Episode nine opens with Helena Eagan swimming laps. She’s in an indoor pool in a glass–walled mansion in the middle of the frozen wasteland that seems to make up most of the outside world of Severance. She goes for a post–swim breakfast with her freak of a father, Jame (Michael Siberry), who admonishes her for not eating her eggs raw. Instead, Helena eats them hard–boiled. With a knife and fork. What a weirdo.
“We’re seeing to Mr. Bailiff,” Helena assures her father, which is terrifying, seeing as we haven’t seen from Irving in a minute. He’s glad to hear this; today is to be a “momentous day,” apparently. It’ll be the day Lumon completes Cold Harbor.
Or so they hope. MDR has other plans, as they so often do. None of the four of them are doing a shred of work, least of all Mark, who’s the crux of this whole thing. Dylan is dealing with marital problems; Helly is trying to fight the sins of her outie self; Irving is caught in a touching romantic drama; and Mark is having a full–blown crashout, Cobel style. There are wild amounts of wage theft going on here.
Let’s start with Dylan. Gretchen, his wife, comes clean to him and tells him that she kissed Dylan G. inside Lumon. Dylan flips about this, which is understandable—I would also have a pretty bad reaction if my wife told me she was cheating on me with me. It’s a mindfuck, to be sure. They fight about it, and Dylan threatens to quit and end Dylan G.’s life.
Inside, the situation is mirrored. Gretchen tells Dylan G. that she told Dylan about the kiss and that he freaked. Dylan G. proposes to her, telling her she deserves someone that makes her happy the way he does, and that he’s positive that outie Dylan doesn’t. Gretchen tearfully turns him down, and Dylan G. decides that he has nothing left to live for. He’s going to quit.
This is bad news for Milchick, who is already at his wit's end with the MDR team. He’s just fought with Helly about Mark being missing for the second day in a row, and now this?
And on top of that, Miss Huang is leaving. She’s completed her Wintertide fellowship a quarter early, which she seems to be a bit sad about. She’s informed that she’ll immediately be moved into the Gunnel Eagan Empathy Center in Svalbard, leaving her family behind. And her childhood, too—Milchick makes her ritualistically smash a child’s toy game of hers with a celebratory Wintertide bust of Jame Eagan, similar to the one Cobel hid her papers in.
Milchick is having a hard time with Dylan, with Miss Huang, and with Helly. Helly tries to pull rank, reminding him that his boss is inside her body, but he insists that it’s different. She asks who’s in charge with Mark absent, and Milchick tells her it’s (pre-quitting) Dylan; “Replace one part with another,” Helly muses like he did to Cobel.
Milchick tells her that she’s being insubordinate. “Yeah, no shit,” she says with a smirk, and saunters away. Helly R., I’ve missed you!
After her fight with Milchick, Helly fights with Dylan, too. She tries to encourage him to stay, telling him that there are things out there for him other than Gretchen, that MDR was a family. Some family, he says. We couldn’t even tell you were different.
“Irving could,” Helly reminds Dylan.
“Mark couldn’t,” Dylan bites back.
Dylan quits, and Helly chases down Irving’s old note, the one that’s tucked behind the “Hang in there!” poster and that gives directions to the exports hall.
Irving himself, meanwhile, makes his way back to his apartment and finds Burt sitting on his couch. Burt is reading through Irving’s old jaded, paranoid notes, which suggest that Burt might be a “Lumon goon.”
“That stings,” Burt sighs. But not because it’s inaccurate—only because “we never used words like that. With Lumon, it’s very specific language.”
We learn that in the before–times that Burt’s husband obliquely referenced at dinner in the other episode, Burt was a driver. He says he doesn’t know anything beyond that he drove people places and didn’t ask what happened to them after that. He brings Irving for a drive, and Irving asks: “Is that what today is?”
Burt doesn’t answer him in the car. Instead, he drops Irving off at a bus station, where he purchases a ticket for Irving to get the hell out of Dodge and never go back. He tells Irving that he severed so that a part of him could have a chance at innocence, and then that innocent part of him fell from grace, fell in love, and it was impossible to look back.
Irving pleads with Burt, tells him that they could try something now. He presses his forehead against Burt’s in a reflection of their tender moment back in season one. But ultimately, Burt pulls away, and says that he can’t.
“I’ve never been loved before,” Irving admits breathlessly.
“Well, now you have,” Burt calmly responds. They shake hands, and they part ways.
