Why Did Cobel Bolt? 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.

Like Harmony Cobel at multiple points in this episode, Severance stomped its foot on the gas pedal this week.

It didn’t look like it was heading that way at first. If we’re being honest, it didn’t look like it was heading that way for most of “Who Is Alive,” which was primarily devoted to slow-burning things with goats and awkward hallway moments and ominous vibes. Mark and his sister devised a plot to sneak a message into the severed floor. Dylan’s Innie met his Outie’s wife, which had to be weird for both of them.

But then, just as the run time was approaching its end, Reghabi showed up again and changed everything. There’s no going back from this point, at least as long as Mark’s reintegration procedure worked. I, for one, am thrilled to see how it all plays out, for many of the reasons discussed below. I’m also thrilled to have met the goat people. It was an exciting episode on a number of levels.

Where is Mark at right now?

We know where he’s at physically: in a makeshift laboratory having his brain tinkered with by a possibly disgraced scientist who did this same procedure on his friend Petey with less-than-stellar results. That should tell you where he’s at emotionally, too. It’s all understandable, or at least as understandable as “consenting to amateur brain tinkering” can be, given what his Outie has been through recently. His dead wife might be alive, and it all might be a secretive plot hatched by the company he works for that until very recently employed as his supervisor a woman who was living a double life as his neighbor and his sister’s lactation consultant. That’s a lot for anyone to process. It’s also a fun thing to try to explain to someone who doesn’t watch Severance. Try it this week.

More importantly, for us at home if not Mark, what does this mean for him? Did the procedure work as intended? Is that what the Innie/Outie flashes at the end of the episode mean, with him in the conference room and the two wavy lines syncing up into one wavy line? We don’t actually know that much about the reintegration procedure beyond what we saw in season one, which was mostly Petey kind of tweaking out and then dying. Reghabi claims she has it figured out a little more this time, but still. What’s going to happen the next time Mark goes to Lumon and gets on that elevator? This is fascinating to me. The show just up and turned everything sideways on us.

It’s almost enough to make you forget how funny it is that the whole episode set up Mark’s plan to burn a phrase into his retinas to get a message to his Innie and then Reghabi showed up and was immediately like, “No, dummy. That won’t work.”

What scared Cobel, and also, what other cassettes do you think she has in her little hatchback?

Two things here that we can address separately.

(1) Cobel spent a lot of this episode almost doing things. She started out fleeing town after the run-in with Mark at the end of the last episode. Then she decided to turn around and go back. Then she confronted Outie Helly a second time about wanting her old job back and used that scary voice that Patricia Arquette can just yoink out whenever she wants and must terrify snotty neighborhood children who cut through her lawn and traipse all over her garden. (Making assumptions here, but it’s fun to picture.) Then, when Helly invited her inside to discuss it and the creepy security guard took an ominous step forward, she bolted again. Why? What does she know or think was going to happen? This is the kind of thing that gets my brain whirring, when people who know things behave in a way that implies something is off. I’m not sure I would put anything past Lumon. Kill her? Sure. Imprison her and subject her to brain experiments? Of course. Feed her to the goats? Frankly, I don’t see how we can rule it out.

(2) When she was out driving around at the beginning of the episode, she shoved a cassette into the tape deck of her car that played the song “Love Spreads,” by the Stone Roses. This means that the Stone Roses, a real band from our universe, exists in the universe of Severance. This raises the possibility that other bands and musicians from our universe exist on the show. And that means Cobel probably has other cassettes to choose from in her car. What else do you think she has in there? I choose to believe she has at least one Pat Benatar album.

Wait, are we getting a Milchick redemption arc?

I … I think we might be? You saw his face when Natalie presented him with those paintings of a black Kier. You saw him take those things and store them away in a closet out of sight and mind. You’ve seen him exhibit flashes of humanlike behavior this season, even if they’re scattered between long stretches of him lying to and/or manipulating team members after riding to their homes at night on his motorcycle.

I don’t think we’re there yet. We will still need more walls to come down before Milchick — a company man through and through, one who is never off the clock — goes rogue. It could just as easily never happen. But I thought I saw a sliver of doubt behind that glorious mustache of his this week. This is a situation I will be monitoring closely.

Is Natalie the most terrifying character on the show right now?

It was a tight race between her and Miss Huang — something about an expressionless child in a position of authority makes my blood run cold, and her popping in over the intercom during Dylan’s family visit didn’t help that — but then Natalie did that diabolical little walk/spin around Milchick in the office while presenting him with the paintings. That’s some Grade-A villain stuff.

Between that and the thing where I’m not sure she has blinked more than eight to ten times in her life, I feel very confident that I would instantly crumble into a pile of loose dust if I entered a room and discovered her standing there looking at me.

Did your skin start crawling off your body in secondhand embarrassment as Mark and Helly just kind of wobbled around in that hallway almost kissing for almost 40 damn seconds?

Yup, it was almost 40 whole seconds. I went back and checked. That is so long to let a moment linger like that, especially in 2025 when everyone has hummingbird brain. I was starting to get fidgety around ten seconds. Then it kept going. And going. And goinggggg.

This is both the sign of a confident television show knowing its audience will stick there with the awkwardness and also maybe the most awful thing I have seen on this show yet. Please imagine yourself in a “Should we kiss? Or no kiss? Little kiss? Hug? Kiss? Are you leaning? Should I …? Kiss? Maybe a peck? A smooch? Tongue? No, no tongue. Oh God, how long have we been standing here? Is it weirder now if we don’t kiss?” stalemate for almost a full minute. I would probably just quit and find a new job.

That will be an exciting thing for reintegrated Mark to navigate going forward.

Did you think, maybe for a second or a number of minutes, that Lumon had set Dylan up with a Fake Outie Wife to tell him a story about what a loser he is out there as a way to make him value his current job more?

I did. In part because, again, I wouldn’t put anything past Lumon right now, but also because you don’t just cast Merritt Wever as a beleaguered housewife. That’s why I was legitimately surprised to see Outie Dylan at home later, right there on the couch, with that same person as his wife trying to get him to do literally anything beyond watching cartoons while the children ran amok.

This leads me to two conclusions.

(1) Something else will be going on soon with Outie Dylan because, I repeat, you do not just cast Merritt Wever as a beleaguered housewife.

(2) Lumon actually wanted Dylan to see what a loser he is on the outside — like, for real — for the same reasons I assumed they were trying to fake it.

Part of me wishes he had landed that job at Great Doors.

Why is the goat lady’s desk just sitting there on the grass?

There are too many questions about the secret goat room staffed by weirdos who wear costumes. I can’t possibly wrap my head around it yet. I will need more information to even begin to formulate a theory on what is going on there. So, for now, I’ll focus on what I know, which is that it’s really funny that the supervisor lady has a desk that just sits on the uneven grass.

I bet it wobbles a lot. Imagine how much coffee she spills on her various goat-related paperwork. No wonder she’s so fried.