Severance Season 2, Episode 3 Recap: Did You Love Her?
Spoilers below.
Much of this week’s Severance episode focuses on re-connecting what has previously been separated: Cobel and Lumon; Outie Mark and Innie Mark; Innie Dylan and his wife; Outie Mark and his wife; the MDR department and the mysterious “Mammalians Nurturable.” This trend begins with Cobel, whom we watch wake inside her car, parked along a highway in the middle of barren, snow-covered Nowhereville, U.S.A. We soon learn she’s several miles outside Salt’s Neck, a fictional town with which she shares some as-yet-undisclosed personal connection, evidenced by her glimpses at the breathing tube sitting like a totem in her passenger seat. (Fans will recall that breathing tube belongs to a “Charlotte Cobel,” possibly Harmony Cobel’s mother.)
But whatever connection Cobel shares with Salt’s Neck convinces her to return to Lumon, where she meets with Outie Helly and demands to re-take control of the company’s severed floor—and MDR in particular—if she’s to return to work. Helly gently critiques Cobel’s Kier-defying arrogance, but opts to schedule a meeting with the board anyway. Together, Helly and Cobel walk toward Lumon, but Cobel loses her nerve at the last moment—or, perhaps, she recognizes something in the man standing next to Helly. Is he Helly’s bodyguard? Or someone Cobel knows? Either way, she turns around and heads back to her car. But we can be certain she and Lumon aren’t done yet.
Inside the building itself, Innie Mark and Innie Helly launch their investigation into Ms. Casey’s disappearance. They work with Innie Irving to hand out “missing” signs across the other (known) Lumon departments, but Innie Dylan seems distracted, his commitment to their quest wavering. (As we know from episode 2, he’s trying to avoid trouble so Lumon will grant him special privileges to meet his Outie’s family.) Sure enough, Miss Huang appears shortly thereafter to escort Dylan to the Visitation Suite, where he first encounters his Outie’s wife, Gretchen (a fabulous Merritt Wever). The scene that follows is fascinating on a number of levels: Despite their discomfort with the situation, Gretchen clearly feels an affection for Innie Dylan that is missing—or, perhaps, temporarily displaced—in her relationship with Outie Dylan. Later that night, we watch her (dressed in what looks like a police officer uniform?) prepare to leave the home she shares with Outie Dylan. In this environment, she exudes a markedly different manner with her husband; she walks him through the steps of baking store-bought cookie dough with the exasperated patience of a mother, not a partner. Outie Dylan seems to sense she’s acting strange, after having met a part of him that he can’t access himself.
Nor is Gretchen the only one giving off weird vibes. At Lumon, Innie Helly seems tighter, more constricted, less comfortable around her friends. Fan theories would take such behavior as further evidence that this Helly isn’t Innie Helly at all; maybe she’s Helena Eagen, and therefore a Lumon plant. But perhaps she’s simply uncomfortable with the unorthodox love triangle—or, really, love hexagon—taking place here. Outie Mark is in love with Gemma. Innie Mark is falling for Innie Helly, and vice versa. Innie Helly and Innie Mark only know Gemma as Ms. Casey. Outie Mark and Outie Helly know nothing of each other. It’s unclear what—or who—Ms. Casey knows at all. Confusing, indeed!
