery after “Attila” (Other than the matter of whether or not Mark just died on us, which seems unlikely.) Before “Attila,” we didn’t know much about Burt Goodman beyond his innie’s relationship with Irving, and how he’d been working in O&D for nearly seven years before he was forced into retirement. What with a drunken Fields revealing that Burt was already involved with Lumon up to eight years before the severance procedure was invented, we have to wonder: Who the hell is this guy?
It seems unlikely that Burt would double back to Fields’s supposed slip-up if it was truly just the rambling of a drunken old man, so Burt must have some long-established relationship with the company. Burt and Fields tell Irving about how they went to church one day and heard a sermon about severance, in which the pastor suggested that innies are complete individuals with their own souls to be judged separately from their outie. Their hope was that Burt’s innie could go to heaven while Burt’s outie, the “scoundrel” that he once was, burned in hell. But it seems like you’d be much more inclined to undergo such a drastic procedure late in life if you already had either a connection to or stake in the company that performs it.
Why is Mr. Drummond investigating Irving?
The other strange, unexplained part of outie Irving’s subplot is the presence of Mr. Drummond, who spends Episode 6 rummaging around Irving’s apartment. He’s timed his visit such that he has the place to himself while Irving enjoys his dinner with Burt and Fields, and he finds the chest that contains evidence of Irving’s own investigation into Lumon Industries. Drummond reads through the same list on which innie Irving found Burt’s address in the Season 1 finale, which includes information on severed employees, with handwritten notes about some of them.
We still don’t know that much about outie Irving, his obsession with the black hallway to Lumon’s testing floor, or who he’s been trying to communicate with every time he’s gone to the phone booth to relay updates about Lumon or his innie. But Drummond and Lumon are now onto him, possibly as a result of innie Irving outing (in-ing?) Helena Eagan at the ORTBO. What comes next for Irving could be even worse than what happened to his innie. One way or another, we may uncover more about who he really is soon enough.
What is Wintertide?
One of the most bizarre mysteries of the second season was introduced in the premiere, when Mark returned to the Lumon office to find a literal child in Mr. Milchick’s former role as deputy manager of the severed floor. Everyone from Dylan to Mark W. has wondered aloud what Miss Huang is doing in this job, and her fun fact about having been a crossing guard was the most we had to go on. Until now.
“I feel I should remind you, you cannot graduate from this fellowship until I have deemed you Wintertide material,” Milchick tells Miss Huang with a stern tone. “This will mean using your time well, focusing on your duties, and eradicating from your essence childish folly.”
There’s a lot to unpack here, and not just because Milchick is still using those big words. Milchick finally reveals that Miss Huang is at the office to complete some form of Lumon fellowship, but as always, Severance answers its questions with more questions. What in the world is Wintertide?
We can’t discern much from the name itself, aside from Severance’s unending love for archaic words and literary terms. But the knowledge that Miss Huang is here as part of a fellowship solves at least one part of the mystery surrounding her. Harmony Cobel was indoctrinated into Kier’s teachings and the Eagans’ cult-like society at a young age, and it seems as if Miss Huang could be in a similar Lumon pipeline. We haven’t seen Harmony since Episode 3, but her evolving story line may eventually inform what we know about Miss Huang, or vice versa.
Why is Helena stalking Mark?
We mostly skipped over this scene in my (lengthy) recap section. Let’s talk about it a bit.
Not long after Helena sleeps with Mark at the ORTBO, she just so happens to arrive at the same Chinese restaurant that he’s eating at, and chooses a seat directly in his line of sight. She then proceeds to blatantly flirt with him (including a light-hearted offer to come home with her to meet her father, Jame), getting way too personal with someone she’s supposedly just met. Helena mentions Mark’s dead wife, calling her by the wrong name and saying that she and Mark should hang out sometime to talk about his OTC experience (?). The whole interaction is desperate and deeply embarrassing for Helena, who also flexes her status as basically being the head of Lumon. The Ringer’s Jodi Walker said it best: Helena really may be “a loser incel who just wants to feel love.”
