‘Severance’ S2, Ep. 2 Recap: A Fetid Moppet

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So, let’s start with the most thrilling thing that happened in this episode. Here’s a real-time look at my notes as I watched: THE CREDITS ARE NEW THEY’RE NEW THEY’RE FUCKING NEW!!!! EEEEEEE!!!

There’s just so much to unpack in the new, wonderfully bizarre sequence by Oliver Latta, a.k.a. Extraweg. (Latta won the Emmy for “Outstanding Main Title Design” in 2022, and he’s certainly going for it again in the year of our Kier, 2025.) I am sure I could devote the space in this entire recap to breaking it down, bonkers visual by bonkers visual, but we have lots of other stuff to talk about. For now, I’ll just say that the balloon imagery is striking, the part where Innie Mark carries Outie Mark through the elevator door is intriguing, and I love Outie Mark’s new red onesie. Also, the creepy baby Kier that scampers around Mark’s feet at the end has already started to haunt my nightmares. Oh! And hearing Theodore Shapiro’s iconic theme (also a deserving winner at the 2022 Emmys) in full was absolutely necessary. We were technically back last week, but now we’re off and running.

The first installment of the season was dedicated to the Innies, so this one is devoted to filling in the Outie blanks. In solving the riddle of why all the Outies decided to return to Lumon, the hour has a decidedly “we have to go back” vibe about it. As Milchick visits all of the refiners, we’re reminded of what Mark S. said to Helly on her first day: “Every time you find yourself here, it’s because you chose to come back.” Mark gets curious about the possibility of Gemma’s existence as well as his Innie’s inner life, Dylan doesn’t seem to belong anywhere else, and Irv seems motivated to return because of his quest for the truth of what’s happening inside the company.

And Helena, well … let’s talk about Helena.

We finally get a chance to see Helena Eagan in action, and her quiet composure and overt condescension of anyone who she perceives to be below her status makes her kind of awful to behold. In the wake of Helly’s disturbance at the gala, she’s attempting to compose herself when her dad finds her. He glares at her and spits two words in her face: “Fetid moppet.” He seems to be implying that she’s a once-beloved but now rotten child. How will she ever get back in his good graces?

Despite her father’s emotional hold over her, it’s worth noting that Helena seems to be the driving force behind the rest of the decisions made in the wake of the OTC debacle. Throughout the episode, director Sam Donovan gives us multiple visually arresting shots of Helena, presiding over the top floor of the glass-covered Lumon building, plotting her next move. In her bold, bejeweled dress, she looks like a supervillain, surveying her fiefdom from on high, but we also learn that she isn’t able to make all the decisions on her own; she has people who hold her accountable. There’s a lot of evil corporate espionage in this episode, and I’m here for all of it.

Helena interacts with several Lumon bigwigs during this episode, one of which is a big, burly dude who appears to be her right-hand man. We find out that he goes by Mr. Drummond (Darri Ólafsson) and has a “Frolic” tattoo placed prominently on the very part of his hand that might be used for strangling another human. Just sayin’.

Helena also meets with Cobel, and in a frosty exchange, she delivers an apology to the ex-manager of the severed floor, but refuses to let her return to her old job. Their back-and-forth includes Cobel claiming, “You fear me,” followed by Helly cooly responding, “We fear nothing.” As a consolation prize for her commitment to Lumon, a.k.a. stopping the OTC after a mere 39 minutes, Helena offers her a job on the made-up Severance Advisory Council. Cobel clearly wants to be where the severed people are, but she says she’ll think about it.

Britt Lower is fascinating to watch in these scenes, as she’s not the Helly we know and love. Instead, she’s a cold, calculating Eagan. And yet, there’s a moment where we see her watching the playback of Helly jumping out of the elevator to passionately smooch Mark. As she compulsively jabs at the rewind button again and again, it’s clear that the moment evokes deep emotion within her. Is she somehow jealous of her Innie? Has she ever experienced a true feeling in her life before?

Dylan, on the other hand, is all feeling. This is legitimately the first time we’ve seen his Outie before and, honestly, he’s not too far off from his Innie. Sure, he’s a bit more worn down by life, with sagging shoulders and a slightly more negative attitude. However, his indignation when Milchick comes to fire him and his witty banter with door-factory owner Mr. Sabila (the great character actor Adrian Martinez) remind us of our Dylan.

The interview scene — a variety of doors briskly swishing by in the background like in the Monsters Inc. factory — is whimsical and promising. But then! As soon as Mr. Saliba figures out that Dylan is severed, the whole thing goes to shit. He claims that the process is “abhorrent.” This is not only a huge slap in the face to Dylan as a human who has chosen to undergo what he thinks is an irreversible process, but also to the idea of severance in the larger world of the show. We saw Mark argue with the Whole Mind Collective last season, but this is the first time we’ve seen such outright hatred of the process from a layperson.

Speaking of Mark, it feels like he might be starting to change his mind about severance. Mark is still at Devon and Ricken’s house, reeling from the OTC aftermath, when Milchick comes looking for him. It’s good fun to see Ricken and Devon interact with Milchick, especially because Mark is the only employee he visits that has witnesses present.

