It is time to gather up the threads (and the eggs), and begin the process of bringing things to a close. A temporary close, one most strongly hopes, though Severance has not yet been officially renewed for a third season. (It did become Apple TV Plus’s most-watched show, though, so I’m quite optimistic.)
“The After Hours,” it turns out, shares its name with an episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s a funny name for an episode that covers what was supposed to be Lumon’s great success: the day Mark Scout completes Cold Harbor. Instead, it’s an episode of meaningful personal interaction while everything else is on pause. Meaningful, funny, powerful, unexpected personal interaction, like this show does best.
Also, we have to spend a few minutes with Jame Eagan, the single creepiest person in this entire creepy world. Jame Eagan, who wants his daughter to take her eggs raw, like Kier. (Slicing a single hard-boiled egg into perfect segments and eating them on a plate with a creepy baby—with a knife and fork!—is not weird enough.) Jame Eagan, who moans a little when she eats. Jame Eagan, whose arrival on the severed floor, to creep over his daughter’s innie, is implied to be from the testing floor; whatever reason he was down there, it can’t be good.
And Jame Eagan, who has sent other women—possibly some number of them—to the birthing cabins. This is apparently such a normal occurrence that the guard doesn’t even blink when Cobel refers to the fake-pregnant Devon as “one of Jame’s.” In a different show, this would probably imply he’s a sexual predator. Here, it probably points to something very different, though I don’t exactly know what.
I do think that things are leaning toward a question not outright asked: the fate of Lumon and the Eagans. Helly doesn’t have any kids; Helly has never taken a man home to daddy, as she creepily told Mark at the restaurant a few episodes back. The Kier baby in the opening titles has, in his way, loomed over this whole season.
Nothing this man does is even remotely normal. Michael Siberry does an incredible, slightly inhuman job in the role; his face never seems to make a normal human expression, his moan when Helena eats is beyond disturbing, even his posture seems slightly off. His entire empire is a fraud; his head is, as was so delightfully made clear in last week’s episode, empty; his creation belongs to Ms. Cobel. So what is his deal?
The only thing his head is useful for, it seems, is smashing things. Poor Miss Huang, having her fellowship cut short and getting sent to Svalbard. (Perhaps she will befriend Iorek Byrnison.) It is very cold in Svalbard, making me wonder if this is connected to Cold Harbor—but of course the immediate mystery here is in two parts. Who the heck is Gunnel Eagan, and since when does Lumon concern itself with empathy? (And also: What did Cobel have to offer as “material sacrifice” when her fellowship was over?)
Using Jame’s head to smash a game that involves a figure of Kier is not not heavily symbolic. And I wonder how much of that was intentional on Milchick’s part. There’s not much else he could have made Miss Huang sacrifice—as far as we know. But Mister Milkshake is clearly in a position of doubt at the moment. He has never been a Lumon cultist the way Ms. Cobel is; he doesn’t seem to have grown up so embedded in Lumon. They have been treating him, as he rises in the ranks, increasingly insultingly, from the paintings to a regular insistence that he use smaller words. It has to be clear to him that he may have Cobel’s job, but he is not earning the same level of respect. Not from his superiors, and not from his subordinates. (The way Helly says, “Yeah, no shit” when he points out her insubordination… how did we ever think Helena was her?)
And so when Drummond, that large and mysterious goon, demands that he repeatedly apologize for using a “needlessly complex” word, he snaps. In an episode full of brilliant lines, “Devour feculence” was possibly the most outstanding (it was the only one that made me shriek and clap at the same time). But every bit of this scene is written—and delivered—with wonderful precision. The way Tramell Tillman enunciates “monosyllabically” ought to be preserved in a museum.
There is, though, more tucked into this scene than just the enjoyable surface. (Severance creator Dan Erickson wrote this episode, and it shows.) Milchick’s assertion of exactly where the boundaries of his power lie is an elegant way to remind Drummond—and us—that to him this is a job, not his life. And the way he specifies that Drummond is responsible for what Mark Scout does when he’s not at work is fascinating and alarming. We have seen both of these men in the homes of their severed workers, but only one was there on normal business, and it sure wasn’t Drummond.
