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. Next up: Episode 9, “The After Hours.” Devour feculence.
Crunching the Numbers
I have a feeling that Mr. Drummond probably haaaates the word “penultimate” when “next to last” would do. But no matter how many syllables you choose to assign to it, this week’s “The After Hours” is that episode for Season 2 of Severance—even if it doesn’t boast the kinds of showy flourishes typical for the lead-in to a finale.
There are no explosions jarring enough to move viewers to post, like, “OMG WTF #severance #stilleryousickmaniac” en masse on social media at minute 43 and a half. There are no murders—on-screen, anyway—no sudden rug pulls or unmaskings, no skip-level big bad boss coming out of the woodwork just yet. Instead, “The After Hours” confirmed some things we thought we knew, raised new questions we didn’t have before, and set the stage for Severance to go in any number of directions in next week’s finale.
We begin with Helena Eagan in a swimming pool, getting in some strokes before her ego gets liquidated by her father.
“We’re seeing to Mr. Bailiff,” Helena updates Jame as she eats the most important meal of the day off a tableau of a boy being held down against his will. That doesn’t sound particularly great for Irving, but Jame is more interested in hating on his daughter’s fussy food choices than furthering the Mr. Bailiff conversation.
At the office, Mr. Milchick congratulates Miss Huang, and by “congratulates” I mean that he commands of her: “Unveil.” She does as she’s told and reveals another Eaganian bust—just like the one Harmony Cobel hid all her Da Vinci codes in last episode—denoting the end of her Wintertide Fellowship. Is this a program specific to promising young girls? Maybe, maybe not, but so far, the two people we’ve known to have completed it are or were.
Miss Huang doesn’t have much reason to celebrate: Here she thought she’d get to finish the quarter playing with her water ring toss game and her theremin, and instead her bed is being shipped to the Arctic Circle and she has to smash her little toy to prove that she’s a big girl because that’s what the handbook says. (This part reminded me of the MTV game show Trashed.) “Again,” Milchick says, Herb Brooks style, as she does what she’s told. “Again.”
More From the Severed Floor
Inside their not particularly happy home, Gretchen tells Dylan the unsolicited truth: She kissed his innie, and she liked it. Or, as she later describes it to innie Dylan: “I told you about us.” And hey, tell me: Has there been a more tragic query in all of Severance than Zach Cherry’s innocent, heart-twisting reading of “Uh, was he glad for us?” in that moment? I didn’t screenshot it because it made me so sad that I had to fast-forward through it upon my second watch.
Inside every messed-up Lumon-adjacent relationship, there are two wolves, and Gretchen comes face-to-face with both. Her grumpy husband threatens to go in and quit—“I end his existence, how about that?”—while her sweet soulmate on the inside begs and pleads and positively screeches and presents a handmade ring and tells her that his life only started when they met, that all he has besides her is pencil erasers. And after she leaves, a heartsick innie Dylan gets to thinking about what he might be able and willing to erase.
Irving arrives home—from that phone booth?—and finds his freaked-out dog staring at Burt, who is paging through Irving’s notes. Like just about everyone who has ever snooped into someone’s personal journals, Burt is a little offended by an observation Irving scribbled down about him: that he “may have participated as a low-level Lumon enforcer or goon.”
“Lumon goon,” Burt says. “That stings! We never used words like that. With Lumon it’s very specific language.” He gives a nervous Irving no real choice but to join him for a car ride.
Elsewhere, ugh, looks like Gemma didn’t kill Dr. Mauer when she finally snapped and bludgeoned him a couple of episodes ago! That creepster merely has a Band-Aid on his face as he surveils the poor woman and tattles on Mark for not making new progress on Cold Harbor. He’s not the only one in search of Mark, though, who is in hot demand at the same time that he isn’t feeling so hot.
Milchick tells Drummond that Mark must be running late. Helly demands answers, but “nondisclosure policy forbids,” Milchick says. Even Devon, who’s physically next to her brother in a smelly car, is trying to locate the real Mark somewhere in there, the guy who responds well to lines like “I’m sorry, the wind was whistling over the hole in your skull, I didn’t quite get that.” They wait for Cobel in the woods.
Her arrival brings a wee bit of comedic relief: There’s something refreshing about the way the ScoutSibs interact with her quirks. “Even under the cover of dark, it’s perilous,” Cobel says grandly of their plan to hit up the magical birthing cabins to access Mark’s innie. “Oh, it’s perilous?” Mark mocks. But Cobel also has worse news. That Cold Harbor file that Mark’s innie is 96 percent of the way through finishing? “If you’ve completed it, well …” Cobel begins dramatically. “Well, what,” asks Mark, and I have to admit, I laughed for half a second at his exasperation. If Mark S. has completed Cold Harbor, well, that means “she’s already dead,” Cobel says.
