This post contains spoilers for the Season Two premiere of Severance, “Hello, Ms. Cobel.”
Imagine for a moment that you are an innie. From your perspective, you are always at work. You never sleep. You never see the sky or breathe fresh air. You don’t know who you truly are, or what the outside world is really like. You are indoctrinated with stories of the divine majesty of Kier Eagan, and you have no way of questioning them. Hell, you barely even know what you do at work. If you push back in any way against all the oppressive, cruel aspects of your existence, you can be subject to torture. And even your “rewards” are patronizing, creepy things that are meant to subconsciously remind you of how small and meaningless your existence truly is. Is it any wonder that, after a few days of experiencing this half-a-life, Innie Helly was determined to quit, even if it essentially meant her own death?
Now think about what Innie Mark does throughout “Hello, Ms. Cobel,” as he attempts to reassemble his old team — even Helly, whom he knows would prefer oblivion to Macrodata Refinement. And then think about the fact that the innie versions of Helly, Dylan, and Irving all agree to return to work, rather than trying to take Mr. Milchick up on his offer to retire for good. Why would Mark do that? Why would they do that? For that matter, why would Lumon management want to resurrect four such troublesome employees?
The most obvious and cynical answer is that Severance would have to become a very different show if it jettisoned most of its original cast. Television history is littered with cliffhangers that seemingly blow up a series’ status quo, then have to be swiftly undone, if not outright ignored, the following season. And to a degree, director Ben Stiller, showrunner Dan Erickson, and company earned enough goodwill over the course of those long-ago Season One episodes that they could probably just get away with putting everyone back in their cubicles without sweating the details too much.
But the events from the end of last season have created new stakes for Mark, Helly, and the others. They have all gotten glimpses of their outies’ lives. They have tried to alert the world to the terrible nature of severance. They have discovered things about their outies that they feel they need to address, starting with the thought that is still rattling around Innie Mark’s head when he blinks out of Devon and Ricken’s party and finds himself back on the severed floor: Ms. Casey is really Outie Mark’s wife Gemma. And now they have things worth fighting for, even if it means staying in that accursed place.
Because of that, and because “Hello, Ms. Cobel” is made with such self-assurance, style, and idiosyncratic comedy, Severance returns from its pesky three-year hiatus feeling very much like a show that has earned its own ongoing existence, and that made very good use of its extended absence.
Where Season One tried whenever possible to offer both the innie and outie perspective on events, this premiere makes the bold choice to take place almost entirely from the point of view of Innie Mark. We don’t know what happened at Devon and Ricken’s party, at the Lumon gala, at Outie Burt’s house, or anywhere else, after Mr. Milchick overpowered Dylan and deactivated the Overtime Contingency. We don’t know if Devon understood what Innie Mark meant when he screamed, “She’s alive!” We don’t know how the audience at the Lumon gala reacted to Helly’s speech. Virtually all we see, and all we know, is what Innie Mark sees, and what Mr. Milchick tells him. We are in as much of an information vacuum as any innie, forced to navigate a world shaped by malevolent forces that have no interest in anything but profit and the glory of Kier.
After a three-minute “Previously, on Severance” montage that covers a lot of what happened last season, but far from all of it, Season Two picks up with Mark transitioning from the party to the elevator at Lumon, which deposits him back on the severed floor. Whether it’s really been five months or a far shorter interval(*), it has only been seconds since he recognized Gemma as Ms. Casey, and vice versa. It is top of mind for him, and for the show, which kicks things off with a disorienting but jaunty montage, scored to the late jazz pianist Les McCann’s “Burnin’ Coal,” where Mark sprints through the white maze of the severed floor, desperately trying to recreate the route to the Wellness room where he used to meet with Ms. Casey. At a little over two minutes, Mark’s search is only a fraction of the length of the granddaddy of all such sequences: Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Cooper spending more than 10 minutes trying to find a way out of the Black Lodge in the Season Two finale of Twin Peaks (fortuitous, if sad, timing on that) and only going in circles. But given how much TV pacing has sped up in the 30-plus years in between, seeing Mark struggling to distinguish one bleak white hallway from the next feels a lot longer than just two minutes. And in both cases, it involves our suit-and-tie-clad hero maneuvering through a labyrinth that looks pleasant enough, but is truly a circle of hell.
(*) Yes, these recaps are being written by someone who has seen the entire season. But my goal is to limit any theorizing within each recap to thoughts I had as I watched the particular episode in question. So you will see me periodically make guesses on things where I know the answer, but it’s the prediction — some right, some wrong — that I genuinely had at the time I saw the screener.
Mark eventually makes it to his destination, but it’s now just a dead end in the hallway, with no Ms. Casey anywhere, and he quickly finds himself in a cracked-mirror version of the severed floor. His team has been replaced by three new severed workers, each of them Bizarro World takes on the friends he’s seemingly lost. Mark W (Bob Balaban) is the Irving stand-in, uptight and annoyed by any seeming deviation from the rules. (He also dislikes having to share a name with Mark S.) Gwendoline (Alia Shawkat) is the Bizarro Helly, wide-eyed and alternately amused and suspicious of what’s going on down there. Dario (Stefano Carannante) is a bit of a stretch as a replacement Dylan, I’ll grant you, but he seems the least troubled to be there — though maybe that’s just because most of his dialogue is in rapid-fire Italian? Mr. Milchick is still there, having kept the promotion he got after Ms. Cobel was suspended late in Season One, but now he has a new lackey who is his physical opposite: Ms. Huang (Sarah Bock), who appears to be just entering adolescence. (“Why are you a child?” Mark W asks her; “Because of when I was born,” she answers simply.) But despite her size and youth, her omnipresent smile and serene demeanor evoke Milchick, which inherently makes her a threat(*).
