I’m only being a little dramatic when I say that Severance should get an Emmy for best editing for the last two minutes of season two, episode three alone.
The ending of this episode is a testament to how unbelievably bold this show is. It culminates in a delicious, crisply edited sequence as Mark reintegrates, combining his severed, rebellious, and desperate innie self with his depressed, crazed, and desperate outie self in the hopes of getting to the bottom of what the hell happened to Gemma.
But let’s not start at the end. We kick off with Cobel waking up in her car on the side of the road, windows frosty and rage raring to go. Similarly vehicularly bound, Mark is driving to work with determination and counting under his breath as he walks from his car to the elevator that brings him down to the severed floor.
Once he’s there, it’s all hands on deck to find the missing Ms. Casey. He and Helly (or is it Helena? We still don’t know if it’s the innie or outie there) go around distributing adorably naive handmade missing posters. They find the goat room (remember the goats from season one?) and a fantastically crazed Gwendoline Christie, who first admonishes the duo for seeking out a distributor of the new–age woke nonsense that is therapy, and then, at Helly’s pushing, admits that Ms. Casey used to come and do sessions for her and her fellow goatherds. As far as they all know, she’s retired, but they won’t stop Mark and Helly from looking for her.
This is probably not at all what Lumon wants. They’re likely listening; they’re certainly aggressively overseeing their employees. Natalie (Sydney Cole Alexander), on behalf of the elusive and mysterious Board, attempts to placate Milchick with a series of creepily doctored paintings of himself as Kier, the founder of Lumon, which totally doesn’t feel cult–y at all. And Helena attempts to bring Cobel back into the company, though it blows up, causing Cobel to drive off in what has become her signature car–based anger, after demanding to return to MDR and see Mark finish Cold Harbor, which he’s apparently close to being done with.
Irving, meanwhile, is determined to figure out what’s up with the paintings of dark hallways he saw his outie making. He journeys to O and D for the first time since Burt left, where he reunites with Felicia. They reminisce about Burt, and Irving shows her sketches he made of Burt—one every day he didn’t see them. As he flips through his notebook, though, Felicia notices a sketch of a dark hallway and asks him how he knows what the “exports hall” is. What the hell is the exports hall? How is there even more of this floor that we haven’t seen yet?
Dylan, the lone member of MDR actually doing his job today, gets taken aside by Miss Huang, who actually comes through on Lumon’s previous promise that he’d get spousal visitation. He meets Gretchen (Merritt Wever), his outie’s wife. The conversation is awkward, stilted, halting, and monitored by an unseen but omnipresent Miss Huang via a god–mic. It’s never been more obvious that innies and outies are two entirely different people, and it’s never been more obvious that the process of severance is really one that attempts to sever a person from what makes them a person. And at home, outie Dylan and his wife’s conversation about the visit is just as squishy. How can you reconcile two people in one body?
Mark attempts to answer that question with reintegration. His counting at the start of the episode, we find out, was in order to find out how much time he’d have to take to burn a message into his retinas—the titular question, who is alive? He ropes his Devon into helping him; she’s happy to, already suspicious of Lumon. Devon’s suspicions aren’t helped by walking in on Natalie talking to Ricken and talking to him about rewriting his self–help book to be more specifically tailored to the innies (read: a propaganda rewrite).
This message–burning thing is ineffective; or, at least, it probably would be, according to Asal Reghabi (Karen Aldridge), a former Lumon employee whom we last saw in season one beating a Lumon guy to death in front of Mark. She interrupts his attempt at the message trick in his car and tells him what the audience knows and what Mark has been circling around both inside and out of work for the past few episodes: Gemma is alive.
Reghabi tells Mark she can reintegrate him if he wants to know the truth. He says yes immediately. She sits him down in a chair, straps him to some gadgets, and starts asking some questions. And as Mark Scout and Mark S. combine back into one person, I have a question, too: Is Mark screwing himself by doing this? Will he be able to finish Cold Harbor as Mark Scout on the severed floor? Is he inadvertently messing up whatever processes might be keeping his wife alive as he tries to save her?
I don’t know! But I do know that I screamed a little when I realized that the reintegration sequence was edited in such a way that it was extremely reminiscent of parts of the new title sequence and when Mark woke up on a table in an exact replica of the shot that opens the series with Helly.
Once again, this episode of Severance has barrelled through me and left me excited about a whole new slew of questions that I hope the rest of the season will start to answer. I’ll clock back in next episode to find out.