But we do have to ask: What does she really want? Is she just trying to hook up with outie Mark to pursue that coveted throuple that Cobel was (allegedly) after? Or does she have some ulterior motive related to innie Mark’s near-completion of Cold Harbor? If her goal is the former, she might want to consider giving the reins back to Helly, because this first effort was so rough it made Mark decide that the risk of hemorrhaging didn’t sound so bad.
Reddit Theory of the Week
OK, so I’m going to cheat a bit this week to shout-out a Reddit post that argues that some theories are missing out on the core messages of the series. Now, I love a good theory as much as the next guy—they’re a natural byproduct of any well-written mystery series. But a lot of Severance theories that suggest that characters like Milchick or Miss Huang are secretly severed, or clones, overlook the show’s tremendous storytelling in favor of rushing to the solutions to its many mysteries.
As the Redditor mentions, there’s a lot of rich material in something like the show’s exploration of Milchick and the kind of corporate racism he’s facing. (And in episodes like this one, we see how it’s starting to get to him. My guy’s hand was shaking after clipping all of those papers.) The theories are fun, but this Redditor offers a useful reminder to credit the writers for the remarkable job they’ve been doing to set up all of these fascinating mysteries, deliver satisfying answers, and give us deeper problems to ponder along the way.
Employee of the Week: Seth Milchick
Performance reviews are never easy, but I can’t imagine what they’re like when they happen once a month and can last upwards of six hours. That’s what Milchick had to deal with in last week’s episode, when he received his first performance review as MDR’s manager. And that’s not even accounting for the egregious gift he recently received from Lumon: “inclusively recanonicalized paintings” of Kier in Blackface.
But Milchick responded this week with the kind of vision, verve, and humility that would make (Black?) Kier Eagan proud. Although he started Episode 6 by using more of the “big words” that earned him one of the three contentions in his report, Milchick spends the rest of his day working to improve on his perceived shortcomings. Someone complained about his paper clips being placed back-to-front instead of front-to-back? No sweat, he’s already locked himself in the back room of his office, getting reps in like he’s practicing his jump shot at the gym after a bad loss. I mean, look at how high these stacks of paper are (and notice that cross-arm motion in his form!):
Most impressively, Milchick breaks out a mirror and tries to address the complaint about big words. As the camera zooms in on the mirror for a close-up on Milchick’s face, he recites a line that’s similar to what he had said to Miss Huang—“You must eradicate from yourself childish folly”—and reduces it to simpler terms. “You must abandon childish things,” becomes “you must grow up,” until Milchick whittles the phrasing all the way down to just “grow.” (He may have oversimplified it now, but it’s hard to deny his intense, slightly scary effort.)
Of course, the most important demerit Milchick received in his performance review concerned how he’d been handling his employees, including how he’d failed to quell their "curiosity or idling” with his kindness reforms. He promised he would be “tightening the leash,” but here he is talking to himself in the mirror as if he’s the Green Goblin while everyone left in MDR is getting freaky in the office. But, hey, two out of three is a great start!
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.
Throughout the series, Severance has featured all kinds of shots or production designs that symbolize or allude to the show’s theme of duality, and its core concept of splitting oneself in two. One of the most prominent examples came in the series premiere, when we saw Mark’s fish tank, which features one red fish and one blue fish, separated by a border. (Sounds a bit like the pills in The Matrix, doesn’t it?) But near the beginning of Episode 6, we get a different view of Mark’s fish tank as he experiences a crossover memory while standing in the kitchens at the office and in his home. And this time, only the blue fish is visible:
Later in the episode, we also see the busted signage of the Chinese restaurant, Zufu, with only half of it lit up:
And then there’s this one:
OK, so maybe this doesn’t fit with the others, but it’s only right that we end this recap by appreciating the ingenuity of the design here. Now that’s a tent to share vessels in. (Sorry, I don’t think this innuendo will ever get old to me.) We’ll see you next week.