On the severed floor, Dylan shows Helly the ring he made Gretchen. And despite a pep talk from Helly, their conversation eventually devolves into resentment. “If we’re so different from our outies, then how come we couldn’t tell when you were gone?” he taunts her. “Irving could,” Helly says. “Mark couldn’t,” Dylan shoots back, a low blow indeed, because hurt people hurt people. They split up, and in a way, the two switch their typical roles: Helly goes and finds the drawing of the dark hallway that Irving left for Dylan, while Dylan wanders the halls and thinks about resigning before his other self can quit. “Fuck this place,” he says.
Mr. Milchick can relate, even if he tends to put things differently. “I’m sure you know this is very disappointing and reeks of ingratitude,” he says as Dylan puts in his official Innie Resignation Request. Later, when Milchick is summoned by Mr. Drummond, he’s obsequious at first. “I thank you for your remonstration,” he says when he’s chastised for Mark’s absence. But he soon snaps when Drummond starts treating him the way Milchick had just treated Miss Huang, with commands and “Again! Again!”s.
Milchick is in the middle of apologizing for using big words when he stops and says: “Devour feculence,” in the bright, testing tone of a toddler who’s exploring new sounds. “It means ‘Eat shit,’ Mr. Drummond,” he helpfully explains. It’s an exchange that you know is going to spell trouble for him eventually but in the moment feels exquisite, like how medieval torture devices probably gave such a great stretch until the moment they really, really didn’t.
At Cobel’s command, Mark calls Milchick in an attempt to take a sick day, but he’s thrown off when Milchick wants to send a car to come pick him up. He’s already been warned that if Milchick “smells chicanery, he’ll lock you out of the building.” So Mark just … tells the truth, or a version of it, anyway: “OK, I’m not sick, I just needed a day,” he admits. “Isn’t that what Lumon’s all about? Balance? I mean, work is just work, right? Do you know what I mean, Mr. Milchick?” Judging by Milchick’s teary (!) response, I think maybe he does.
In the car, Burt tells Irving that he never hurt anyone during his time working at Lumon in the pre-severance days. He just drove the car, and he didn’t ask questions. Irving wants to know whether this is one of those drives. They arrive at a train station, where Burt has three instructions for Irving: (1) Get on the train, (2) don’t tell me where you’re getting off, and (3) don’t come back now, ya hear? What follows is one of three pop culture train-related scenes I can think of that have made me cry, though I’m sure I’m forgetting about a whole bunch of them:
- When Marla Hooch’s dad pantomimes the baseball swing as his little big hitter’s train pulls out of the station.
- With or without you, with or wiiiiiiithhhoouutttt youuuuuuuu (IYKYK; if you don’t, click at your own risk!)
- Irving telling Burt he’s never been loved; Irving boarding the train to wherever; Irving smiling a whole lot like his innie did, the very last time we saw him.
Back at Lumon, innie Dylan boards the elevator to the outside world. Will it be for the last time? Miss Huang, looking particularly childlike in those earmuffs, clutching that Eagan head like a teddy bear, waits to board the bus to her next opportunity. The elevator in the long, dark hallway opens. A shadowy figure appears behind Helly, who is busy trying to memorize Irving’s written route. Slenderman? Nah, just Jame, who says, “You tricked me” and “My Helly” and, just, ew.
At the birthing cabins, Cobel speaks to the guard in some sort of code. “Miss Marsha White, ninth floor … Specialties Department … I’m looking for a gold thimble,” things of that nature. It works, and soon innie Mark has been conjured, against his will, to be reminded that Your outie’s wife is alive, and also being tortured.
Unanswered Questions
What’s a mystery box show without them? Here’s what we can’t stop thinking about.
Did deadbeat Dylan have to sign off on that Innie Resignation Request form?
When Helly tried to give notice re: her position on the severed floor in Season 1, an answer came back from the great beyond. But in “The After Hours,” we crucially don’t get to see who or where Dylan is when he steps out of the elevator for a possible final time. Neither do we see whether Dylan’s outie was even asked for approval.
Would he grant it if he were? One would think that once outie Dylan cooled off a little, he would remember his experience at the door store, realize “You don’t wanna be out here,” and keep his innie toiling. On the other hand, maybe the mere existence of the request would annoy him enough to give the A-OK. Either way: Did the elevator doors opening for Dylan imply that the “Outie Response” section on the form got filled in? Tune in next week to find out.
Why does Jame Eagan wish his daughter would “take them raw”?
At first, I vibed with Jame Eagan’s obvious annoyance with Helena as she attended to her little personal pan egg bar party in his presence. That woman was slicing and dicing her way through that hard-boiled egg like she was eating her peas one at a time. Someone needed to say something. Down the hatch, girl, let’s go!
But then Jame spoke what he was actually thinking. “I wish you’d take them raw,” he said, and, uh, come again?
The simplest explanation is that he’s just a real stickler for family customs. A core daily component of the Kier Eagan diet back in his day was, we learned in an earlier episode, three raw eggs washed down via milk. And theories abound that Jame is Kier or at least contains some aspect of his consciousness. He lives in you …
Either way, it’s probably worth filing this incident away with other eggy happenings in the Severance world. Like Irving B. closing an egg into a book. (Whatever happened with that?) Or Mark and Gemma enduring an IVF cycle. Or the earnest words “Yeah, the egg bar is coveted as fuck.” (Poor Dylan, once motivated by such achievable delights.) When the goat herders expressed their curiosity about navels earlier this season, they mentioned marsupial pouches, but you know what other kind of creature doesn’t have belly buttons? The kind that lays eggs. Oh, and then there’s this, which is fun.
