Last week, the long-awaited Season 2 premiere of Severance on Apple TV+ threw so much at us that it practically made your head spin. Mark S., for example, was greeted by the sight of an all-new MDR crew, Milchick got promoted, Ms. Cobel got the boot, and now a freaking child (“Miss Huang”) is the new deputy manager on the severed floor at Lumon. Milchick, meanwhile, lied that it had been five months since the innie rebellion, and — well, like I said. It was a lot.
As I put it in my recap of Episode 1, the Season 2 opener was basically packed with one WTF moment after another and offered up a smorgasbord of surprises, reveals, and intriguing teases. In the newly released Episode 2, the Severance narrative shifts back to the outies — and, in particular, to the repercussions of the innies triggering the Overtime Contingency in last season’s finale, effectively hijacking the bodies of their outies for almost 40 minutes.
Here’s some of what we learned in Episode 2. The standard warning: You’ll find spoilers about the new episode below.
Is Mark … special? The last thing we heard before the credits started rolling in the Severance Season 1 finale was Mark’s innie yelling out to his sister, having seen a photo of Gemma, that “She’s alive!” Turns out, in the aftermath of his outburst, innie Mark didn’t exactly make clear who he was referring to. Rats! At least Devon’s sister is convinced he was referring to Gemma. Mark (that is, the outie/real world version of Mark) refuses to let himself believe that’s who he was referring to.
To complicate matters further, Mark decides to quit Lumon. And then “milkshake” — sorry, Milchick — shows up at his door, practically begging Mark to return to work (even throwing in a 20% salary bump as an incentive). These people are serious about Mark finishing the Cold Harbor file that may or may not (but probably) has something to do with Gemma, whose face flashed on Mark’s screen when he was working on the file during the previous episode.
Lumon seems really desperate. To that point I just made, about Lumon practically begging Mark to rethink his decision to resign — the company also authorizes Milchick to take some dramatic steps to smooth the way back for Mark. Helena, to be more specific, is the one who does the authorizing. And she does so, I might add, after getting chastened by her father (Lumon CEO Jame Eagan), who angrily sneers that she’s a “fetid moppet” before storming off (why are these names, as well as so much of the dialogue on Severance, so darn weird?). Presumably, he’s pissed at what her innie said during the crowded Lumon gathering.
Be all that as it may, Helena wastes no time in making some moves. She tasks Milchick with figuring out what the innies said while they were in the body of their outies. She basically gives him carte blanche, telling him, “Let Kier guide your hand.” So tasked, Milchick then ventures out into the night and to the homes of Dylan and Iriving, where he just outright fires them. He pulls together a new 3-person MDR team that greets Mark back at the office. Mark freaks out, demanding that his friends come back (Milchick, we now know, lied during Episode 1 when he said that the other three refused to come back to work).
I suppose the plan was for Mark to be integrated into an all-new and totally happy work foursome that wouldn’t cause trouble. With that pipe dream out the window, the OG MDR crew is brought back to Lumon. Because a happy Mark is apparently a Cold-Harbor-file-completing Mark.
I’ve droned on too long about this, but one final point: All of the above lets us know two things. Not only is Mark important, but his finishing the Cold Harbor file seems to be super-important, as well.
Odds and ends. In terms of some of the episode’s other highlights, remember how Irving walked up to Burt’s front door and was loudly banging on it at the end of Severance’s Season 1 finale? Here, we see him making a call from a phone booth (I guess those still exist in Lumon land?) and, based on Irving’s end of the call, presumably leaving a message for Burt … who is actually sitting in a car, just up the way, staring intently and not very happily at Irving in the phone booth.
Harmony, meanwhile, demands her old job back, which Helena declines to give her. Instead, she presents Harmony with what she describes as a promotion — heading up a newly created severance advisory council. She and Helena are strolling into Lumon toward the end of the episode, presumably for a showdown in front of the board, but Harmony seems to get spooked by the sight of a bodyguard-looking dude with Helena.
Harmony runs off, and the last we see of her is her car packed, and a now clued-in Mark standing in her car’s path to grill her about why she lives next to him and just what the hell is going on. After an uncomfortable silence, Harmony lets out a blood-curdling scream and just drives away into the night. Poor Mark. He still has no idea about Gemma’s fate — while we, the audience, are starting to wonder if his innie’s kind-of office crush Helly is, in fact, Helena incognito (one of many popular Severance fan theories at the moment, that Helena snuck on to the severed floor pretending to be her innie).
