Who Is the Most Fed Up? 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 this week’s episode, “The After Hours.” There will be theories. Many will be unhinged.

Hello, and welcome to Insubordination Week! Helly is talking back to Milchick because she’s realized he can’t control her. Dylan is talking back to Milchick because his poor Innie heart is shattered into a million pieces after losing both Irv and Gretchen. Milchick is talking back to Drummond because Drummond is a big dumb bully who deserves it. It turns out Burt was a Lumon goon — not his choice of words — before he chose to get severed in the hopes of saving his soul, and now he’s choosing to defy the company by shuffling Irv out of town on a train before anything awful can happen. Mark and Devon are at a birthing cabin with Cobel to show her what his Innie knows and hopefully learn some information that will help with rescuing Gemma and/or destroying Lumon. This last one might extend beyond standard insubordination. What is important is that everyone is fed up.

And they should be! Where the first season was about a bunch of people working together to put together a puzzle, now they’re all being ripped to pieces as they go on the individual journeys set in motion by that puzzle-constructing. It’s been a strange and tense ride, with excursions into caves and basement laboratories and ether factories. And it looks like it might be coming to a head, finally, after an episode where we check in on almost every character for the first time in weeks.

Yes, I do have questions about it all. Let’s start at the top …

Is all of this headed toward a situation where a reintegrated Mark goes back to Lumon armed with the full knowledge of Cold Harbor and Helly R. uses the memorized directions to the testing floor to get both of them down there and then they clobber the weird doctor again and Ricken uses his gecko-like climbing skills to help them escape up the elevator shaft with Gemma?

I hope so. That would be lovely. It’s probably not realistic, though, for a handful of reasons, the most important being that Severance has not, to date, been a show that deals in satisfying conclusions. There’s always another shoe that drops, another twist ahead, a give and then a take and then maybe a second take just to keep you from getting too comfortable. You can get the thing you want, but you might also have to smash your beloved ring-toss game with a bronze bust as a sacrifice. This is kind of the whole deal.

So, if not a gratifying ending where everyone lives happily ever after and the villains get clobbered, then what? Where are we headed now that Cobel knows Mark’s Innie knows that his Outie’s thought-dead wife is alive and being subjected to experiments in the bowels of the building he has been working in for years? Does she reveal everything about Cold Harbor and help them? Does she double-cross them? It’s tough to imagine a motivation for that after her anti-Lumon origin story last episode, but you really can’t put anything past her at this point. You remember the Mrs. Selvig ruse from last season. You saw how she looked standing in front of that fire in the birthing cabin. She could still be flying on ether, for all we know. The woman is a wild card.

We are headed somewhere, though. That much is very clear. If Mark does indeed head back into the office and he does so with any degree of information about Cold Harbor that Cobel spills to him and Devon, well, things are going to get wild pretty fast. This has been a much different season of television from the first, with much less inter-office conspiring and much more piecework storytelling, but things are circling back together in a bunch of ways. I’m looking forward to seeing how (possibly if) they pay it all off.

Is Milchick going rogue?

Milchick has been subjected to a series of indignities this season, ranging in severity but consistent enough to push him right up against the edge. It started when he couldn’t get anyone at Lumon to get Cobel’s name off of his screen after he got promoted into her position. He was forced to drive around on his motorcycle after work hours to deliver pineapples and put out fires. He had to sit through a humiliating performance review where he was chastised for the way he uses paper clips and big words. They gave him those damn paintings.

And that’s before we even get to the ORTBO debacle and the Helly/Helena business, the thing where he’s been tasked with “supervising” the Innie of the next Eagan in line, who has apparently figured out how unsupervisable she is. Milchick made his own series of choices to get here, I presume, so he’s not without fault, but he’s been set up to fail from the start and kicked in the ribs the whole way down. So, yeah, he snapped a little. He told his boss to eat shit — “devour feculence” in Milchick speak, which feels like a phrase that is going to achieve escape velocity and reach the general public at some point — and I bet it felt incredible. I was so happy for him. I still am.