In 2022, Ben Stiller replied to a tweet about the egg bar scene and said he’d almost put the kibosh on it because he’s not an egg guy and “personally can’t deal.” But the man’s a soldier, so ultimately, he realized it was “necessary for the story.” You can’t make an omelet without scrambling a few brains.
Who are “Jame’s girls,” and what’s the “golden thimble”?
I don’t have an answer to the second question, even after googling a little. And I really don’t want to know the answer to the first—I’ve seen one too many fucked-up family trees lately. Doesn’t really seem like this whole thing is on the up-and-up, huh! Cobel’s cryptic exchange with the guard at the birthing cabins gave me flashbacks to the NYC neo-speakeasy era in the aughts. We should move on.
UPDATE: Hold the elevator! My many many thanks to the folks who filled in this gap. Your outie enjoys watching The Twilight Zone.
Where is Miss Huang being sent?
“The Gunnel Eagan Empathy Center in Svalbard,” according to the closed captions. Let’s take this one noun at a time.
I can’t say I’m familiar with ol’ Gunnel, to the extent that I don’t know whether that’s a first name or last. Eagan—that we know.
The Empathy Center? OK, now that’s a spooky set of words, as anyone who has ever dealt with self-centered I’m-such-an-empath types can attest. What kind of evil concern-trolling passive-aggression is being cooked up at that spot? Near the end of Season 1, Natalie noted that Lumon is close to creating “a revolution of kindness and empathy, with the human being in the center.” Don’t fret, Miss Huang: Maybe it will be just like seeing Phish at Sphere.
And finally, Svalbard—ayup, that’s up there, all right, a “Norwegian archipelago” where the Arctic Ocean meets the Atlantic and the dominant and/or dormant industries have included whaling, mining, research, fending off Russians, and polar bear tourism. It’s also the home of the “Svalbard Global Seed Vault,” quite the strategic reserve. I guess if you’re in the business of siring worlds, this is the place to be postgraduation.
Will the Cold Harbor file be completed?
So much rides on so little. Four measly percentage points, the gap between Mark’s 96 percent progress refining the Cold Harbor data file and its completion. You can imagine a finale that ends just as the project is finished, extending the mystery into Season 3. And look, I’ll always love a climactic progress bar; I was raised on the Net!
But to its credit, Severance didn’t end Season 1 with a similar trick, like fading to black right as the OTC switch was flipped, and it didn’t end the penultimate episode this season with some wild and crazy big happening. So maybe this whole Cold Harbor hullabaloo will, by this time next week, be like an old rumor: important context but yesterday’s news.
Will Mark keep his promise to Milchick and clock in tomorrow?
I say yes. Maybe he’ll run into Jame Eagan in the bathroom, talk some shop!
OK, but if he doesn’t, who is department head in his absence?
Dylan! Ah, wait, right, maybe not.
So then I guess … Helly? Heh. As the woman herself might say: What the fuck?
Reddit Theory of the Week
The week before the finale is an excellent time to brush up on some of Severance’s supplemental content, like “the Lexington Letter” and Ricken’s book. Once you have, hop (or waddle) over to Reddit and eat your heart out!
Employee of the Week
We love a work-life balance king, don’t we, folks? Mr. Milchick has my attention after this episode: Might everybody’s favorite Organization Man finally be catching on that the institution will never love you back? What I enjoy most about Milchick in “The After Hours” is how he’s beginning to weaponize his institutional knowledge of company policy to build a shield around himself. Tried-and-true middle manager strat. The way he says, “I am manager of the severed floor” makes him sound like the mother of dragons; the way he follows “to put that monosyllabically …” with 13 actual monosyllables is music to the ears.
PS: As a double dactyl enthusiast—I’m actually surprised this whimsical rules-and-regulations-ass rhyme scheme isn’t some staple of the Severance universe; it seems like precisely the kind of puzzle these Kier freaks would enjoy—I want to thank Milchick for reminding me of a word to add to my arsenal. As a token of my appreciation, here’s a mini-recap of the man’s character arc in “The After Hours,” all according to the protocol, of course.
Feculance? Truculence!
Mr. Seth Milchick
pushed back on (and showed!)
managerial rage.
Spitting at Drummond so
monosyllabically?
His next review may well
have a new page.
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.
This was a surprisingly vibrant episode! From the water ring game to the egg plate, from Milchick’s particularly verdant bonsai tree to this slammin’ sunset, it was good to taste the rainbow a little.
Make no mistake: “The After Hours” was still as grim and depressing as ever. But it had some legit pops of color, like a 2014 living room reveal from millennial DIY bloggers. (Complimentary!)
And what’s that saying? Red sky at night, sailor’s delight? Maybe Irving and that good boy of his will be OK after all.