We’ve had to wait forever and not long at all (two episodes) for the fallout from Drummond’s visit to Irving’s home. This time, when someone unexpected is in Irving’s apartment, it’s Burt, here for a scene absolutely masterful in its implications and the things unsaid—even as Burt does a modest amount of revealing. He was not a goon. (“With Lumon it’s very specific language” is a great overlap to Drummond’s attempt to control Milchick’s language.) He didn’t hurt people. The implication, certainly, is that he allowed people to be hurt. He drove people places.
“Is that what this is?” Irving asks, and you know, I would also like to know this. It is very clear that Burt—in both outie and innie form—has worked for Lumon. It is not clear if he is working for Lumon at this exact moment. Helena said they were “seeing to” Mr. Bailiff, so either that’s what this is, and Burt still works for Lumon in some capacity, or Burt does not work for Lumon yet has some connection on the inside who gave him the information necessary for him to spirit Burt away from whatever Lumon had planned for him. Would Helena be merciful enough to spare the man who tried to drown her? I don’t think so.
I love the settings of the scenes with these two, moving from Irv’s small apartment to the winding roads to that hulking yet beautiful train station, in which they become just two more small figures against its towering stone bulk. Burt tries to stick to the facts of the situation—he can’t know where Irv goes, and Irv can never come back to Kier (interesting double meanings there). But Irv wants to talk about love, and can’t be deterred. It’s crushing and beautiful, and so much happens on John Turturro’s face. He is talking to Burt, but also to himself. “I’m ready,” he says, repeatedly, until Burt growls, “We can’t” in a way that directly recalls Milchick growling “Grow” at himself.
I spent a lot of this scene worrying about whether Radar was going to get on that train too. I spent the rest of it thinking about the terrible tragedy of these two men knowing love with one another but also not knowing it at all. Some part of them knows, and some part of them doesn’t, which is entirely realistic, except that usually we’re hiding things from ourselves, not having them hidden by nefarious technology. Irving, though, has clearly taken something away from all of this even through the chip. There’s confidence in him, and grace, and the impression, as he sits on that train, that he has found something meaningful even as he loses Burt forever. We all love to say that all these actors deserve all the awards. This is true. But John Turturro expressing Irv’s epiphanies about love without saying anything is, like, god-tier work. Bravo.
And of course this isn’t the only heartbreak this episode. Poor innie Dylan, making one desperate play for his outie’s wife, only to be rebuffed. And poor Gretchen, yearning for her husband like she used to know him, only to have to walk away from that man out of practical concerns. It is hard to feel a ton of sympathy for outie Dylan, except that he’s also innie Dylan, and both of them are caught in a tangle of misery about loneliness and self-worth. And innie Dylan, crushingly, proposes to Gretchen, saying he could give her a life. The impossibility is heartrending. Her rejection seems inevitable. This is the worst love triangle.
The shared misery brings both Dylans into alignment: They both want to quit because of their feelings about Gretchen. (Poor Dylan, following in innie Irv’s footsteps.) I didn’t actually believe that Lumon would let innies quit; I thought that was as much bullshit as the paper Milchick showed to the MDR team when they returned post-OTC. Do they show the resignation form to the outies and make them confirm? Given what we’ve seen on the testing floor, couldn’t they just re-sever Dylan into yet another version of himself and send him back down? The last Dylan scene of the episode begins with an incredibly framed shot of him sitting in front of the Kier painting by the elevator, perfectly lined up so that Kier’s hand appears to be on Dylan’s head. The other hand, of course, is holding a sword.
While lonely Dylan gives up, lonely Helly digs in. Her hopeful face when she gets off the elevator, excited to see Mark only to find the office empty, is yet another crushing moment in an episode full of them. But Helly has all the fierceness Helena Eagan has never been allowed to show: She faces off with Milchick, turns Dylan’s heartbreak into a brief screed about how they’re treated by outies, and picks up Irving’s quest after Dylan leaves.
The way Irving is present in Helly and Dylan’s entire conversation is positively gorgeous. Dylan tries to hurt her by reminding her that he and Mark didn’t know she was Helena, and her face lights up when she says, “Irving did.” Irving recognized Helly, and Dylan understood Irving, and Helly appeals to that to try to get Dylan to pick up Irv’s quest. When he won’t, she picks it up herself. Of course she does. And of course she’s too smart to just wander off down the hall holding Irving’s directions.