But before Mark and Helly can get to untangling any of these romantic threads, they come upon the mysterious goats department from season 1, crawl through the goat chute, and step into a literal grazing pasture flooded in fluorescent light. There, they meet Gwendolyn Christie’s as-yet-unnamed goatherd, who reveals the MDR employees have stumbled upon “Mammalians Nurturable.” When Outie Mark presses her for information about Ms. Casey, she rings her cowbell to summon her co-workers out into the pasture. They seem threatened by Mark and Helly’s presence, but Christie’s character finally admits that Ms. Casey used to conduct wellness sessions in the Mammalians Nuturable husbandry tanks—and that MN won’t hinder MDR’s search for her. But before Mark and Helly leave, the MN employees want to confirm the MDR folks’ bellies don’t have pouches. This is a clever callback to season 1, when we first learned that Lumon spreads mythic (and ludicrous) propaganda between separate severed departments so that they remain distrustful and afraid of one another. This is union-busting 101, folks. A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Meanwhile, Innie Irving has re-created his Outie’s paintings of a long, dark hallway, ending in an elevator heading down. Irving suspects that hallway is somewhere on the severed floor, and when he heads over to O&D to pass out the missing posters, he encounters Felicia (Claudia Robinson), who confirms his suspicions. As she flips through Irving’s many drawings of Burt, she discovers a sketch of what she calls “the exports hall.” O&D apparently sends shipments there; the O&D staff used to visit the hallway themselves, but now, she says, they “send a guy.” Felicia gives Irving directions for how to get there, but that’s the last we see of them this episode.
Still, those aren’t the only developments taking place inside Lumon. In his depressingly sterile office, Milchick meets with board liaison Natalie (Sydney Cole Alexander), who shares that the Lumon board members want Milchick to feel “connected to Lumon’s history.” She presents him with a gift of “inclusively re-canonicalized paintings,” each depicting Kier—Lumon’s founder and pseudo-deity—as a Black man with blue eyes. Milchick, famously controlled in his reactions, does not betray the degree to which this unsettles him. Neither does Natalie, who tells him she received the same gift from Lumon. After the board concludes their call, Milchick looks at Natalie meaningfully, trying to communicate something he knows he cannot say aloud. She gives him a wide, deeply strained grin in response.
Later, Natalie shows up again outside Lumon itself, this time at Devon and Ricken’s kitchen table, where she attempts to convince Ricken to write a version of The You You Are specifically for Innies. Ricken is all for this idea. Devon—bless her—recognizes it as a ploy to create more Innie propaganda. She does not share these suspicions with Ricken, however, instead saving them for Outie Mark, with whom she’s working on a tool to communicate with Innie Mark.
Having tracked the amount of time it takes to get from his car and up the Lumon elevator into his Innie’s consciousness, Outie Mark attempts to burn a message onto his retinas long enough for his Innie to see it: “Who Is Alive?” But when Mark tests this idea outside in his car, an old friend shows up: Asal Reghabi (Karen Aldridge), the former Lumon surgeon who reintegrated MDR employee Petey (Yul Vazquez) in season 1. You might recall Petey died shortly after this reintegration, which would explain Mark’s hesitation to undergo the same process.
But after she convinces him that the retina-burning idea is unequivocally dumb, Reghabi drops a bomb in Mark’s lap: She saw Gemma alive, inside Lumon. He’s so floored by this news he almost collapses on the spot. She insists there’s only one way to exchange information between Innie and Outies—and therefore get news about Gemma—and that’s through the reintegration process. “I can make it work with you,” she promises, Petey’s death a distant memory. Mark doesn’t even take a second to think before he replies, “Yes. Do it.” He’s visibly shaking, tears dropping to the floor as he stands up a little straighter. “I want to see my wife.”
In his basement, they begin the process with a wonky assortment of machines. As Reghabi works to align Outie Mark’s brainwaves with his Innie’s, she asks him a series of questions designed to reveal the closing gap between each half of himself. “What was your mother’s name?” she begins. “What was her eye color? Did you love her?”
I’m particularly intrigued by this last question, because it’s less about a measurable, objective fact than it is about a feeling, and Severance has already demonstrated that feeling can eclipse the Innie-Outie divide—sometimes, more readily than fact itself. Reghabi then asks Outie Mark to name “something for which you feel shame,” another question not measured in observable truth but rather in interiority. By the time she asks him to share his first memory, Outie Mark can no longer recall. His Innie and Outie selves have temporarily re-connected, and it is no longer clear exactly who he is.
If love (and pain) can somehow transcend severance, then the love hexagon between Mark, Helly, and Gemma/Ms. Casey is only going to get more fraught in the episodes to come. But that’s perhaps only the least of their concerns, if Cobel already knows about re-integration—and is working up the strength to stop it.