At this point, I am practically biting my arm off with how much I feel like I’m being shot point–blank 12 times in the chest. And Mark’s not doing so hot, either. His head lolls against his seatbelt, getting jostled around as Devon drives him to meet with Cobel so they can go to the birthing cabins from season one and hopefully chat with Mark S.
They arrive at a barren, cold clearing, where Cobel is waiting for them, her gray hair blending in with the white snow. Milchick rings Mark’s phone; Devon tells him not to answer, and he doesn’t.
Cobel is, as is her nature, cryptic as hell. She says some stuff about “the file,” which is Cold Harbor, and for once, we as the audience actually know a hell of a lot more than (most of) the characters do, because Mark is completely lost. He’s freaked out, though, because Cobel says that if Cold Harbor has been completed, Gemma’s already dead.
Mark rages. Devon tries to screw his head back on straight—their only option right now is to go along with Cobel, she tells him. Everything else is a shot in the dark. This, at least, seems like it might be inching towards some semblance of light in the distance.
Cobel tells Mark to call in sick. He returns Milchick’s call, and says he’s taking a personal day, but promises to come back tomorrow.
Milchick, who has already been having a pretty shitty time at work this season, is facing potentially the worst day on the job of his life. His child laborer is going to Norway. His department head is taking a mental health day on the day his work is supposed to be finished when the project he’s working on is 4% away from completion. His backup department head is quitting because of sci–fi marital troubles. And of the other two members of his department, one’s been fired, and the other is somehow even more of a pain in his ass now that she knows who she is on the outside.
He has to field a collective breakdown from the higher–ups who are all pretty much shitting bricks due to Mark playing hooky. Today was supposed to be the day! And they’re all blaming Milchick, even though it is deeply not his fault!
Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), the big Lumon goon, to use Irving’s words, confronts Milchick directly with these grievances, and Milchick apologizes. He says he did everything he could, and he couldn't be more sorry.
Drummond, on behalf of the Board and Jame Eagan and everyone else, makes Milchick feel less–than by demeaning him for continuing to use big words and demands a repeated, demure, groveling apology.
Finally (finally!), Milchick has had enough. He snarls at Drummond that he did everything by the book and did everything he was supposed to and that anything Mark Scout does outside of work is, frankly, not Milchick’s problem, and certainly not his responsibility. “Devour feculence,” Milchick grinds out. “It means: Eat shit, Mr. Drummond.”
Milchick has snapped. Huang has been snatched up by the shuttle and sent en route to the edge of the Arctic. Dylan waits by the elevator, the painting behind him aligning so that Kier’s hand rests on his bowed head. The arrow above the elevator lights up the same orange as the sunlight hitting Irving’s smiling, bittersweet expression as his bus heads out far, far away, the same orange of Helly’s hair as she sits, memorizing the instructions that Irving left to the exports hall.
Behind her appears a figure. It’s Jame. “You tricked me, my Helly,” he says.
Mark slips under the tarp in the back of Hampton’s truck, just as Cobel did last episode. They drive to a castle–like structure, the entrance to the birthing retreat. They’re stopped by a cop who questions what’s happening, but Harmony says that the woman sitting next to her is “one of Jame’s. No one’s to know.”
The cop nods, understanding, and lets in Harmony, as well as a visibly pregnant Devon in the passenger’s seat, playing the part of a young woman impregnated by a powerful man who now has to either deliver or abort in complete silence. Mark huddles closer to himself under the tarp, and they pass through without consequence.
And then Mark S. is in the cabin, talking to his sister again. She brings him to Cobel, who stands backlit by a roaring fire, a stern and imposing figure.
“Do you remember the last thing you said to me?” Devon asks Mark S.
He nods. “She’s alive.”
I’d love to leave it on that dramatic note, but I have to synthesize some thoughts. On the Lumon side of things: First and foremost, of course, it’s a pattern that Jame brings young women to this retreat so they can deal with their babies in quiet. Of course it is. Secondly, oh my goodness, Miss Huang! Get out of there before you become a drug–huffing child prodigy like Cobel! Third, hell fucking yes, Milchick. You’re too awesome to be part of Lumon. Break free.
Helly’s fucked. Dylan’s depressed. Irving’s out of the country. Mark’s probably dying from reintegration. And Gemma toils away, trapped within Lumon’s sterile walls, waiting to be killed. Here’s hoping she (and the rest of the team) make it past next week’s season finale.
