Well, that was fast! It was probably inevitable that Severance would, at some point, un-sever Mark and Mark S., the outie/innie pair at the center of the series. But if it went anything like everything else on this show goes, the process would take several painstaking steps over several hour-long episodes, during which time any number of other pathways would open up and get walked down before we made our way to our appointed destination.
Instead, Mark learns he can be reintegrated, agrees to do it, then gets it done in a grand total of two back-to-back scenes at the very end of this episode. Zero to 100, just like that, in defiance of the way this show has told its story since its inception. It’s a surprise that works on more than just an entertainment level, too: If your show is about the tyranny of routine, it’s a good idea to break from routine now and then.
It also may be an idea borne out of necessity. Taking fully two episodes to go over the same amount of time, once from the perspective of the innies and then the outies, obviously eats up a lot of screen time. Even if you keep your time in the Severance corners of the internet to a minimum, you may have seen people complain that the show lost its sense of forward momentum by going over the same ground twice, more or less. Now, thanks to the sudden intervention of ex-Lumon surgeon turned anti-Lumon rebel Regabhi (Karen Aldridge), Mark is Mark S., and Mark S. is Mark. That should move things along quite nicely!
Things are moving fairly slowly otherwise, though there’s no shortage of diverting imagery to encounter along the way. Down on the severed floor, Seth Milchick is settling in as floor manager, and is granted a special gift by the mysterious Board via their Mouth of Sauron, the beautiful Natalie (Sydney Cole Alexander): a series of paintings in which Kier Eagan is depicted as Black. (Please note: This was filmed before President Trump made it illegal to even pretend to value your non-white employees.)
Natalie is forced by the Board to tell him how much she loooooved receiving her own copies when she got this job, but the moment they hang up on the speakerphone, her smile goes from “obviously fake” to “oh my god, did someone just tell her her grandmother died?” Even though both of these characters are sociopaths, it’s a troubling scene, all the more so for the rapidity with which major corporations have dumped even surface-level efforts at inclusion such as these now that DEI has been declared a four-letter word.
Milchick’s former boss, Ms. Cobel, is having an even harder time of it. Finding herself unable to quit Lumon, she returns and begins issuing demands to Helena Eagan in the parking lot. Helena quickly disabuses Cobel of the notion that she has either value to or leverage against the company. When she offers to negotiate anyway, it isn’t long before Cobel suspects ill intent and hightails it out of there before she can be killed.
Among the innies, the mission is now to find Miss Casey, whom they now know to somehow be Mark S.’s outie’s wife. To investigate, Irving B. travels to Optics and Design, the department once headed by the love of his severed life, Burt G. He and Felicia (Claudia Robinson), Burt’s colleague of six years (that’s the longest tenure on the severed floor we’ve heard of so far, I think), laugh and swap Burt stories.
Flipping through Irving’s many loving sketches of the man — turns out his innie is an artist just as his outie is — she comes across his drawing of the black hallway represented in the outie Irving’s countless obsessive paintings. “How do you know about the Exports Hall?” Felicia asks ominously, telling Irving that her department sends a lot of goods that way via some mystery man who comes to collect them. With her help, he hopes to find the hallway himself.
Mark S. and Helly’s end of the quest also has a romantic element: their own. The pair kinda sorta almost but not quite kiss, which given their earlier ardor could be chalked up to awkwardness about Mark’s outie wife, or Helly’s discomfort about her secret identity, or the very popular theory that Helly is currently her secret identity pretending to be her severed self.
They find the goat room eventually, absent the highly strung man who’d minded them previously, as well as the goats themselves. They follow a goat trail through a long crawlspace (very Being John Malkovich, one of the show’s many late-90s “work sucks, I know” touchstones) into an indoor pasture presided over by a towering shepherdess played by Gwendoline Christie. She and her goat people seem on the verge of Wicker Man-ing the macrodata duo, whom they suspect of having pouches for their larvae, when Mark S. successfully sells them on the idea of intra-innie solidarity. If one of their goats went missing, they’d look for it — shouldn’t it be the same with their fellow innie Miss Casey?
The leader finally relents and admits they all knew and liked the now-missing wellness coach. They’ve been told she retired just like the MDR crew were, but they won’t stand in the way of further investigation.
The one innie to sit things out is Dylan G., who’s been quite successfully bribed by Lumon with the promise of meeting his outie wife and kids. This process begins almost immediately: Miss Huang brings him to meet his outie wife Gretchen (Merrit Wever) in the now-repurposed Security Room. Their encounter is alternately uncomfortable and sweet: Gretchen expresses open affection for this man despite the fact that he’s ultimately a stranger to her, and Dylan G., while delighted and warmed by her presence, can’t bring himself to say “I love you” back to someone he doesn’t remember ever meeting before. That is, of course, if “Gretchen” is his wife at all: The fact that we never met her in person during last week’s outie-focused episode leaves open the possibility that Dylan G. just met a Lumon-hired ringer.
The only outie employee we meet up with this week is Mark. Even before Regabhi catches up with him to perform her transcranial magnetic procedure on, he’s already joined forces with his sister Devon to try to relay a message to his innie self by burning the phrase “WHO IS ALIVE?” into his retinas. (Regabhi says this is a bad idea because, among other reasons, you might go blind.) The siblings are pointedly leaving her husband Ricken out of the conspiracy, since he’s actively being courted by Lumon to produce an “innie cut” of his self-help book. Another mystery that needs investigating: why Devon, an interesting person with a head on her shoulders, would give Ricken, a self-important gasbag moron, the time of day. (I know the answer is “because Dan Erickson thinks it’s funny,” but that’s not good enough, dammit!)
Clearly this episode is mainly a bridge between the establishing work done by this season’s first two installments and whatever will happen now that Mark has been reintegrated. Individual moments and images are its selling points — Cobel fleeing from that parking lot, Milchick grimacing at the patronizing painting, Gwendoline Christie and Merrit Wever showing up, huge Brit-rock needle drops by the Stone Roses and the Who, and so on. But Miss Casey and the Export Hall are still out there, and for now at least, it’s the journey, not the destination.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