(*) She even seems like a bit of a threat to Milchick himself — or, at least, to his authority. We don’t know the nature of their relationship, but Tramell Tillman plays every scene with Bock as if Milchick has never hated anyone more than he hates this little girl — which means he has to hide his contempt under a thicker smile than usual. It’s very funny.
Bock as Ms. Huang Jon Pack/AppleTV+
Our Mark puts up with a few days of this nonsense — and the editing reminds us once again that for innies, workdays never really end, because as soon as you exit the offense, you find yourself returning to it — before going to what’s thankfully become his default behavior: rebellion. He forges a note from Mark W that refers to their manager as “a shambolic rube named Milkshake” — a joke both on Milchick’s moniker and on his love of flowery language — knowing of course that everyone will recognize that he wrote it. All he needs is to distract Milchick long enough so he can again sprint through the hallways, this time to get into Milchick’s office to use his intercom to address Lumon management and demand the return of his team.
Milchick dismisses the stunt as a case of Innie Mark’s ego run amok, but amazingly, it works. The next day, Mark re-enters the severed floor to find Dylan waiting for him, and soon they’re joined by Irving and Helly — who, for the moment at least, seems more relieved to be around her friends (Mark in particular) than she is eager to end her severed life. Even this victory comes with a cost, albeit one Mark is OK paying, as Dylan notes that Mark has essentially killed off their replacement innies. (Though based on Mark W’s comment about how surprised he was to return after his old branch shut down, it seems more like Mark S just ended their stay of execution.)
What follows is a pretty spectacular pile of corporate double-talk and other infantilizing bullshit. Milchick has already told Mark that five months have passed, that the “Macrodat Uprising” became a cause célèbre around the world, and that Ms. Cobel has been made the fall guy for almost all of it. Now the whole team gets the full load, including a ridiculous animated film that attempts to anthropomorphize the Lumon building itself into a character that can’t be happy unless its workers are happy. (It also offers cartoon recreations of events from the first season, like Helly kissing Mark near the elevator.) They are promised less surveillance, new snacks, and other rewards for good work, and other things that don’t solve the fundamental problem that they are slaves who are denied any of the real benefits of life on Earth. Milchick does give each of them the chance to retire for good — a.k.a. the suicide that Helly couldn’t successfully complete last season — but because none of them take him up on the offer, we have no way of knowing if it was real(*).
(*) Milchick and/or his superiors are at least not naive enough to assume the cartoon and the new incentives will actually mollify this group. Dylan’s discovery that he had a family is what started the uprising, so Milchick quietly moves to address this separately with him, telling him about a new family visitation suite and that his outie’s wife’s name is Gretchen, and implying that if he behaves, he might get to meet her. Excellent divide-and-conquer strategy.
Still, we know Outie Mark agreed to return for some reason. Maybe Milchick is telling the truth, and the world really is watching what Lumon does now. Maybe Devon figured out what “She’s alive!” meant, and Outie Mark just sent Innie Mark to go looking for Gemma. Maybe Helena Eagan showed up at Outie Mark’s door with a dump truck full of money. We don’t know why he chose to come back, nor do we know why Lumon would even want to have anything to do with four employees who threatened the company with such a scandal. By structuring the premiere this way, Erickson and Stiller want us to better understand what it’s like to be an innie, even if it means we have to wait until later in the season for the full context of what’s happening.
That extends to what happens after Milchick leaves them alone after his absurd presentation. As the innies catch each other up on what they experienced in the outside world, Helly lies to the group about her true identity, instead claiming she woke up in a boring apartment, found a man gardening outside, and asked him to tell his cop brother about what’s being done to them. Is she simply ashamed to have learned that her outie is an Eagan, and/or worried that the others will judge her for a thing she has no control over? Or could it be that this isn’t Helly R at all, but Helena Eagan sent down to spy on the others and make sure they can’t further endanger the great and important work being done in the name of Kier?
It’s definitely suspicious behavior — Irving immediately begins poking holes in her story about a “night gardener” — but we don’t know what’s really motivating it yet. But even the possibility that this is really Helena adds whole new layers to the bizarre love triangle that’s developed, where Outie Mark is still in love with Gemma, and Innie Mark is in love with Helly. It’s far more complicated than the throuple that Milchick claims Harmony Cobel wanted to create between herself and the two Marks. As Innie Mark puts it to Helly, while discussing his attempt to find Ms. Casey on behalf of his outie, “We’re the same-ish person. So it’s, uh, mushy.” Said mushiness follows us through to the end of the episode, where Mark finally settles in at his workstation to begin looking at the numbers again, only to picture a digitized Ms. Casey on the monitor.
It’s a striking image on which to end this thrillingly weird return to the world of Severance. Despite placing us inside the head of Innie Mark, the hour also fiendishly allows us to see the world the way Lumon management does. Severed life is awful for Helly and the others, but it’s damned entertaining for us to watch.
