How Long Has This Been Going On? And Other Severance Questions.

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Seven Severance Questions is a weekly attempt to digest the events of one of television’s twistiest shows by highlighting the weirdest, most confusing, and most important unresolved issues after each episode. There will be theories. Many will be unhinged.

Severance is just under halfway through its second season, and the show has flipped itself on its head no fewer than three times. Maybe four? First, it was the MDR team returning after the Waffle Party Rebellion of season one. Then, it was the Outie reveal from the second episode that showed how everything in the premiere came to be. Mark underwent the reintegration procedure. Helly’s Outie has been — surprise! — traipsing around as her Innie, possibly as a mole and possibly on a hunt for love and probably a little of both. Milchick drives a motorcycle. Cobel listens to the Stone Roses. You can be forgiven if you’re swimming a little bit here.

At some point, hopefully sooner than later, the show will have to pay off a few of the mysteries it takes great pleasure in introducing. It probably will. Again, we’re still in the front half of this season and everyone is still trying to grapple with what unfolded in the season-one finale. But for right now, it’s fun to zoom out and look at this from a satellite in space. Severance is the kind of show where the characters can be transported to the wilderness for an Outdoor Retreat Team Building Occurrence — ORTBO, which sounds like something Ricken would name a dog — where all sorts of supernatural things happen and a child operates an open-flame grill and … it feels normal? That’s still pretty cool. The answers can wait, at least a little bit longer. For now, it’s more fun to ask the questions.

Speaking of which …

How long has Helly been an impostor?

There was a school of thought back at the beginning of this season that Helly R. had gone back to the severed floor as her Outie, Helena Eagan, and was down there to spy on the rebellious MDR team on behalf of Lumon. I considered it at the time but pushed it aside both because I did not want to come in too hot after the first episode in a few years (“WELCOME BACK EVERYONE IS FAKE AND/OR ROBOTS”) and because I figured the whole undertaking would require too many leaps. It would mean Helena — an heiress and executive, not a seasoned undercover operative, as far as we know — would need to study closely everything Helly did and knew so as not to trigger the suspicions of the already suspicious co-workers who knew her Innie self better than she did. It would mean that the look in her eyes when she saw Helly R. kiss Mark was not just jealousy that her Innie had discovered a personal connection she couldn’t grasp in her tightly wound real life but also, possibly, the flickers of an infatuation that could smash the severed and non-severed worlds together in a way that gets progressively yuckier as you think about it. It seemed like, frankly, a lot.

What I did not consider, though, and this is admittedly on me, is that maybe she’d just do it and be bad at it and blow her cover a few episodes later by being mean to Irv at a spooky wilderness retreat and get herself almost drowned in an icy creek after having sex in a tent with Mark. Let’s go ahead and call that an oopsie on my end.

The implications for this going forward make my head hurt a little, in more of a good way than a “just had an experimental brain procedure done on me in a makeshift lab” way. A lot of it depends on how the Glasgow Block works. Is it something that has been flipped on and off before? Is it something they can keep flipping on and off going forward? How do Dylan and Mark — especially Mark, holy heck — explain any of this to Helly’s Innie? Can they ever trust her Innie going forward? Does the Glasgow Block work with other severed employees, or was that an Eagan special? I could go on. I probably will on my own.

The bigger issue is that this makes two episodes in a row that ended with series-altering twists. I genuinely have no clue where things go from this point. It’s kind of exciting.

On a scale of 1–10, how messed up is Mark going to be after this?

I’m tempted to say 10. It’s hard to imagine things getting weirder than “the wife he thought was dead could be alive as part of a wide-ranging conspiracy led by the company he allowed to perform a weird brain procedure on him that he just had a possibly disgraced scientist reverse in a creaky lab before learning that the work crush he just hooked up with in a tent was actually a high-level executive at the same company who was doing subterfuge and also might be obsessed with him.” But I also didn’t see any of that coming when I started watching this show. Let’s go ahead and put him at an 8 just to leave ourselves room to go up from here.

There’s also the question of how much the reintegration procedure complicates things. We haven’t gotten much clarification on that beyond Mark glitching out in the tent for a second. Does his Innie know what his Outie knows? Or does his Outie know what his Innie knows, or both or neither? There is so much up in the air right now.

The only thing I know for certain is that I would like to watch a soapy Good Wife–style network procedural that exists inside the world of Severance and follows a team of attractive employment lawyers just filing lawsuits as fast as they can over all of this.

This was all probably pretty weird for Milchick, too, right?

I don’t know why I’m going soft on Milchick all of a sudden. He really hasn’t given me a great reason to. All he’s done this season is manipulate people and do that ominous look he does and waste some marshmallows. But still, there I was, thinking back on this season and feeling kind of bad for him.

The events of the first season were weird enough, having to “supervise” the Eagan heiress after she was severed. But then in this episode, he knew it was really her and still had to keep up appearances as she laughed at his campfire story and make Miss Huang heave those perfectly good marshmallows into the flames. Just once I would like to see him drink a bottle or two of wine and tell someone what he really thinks about any of this.

I would also like to see the rest of the clothes he owns. Between the turtlenecks and leather jacket from earlier in the season and this week’s incredible white parka, the man has really stepped his game up from short-sleeve dress shirts and neckties. Show me that closet and get him a little drunk. These feel like reasonable requests.

Have we seen the last of Irv?

On one hand: If you’re gonna go out, tough to go out harder than almost freezing to death in the woods, having a dream about spooky ghost brides working next to your crush, and exposing your co-worker as a secret Eagan who was sent to spy on you and/or seduce your colleague.

On the other hand: Outie Irv still has business to attend to. And Burt was snooping on him at that pay phone a while ago, so there’s more meat on that bone too. And it would make me sad if we lost Irv.

Here is my theory based on absolutely nothing: Reintegrated Mark finds Outie Irv and they work on the secret hallway thing together.

How did the TV on the cliff work?

There are roughly 600 more important issues to cover from the ORTBO. This doesn’t rank above something like Why does the MDR team have weird doppelgängers who pop up to point toward things ominously? Or even Do you think, inside the universe of Severance, that really is the world’s tallest waterfall?

This is the one that’s breaking me a little, though. I assume it’s one of those situations where your brain gets overwhelmed by more complicated matters so it zeroes in on something stupid. It’s not like this is the oddest technological conundrum we’ve seen on this show. It might not be the oddest one from this episode, actually. That honor might go to the working light on the wall of the Scissor Cave where they found the new appendix. But still: How did the TV work with no cords or outlets up there on that desolate cliff?

I swear to god, if any of you say “batteries,” I will heave your dessert into the fire.

Do you ever wonder if Kier was just some pompous bozo like Ricken and things kind of got out of control after a while?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Between Natalie talking with Ricken about editing his book to be more employee friendly for Lumon and the ridiculous Kier excerpts we heard this week, the parallels are fun to explore. Like, imagine the first group of people who read some of the things Kier wrote and tell me it’s that different from the people at Ricken’s reading.

I choose to believe there’s a world many generations out from the one we’re watching now where Ricken is regarded as a Kier-like god, complete with a series of oil paintings. I suspect Ricken chooses to believe this too.

Which of these phrases used in the episode would make the best band name?

Scissor Cave
Woe’s Hollow
The Night Gardeners
Luxury Meats
Chaos’ Whore
The Glasgow Block

The answer is the Night Gardeners. It’s not particularly close. I bet Cobel listens to them in her car.