How Soon Until Dylan Snaps? And Other Severance Questions.

For more on Severance, sign up for Severance Club, our subscriber-exclusive newsletter obsessing, dissecting, and debating everything about season two.

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.

Hello, and welcome back to the severed floor. I hope everyone had a lovely ORTBO. What’s that? The ORTBO went poorly? The company’s heiress seduced an employee while pretending to be her own Innie, then almost got murdered by a wild-eyed co-worker who sniffed out her ruse and revealed it to everyone? Everyone laughed at Kier’s tale of children pleasuring themselves? The marshmallows were wasted? Well, that certainly sounds like something that might have ramifications back at the office.

And yup, as we saw in this week’s episode, it sure did. Irv is indeed gone. Everyone is getting lippy with Milchick. Distrust is at an all-time high. Things are weird and awkward for a show where “weird and awkward” is pretty much the default setting. It doesn’t look like it’s going to get less weird and awkward going forward, either. Buckle in, gang. Milchick is tightening the leash. Mark is having visions. Irv and Burt are going to eat a ham. It’s all very exciting. It also raises some questions. A lot of them. But let’s focus on these seven for now.

Is Mark’s body falling apart now, too?

There are not many things more ominous than a character in a movie or television show developing a shallow little cough. That rarely works out well. In fact, the only time I can remember it working out was when Tiny Tim survived in The Muppet Christmas Carol, and that required three spirits visiting an evil old rich guy in the middle of the night to teach him a lesson about humanity. I don’t know if we can reasonably expect some ghosts to come knocking for Helena Eagan’s dad before this season ends. I suppose we can’t rule it out given everything that has ever happened on this show. And maybe it’s just, like, a little tickle related to the weather there. Maybe he just needs a lozenge and some hot tea in addition to the regimen of pills and gross sludge that his live-in scientist has prescribed. But I wouldn’t bet on any of that. Let’s be cautious and add Mark’s physical health to his growing list of problems.

And buddy, that list sure is growing. Start at the top, with him returning to the severed floor after the ORTBO and running into Helly R., the Innie version of the Lumon tycoon who seduced him in a tent under extremely false pretenses. What exactly does one even do in this situation? Is it fair to be mad at the Innie who still has no clue what happened? Does he confront her about it? What good does that do? Does Helly deserve to know what Helena is out there doing with their body and is he the best messenger considering he was unwittingly the one doing it with her? You could pull back the layers of this ethical conundrum for days. And we haven’t even gotten to how betrayed he feels knowing that their whole plan to snoop around and investigate the Ms. Casey business was reported straight up the ladder by the same person. I don’t think “kind of pout and be cold to everyone in the office” is the worst response to it all, especially considering “burn down the building” is something that’s on the table, too.

Oh, and there’s also the thing where his menacing mustachioed boss is now confronting him in the elevator. And the thing where the reintegration seems to be sticking and he’s having visions of his maybe-dead ex-wife talking to him in spooky hallways. Even if that cough is just a little seasonal mucus drip, he sure doesn’t need that on top of all of this stuff.

Get this man some combination of Mucinex and benevolent ghosts as soon as possible. His body and mind are falling apart.

Is this weirder for Helly R. or Helena Eagan?

Okay, I know the answer is Helly R. That’s the answer even before she knows that her diabolical corporate alter ego slept with her colleague while pretending to be her, which, as we’ve discussed, is a level of weird almost impossible to unpack. All she knows right now is that she snapped to life soaking wet in a snowy forest with one of her co-workers kind of trying to drown her Outie and now the same Outie sent her back to work. That’s a lot. Probably too much.

But consider Helena Eagan for a second. She’s not deserving of much sympathy here, at least not from what we’ve seen, but it does have to be wild for her, too. She’s a lonely billionaire who can’t please her father and whose family business is sending her back into a situation where she has no real agency and at least two of the four people she works with — Irv and her own Innie — have tried to murder her. She tricked the third one into having sex with her and will have to look him in the eye with no clue what happened.

Do I feel bad for her about any of this? Nope, not really. Not yet, at least. Everything we know about her indicates she could quit this job tomorrow and go sit in a jacuzzi with an umbrella drink for the rest of her life. But it is undeniably weird, top to bottom.

If you were forced to sit through a four-to-six-hour performance review, what would you order for lunch?

There are two ways you can go here:

— You can be logical about it. You can order something comforting, something sustaining, something that will make you feel good and full and not gassy or bloated as you sit through a long and unpleasant meeting where your superiors give you a frank and unflattering review of a situation that turned out poorly, to whatever degree “almost getting the boss’s daughter drowned in a creek” is considered a poor outcome.

— You can be petty. You can order whatever looks most expensive or whatever will enable you to take the most bathroom breaks or give you the most foul-smelling emissions or really just whatever will give the people putting you through a freaking four-to-six-hour performance review the most pain possible.

Is lobster chili a thing? Two bowls for Milchick, please. Maybe then Natalie will understand how he felt about those damn paintings.

Speaking of awkward meals, how weird is Irv and Burt’s ham-and-wine dinner going to be?

Oh, that’s gonna be weird. Just super, super weird. I hope it’s the entire next episode. Irv and Burt and Burt’s partner, Fields, just sitting around a table trying to figure out where to start a conversation when all they know for certain is that two of them were recently fired from the same company where they might have fallen in love in such a deeply passionate way that it resulted in a door-banging, name-shouting scene that neither of them now understands, and the third is eating ham and drinking wine and trying to figure out if he should be jealous. That sounds like fascinating television to me.

Arguments can be made that this wasn’t the most important takeaway from the scene where this played out. Things like “Who was Irv talking to on the phone?” and “Oh, Burt didn’t retire after all” probably have bigger long-term ramifications. I do not care. Give me Christopher Walken and John Turturro at a dinner party. I deserve this. We all do.

How close is Dylan to snapping like a stale pretzel rod?

I worry about Dylan. A lot. He somehow knows both more and less than anyone else on the team right now. Mark and Helly have a thing, or things plural, and their own levels of comfort and discomfort that go along with all of that, some of which they’re not aware of but absolutely none of which Dylan is. Irv is gone and he’s pretty messed up about it. He wants to rage in about four different directions, but he’s afraid to both because he doesn’t want to lose that family time with his Outie’s wife and because he now knows he kind of needs this job because that same family time made him aware that he’s a flailing screw-up on the outside and his wife has some exhaustion in her eyes about it.

Also, he can’t keep his glasses up on his nose properly. This last one might not be as important as the other ones, but at the very least it is driving me insane, if not him.

If you were offered a watermelon sculpture of your beloved co-worker’s head at his fake funeral, what part of him would you eat first?

I’m gonna say the cheek. Maybe the chin or forehead. Something fleshy and plain-looking. I don’t think I’d want to be the first person in line, either. Let someone else jump on that grenade. Let them figure out where to make the first cut. I’ll stay in the back until we’ve started sorting it all out. Being a leader is overrated anyway.

There’s really no correct answer here, for the record, only varying degrees of bad ones. Like, what if the first person in line goes straight for the eyes? Or, potentially more unsettling, the lips? What if someone walks up and bites off the whole nose? How could you look at the person ever again without thinking about that? Nope. No, thank you. Watermelon is delicious, but this time it’s just not worth it.

Is there a creepier song in the whole entire world for a scary doctor to whistle as he ambles down an empty hallway with a tray of surgical tools toward a mysterious room where experiments are done that may or may not involve necromancy than “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”?

Yes. “Mambo No. 5,” by Lou Bega.