But is he going rogue in the same way the MDR team he was in charge of has gone rogue? Is he going to take steps to actively destroy Lumon and possibly assist Mark and Helly and Ricken in my fever-dream cliffhanger jailbreak scenario? I don’t know, man. This was all already a big step for Milchick, cussing out his boss and telling Mark it was cool to take a personal day instead of hopping on his motorcycle and going on a one-man search party through the snow. That’s a lot for a company man.

On the other hand, it’s not like he’s going to have much of a team left to supervise. Dylan quit. Irv got fired. Helly isn’t listening to him. Mark is so intent on sabotaging the company that he had a second experimental brain surgery to do it. Things are very wobbly for Seth Milchick. He could do anything. This represents the most fascinating situation of all to me.

What’s it going to look like at home now that Innie Dylan quit?

Probably not great! Gretchen will be left wondering if Dylan’s outie quit and lied about it as a way to punish her or if, as we at home know, her breakup with Dylan’s innie left that sweet man so devastated that he chose to wipe himself out of existence rather than go on. Dylan will be left wondering why his innie quit and to what degree it had to do with his wife and his innie’s forbidden romance. Trust will be in the toilet. He won’t have a job. We saw how the job hunt went the last time he was out there getting shut out of Great Doors. There is a scenario that is very easy to imagine where he is just sitting on the couch a lot as the two of them drift apart until they’re just ships passing in the night.

What I’m saying is that I hope there are good marriage counselors in this universe.

Is there a creepier man alive than Jame Eagan?

I suppose this is not the question I should be asking. I should be asking, “What did he mean at the end of the episode when he said Helly tricked him?” But we’ll find out the answer to that one next week, presumably. My hope is that she somehow reverse-Glasgowed herself so it was her innie with him at the beginning of the episode. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe he put together the degree to which this Helena/Helly thing has gotten deeply screwy. Maybe she beat him at Scrabble and he decided to confront her Innie about it instead. One of you probably has it figured out.

I’m more focused on what an all-time creep this man is. Stealing the idea for severance from Cobel, apparently fathering enough secret children that you can show up unannounced at a birthing cabin and be waved right through by saying it’s another one of his, watching his daughter pick at a hard-boiled egg and then express disappointment that she doesn’t “take it raw” … I mean, it’s all very disquieting. I genuinely do not enjoy seeing him on the screen. The next episode could open with him completely naked riding on a giant turtle and it would not surprise me even a little.

Is it weird that of all the potential good-byes in this episode, it was Miss Huang that upset me most?

Let me try to explain …

The Dylan thing was bubbling for a while, and the MDR team had been drifting apart all season.

The situation with Irv has been kinda weird ever since the ORTBO and, while the train-station good-bye with Burt was a sad twist where the outies wanted what the innies had, I feel like it was time for a next step one way or another. I still don’t believe he’s gone gone, but we said good-bye to his innie already, so there was a precedent here.

Miss Huang just went and got humanized a little. She was revealed to be just a kid, not some wild goat-related clone. She’s leaving her home and her office and getting shipped off to another Lumon project, and she doesn’t even have her ring-toss game to play on the shuttle. It’s all gone from mysterious to sad pretty fast and LOOK I JUST WANT EUSTACE HUANG TO BE HAPPY, OKAY?

Are you prepared to go full John Wick if anything happens to Irv’s dog?

I am.

Which character on the show is most likely to burn down the Lumon headquarters by the end of the season?

Here are my top ten:

10. Dylan (too much going on at home to worry about this)
9. Irv (too painful to return right now)
8. Mark (too much going on with Gemma to risk it)
7. Miss Huang (no good reason, just rooting for it)
6. Burt (looking for innocence, fire is cleansing)
5. Reghabi (reintegrated this fool in his basement and he calls Cobel???)
4. Drummond/Natalie/Jame (it’s messy now, clean it up)
3. Helly/Helena (“SCREW YOU, DAD”)
2. Cobel (“SCREW YOU, D … I MEAN, JAME”)
1. Milchick (fed up)

Fingers crossed.