Apparently, the team triggered the OTC on a Friday, because for the next two days, Mark skulks around his house just waiting to catch a glimpse of Cobel. He even knocks on her door at one point, but she’s probably busy packing up her Kier shrine. On Saturday, Devon and Mark meet at Pip’s to discuss the situation. Devon thinks that her brother was referring to Gemma when he shouted, “She’s alive!,” but Mark has his doubts. Well, no. He can’t allow himself to believe that she might be alive, because he’s grieved so deeply and so inefficiently that it’s part of who he is now. He’s a huge asshole to Devon about it, and he stomps out of the diner in a snit.

However, later in the weekend, Milchick appears on Mark’s doorstep with a basketful of pineapple and a smile. He sits down and tells Mark a bunch of pleasing facts about his Innie — he’s happy, he cares for people, and he’s funny — to encourage him to come back to work. He also brings up Gemma, citing that Innie Mark is happy and has found love. Mark’s befuddled response, “Love? With who?!” goes ignored by Milchick, but it’s a layered line that’s initially funny and then a bit sad when Mark drops the question all too quickly. Milchick also offers Mark a 20 percent pay bump. What do we think the Innies are making? Upwards of $70,000 a year? More? Less? You’d have to pay me quite a premium to perform a supposedly irreversible procedure on my brain.

The rest of the episode focuses on getting the gang back together in the wake of Innie Mark’s outburst to the board. Helena listens to a tape of the incident, and her advisers, Mr. Drummond and Natalie (Sydney Cole Alexander), impress upon her the importance of Helly returning to work so that Mark S. will finish refining Cold Harbor. She balks at first, visibly uncomfortable with the idea of going back down to the severed floor. I’m no fan of Helena’s, but I get it. She doesn’t want to lose control over her body anymore, and why would she?! Helly did try to kill her once! But then Natalie and Drummond basically insist that she return.

In a back-to-work montage, we see the refiners check in for the day. We see Irving and Dylan separately dump their winterwear in their lockers and then take their respective elevator rides. As both men descend, each time we hear the distinctive “ding” that means they have crossed the brain barrier, we also see the light on the side of the elevator turn red. Then, it’s Helena’s turn. Steely-faced, she swaps out her lanyard and steps through the open doors of the elevator. Then, the doors close. The scene ends without a ding. Huh.

The conspicuous absence of the “ding” — our auditory Pavlovian cue that we have switched to Innie World — feels like the show is signifying that a popular theory might be correct. Many of you theorized about this twist in the comments section last week, but for readers who might not want to read about theories, here’s your warning to skip the rest of this paragraph! Are they gone? Okay. So … if the woman we saw in the previous episode was, indeed, Helena Eagan and not Helly, she surely could have come up with a better OTC cover story than “stumbled out of my apartment in a ‘Save the Gorillas’ tee to talk to a night gardener,” right? Is Helena kind of dumb? Or does she think so little of the Innies that she doesn’t think they’ll catch on? If it turns out to be Helena, I believe that I’ll agree with her dad’s assessment that she’s a fetid moppet for sure.

We don’t follow the gang to work — we’ve already seen all that — but we do catch up with Mark that evening. As he returns home, he sees Cobel leaving, presumably for good. As she packs up, Mark mentions that he’s back to work. She sighs and smirks, “Was a pineapple involved?” It wasHarmony. You know it was. Help him, girl.

Mark attempts to get more information out of her by jumping in front of her car, and she stops long enough for Mark to ask the million-dollar question: “Do you know something about Gemma?” At first, the question throws her off-kilter and she gets very quiet and pensive. Confronted with a storm of conflicting directives and facts inside her head, she explodes. Patricia Arquette is astounding in this scene. She lets loose a feral shriek that belies her inability to untangle her inner conflict. She peels out of the complex, Mark just barely hopping out of the way as her white Rabbit careens into the distance.

Good-bye, Ms. Cobel. Hello, Mr. Milchick. The man certainly earned his stripes this week, doing double-duty house calls to all the refiners, walling up Wellness, creating an absolutely unhinged training video, hiring a whole new MDR team for Mark — his description of Dario R. as a “floater” was curious — and promoting Miss Huang. There are never enough words to express how amazing Tramell Tillman is, so let’s just say I’m making my eyes impressed.

It looks like it’s time for my staggered exit, so I’m going to go grab the elevator. Until next time …

• It’s interesting that Mark jokingly calls Devon “Persephone” when he switches back to Outie mode. Persephone’s whole deal is that she was held in the underworld against her will. Long story short: She is why we have winter. As Severance takes place in the bleakest of winter months, and Persephone’s plight somewhat mirrors the refiners’ — time split between Lumon (a.k.a. hell on earth) and the real world — the name-drop felt like a fun little Easter egg.

• Love how Devon and Ricken came up with Cobelvig!

• Who on earth was Irving talking to on that pay phone?

• Now that we know that the premiere episode took place a mere two days after the OTC was triggered, it seems weird that Milchick would have lied to the Innies about the five-month time gap. When you consider that the files the refiners work on expire after a period of time — often while they’re in the middle of refining them — it feels as if Mark should have known something was up when he returned to work on Cold Harbor, a file that he had already made significant progress on. Wouldn’t he be suspicious as to why the file hadn’t expired?

• The door factory seems to have been a nod to the job that Severance creator Dan Erickson had when he first wrote the pilot of the series. He chats about it in episode one of the official Severance podcast, which you should totally be listening to.

A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the name of the episode’s director. It has been updated.