Alright, So What’s Really Up With the Goats in Severance Season 2?

Spoilers below.

Lumon might know them as “Mammalians Nurturable,” but you know them as the Severance goats. The infamous little farm animals made their first (brief) appearance in the Apple TV sci-fi hit’s first season, during which Mark S. (Adam Scott) and Helly R. (Britt Lower) stumble upon a Lumon employee feeding the creatures in a tiny, unobtrusive white room. When Mark and Helly attempt to make contact, the man shoos them away, insisting that “You can’t take them yet! They’re not ready! It isn’t time!” Mark and Helly indeed return to their desks in the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) department, but neither they nor Severance fans have forgotten about the goats.

Season 2, episode 3, “Who Is Alive?” finally re-centers the babies, this time revealing an entire department devoted to animal care: Mammalians Nurturable, led by a goatherd named Lorne (Gwendolyn Christie), or so Vulture reports. Lorne and her fellow MN members are immediately distrusting of Mark and Helly; their culture is much more similar to that of an insulated farm community than a lifeless corporate office. Still, they’re curious about their fellow Lumon employees, and they eventually agree not to disrupt Mark and Helly’s search for Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), the former Lumon wellness director.

Although episode 3 expands our understanding of the goats’ territory within Lumon, revealing a massive indoor pasture where the goats graze freely, we’re still no closer to understanding their actual purpose. So far, Severance has no answers to provide—beyond a tease that Lumon might nurture other mammalians beyond goats. As Severance creator Dan Erickson told Vulture, “There’s always the potential for other animals. But as to whether there actually are or not, I can’t quite say.”

For now, that leaves us with fan theories. Perhaps the foremost theory suggests that Lumon has trained its MN employees to (unknowingly) raise baby goats as test subjects for Lumon products and experiments. (That might explain why, in season 1, the MN man insists the kids aren’t “ready” yet.) We know from character interactions in the world outside Lumon that Lumon products are practically ubiquitous. In episode 2, Helly’s Outie blames a “non-Lumon medication” for causing adverse effects while she was drinking at a Lumon gala. (This isn’t the actual reason for her behavior, as we know, but it seems a message the public is willing to believe.) If Lumon’s medications are truly so common—and supposedly superior—then it stands to reason that the company might take extreme measures to test their power and safety.

Still, that explanation seems a bit too simplistic for Severance, a show that seems to pride itself on its intricacy and interconnectedness. If the purpose of the animals is simply experimentation, then why use goats and not rats?

Imagery of sheep, rams, and goats appear frequently throughout Severance seasons 1 and 2, including in the season 2 opening credits and in the creepy “waffle party” scene in season 1’s penultimate episode. Given the show’s equally frequent use of religious imagery, I’m inclined to favor a theory suggested on Reddit, citing the Greek myth of Pan as inspiration for the goats.

Pan, often depicted as having hooves and horns, is a god associated with the wilderness, with sex and fertility, with music, and with shepherds and their flocks—all themes that appear at difference times in Severance itself. As the Reddit theory goes, Severance bears some resemblance to the plot of The Great God Pan, an 1894 horror novella by author Arthur Machen, in which a doctor performs brain surgery on a young woman so she can see the supernatural world. This woman later gives birth to a daughter named Helen, whose father is later implied to be the god Pan himself. (Seeing the similarities already?) Helen grows up to create a great deal of turmoil in her community, only to die by hanging and dissolve into a viscous substance…not unlike the kind glimpsed by Irving in his season 1 nightmares.

If these similarities are intentional, then the goats might indeed serve a physical purpose as testing subjects, but their symbolic significance is equally important. Lumon, like Kier (and therefore like Pan), sees the whole world as its flock. But if that flock ultimately ends up as testing subjects—i.e. severed employees—then the company’s quest is not one of care but of destruction and domination. The word “panic” is derived from Pan. Sure, the goats indicate the MN department’s capability to nurture, but the fact that they’re goats (and not, say, kittens) ought to be interpreted as a sign of foreboding.

For now, we don’t know what Lumon’s doing with the goats. But we can be certain it’s nothing good.

This story will be updated.