I do not know what to make of Jame’s appearance behind her, other than to acknowledge how cleverly it was filmed, so that it could have been anyone, maybe Milchick even, before Jame came into focus. Is he still mad about the OTC? Did he find something out about the calamitous ORTBO, which his employees had kept from him? Can he please not loom like that? It creeps me out.
While all of this has been happening, Cold Harbor has not been progressing, because Mark is busy meeting up with Cobel on a cliffside, for some illogical reason (Don’t let him stand so close to the edge!). His interactions with Devon provide some much, much needed levity before we wind up in this seemingly day-long, super awkward lakeside hang, while the three of them wait for night to fall.
Mark is doing, uh, great. “Oh my god, so good,” he replies, when Cobel asks how he is. He is not fully reintegrated, but not not reintegrated, and he is pissy and fried and generally not a ton of fun to be around (understandably). What brings him back to sense is Devon reminding him why they’re there: Gemma. (Her delivery of “Gem-ma” echoes Milchick’s careful syllables.) Who might be dead already, if he finished Cold Harbor. This is not a helpful thing for Cobel to tell him, and it is not a helpful thing for us to hear, either, because it leaves people like me yelling “WHY! WHAT DOES IT MEAN!” at the television.
Everyone in this little work/life triangle is tense and prickly, but somehow they make progress. In what might be the most meaningful conversation in an episode full of them, Mark calls in “sick,” and has an extremely rare moment with Milchik: he talks to him like a normal person. He’s not sick; he has life stuff. “Isn’t that what Lumon’s all about? Balance? I mean, work is just work, right? Do you know what I mean, Mr. Milchick?”
Isn’t that what Lumon’s all about? Milchick, staring at his iceberg art, might just be having an epiphany. He’s still a Lumon man, and gets Mark to promise he’ll be in the next day. But he is most certainly rattled. This little moment of bringing everything back to the initial theme of this show—the concept of work/life balance, trying to break your life into manageable pieces, taking the hurt out of your workdays—is a necessary break from the weirdness and the theorizing, the hints and suggestions and references. Why are we here in this show? Because Mark wanted to spend eight hours of his days not consciously grieving Gemma. Why are we here, in this exact moment and place? Because maybe he doesn’t have to do that any more. The last words of this episode, like the last words of last season, are “She’s alive.”
Those references, though. I am not fluent in Twilight Zone, having grown up without a TV and also being a big baby about anything scary, so all credit here to the many Redditors who made this connection. But the words Ms. Cobel says to the gate guard at the birthing cabins come directly from the 34th episode of The Twilight Zone, in which the narrator says, “Miss Marsha White on the ninth floor, specialties department, looking for a gold thimble.”
His next words are maybe important, and maybe just a fun reference: “The odds are that she’ll find it—but there are even better odds that she’ll find something else, because this isn’t just a department store. This happens to be The Twilight Zone.”
The ninth floor is the secret home to sentient mannequins. Maybe this is just a fun code phrase for getting in the gate. Do they have The Twilight Zone in Kier? Maybe it’s a tell, a phrase that alerts the gate guard to some trickery. Maybe it’s a terrible hint. Maybe we’ll find out next week, when we finally get to Cold Harbor.
Shattered Bits of Ring Toss Game
- That’s an absolutely stunning shot revealing the way the Eagan house mirrors the Lumon office building, across the pond and past the water tower, implying they stay close, always watching.
- I keep thinking about how they get mad at Milchik for using big words, but when Natalie delivered the horrifying paintings to him, she called them “inclusively recanonicalized.” Did they pick complex words on purpose, for Milchick? Does that make the whole thing even worse?
- “This is so many dimensions of fuck” is a new classic from Dylan.
- Miss Huang apologizing to Dylan for not having facilitated better broke my heart a little bit.
- Why is Dr. Mauer the only person in the doppelganger office? What did they do with the creepy people???
- Ms. Cobel is still in Hampton’s truck. Ms. Cobel is no longer the white Rabbit. Seems relevant.
- I don’t think this is the last we’ll see of Irving. We still don’t know who he was calling, or what his outie really knew, or why he thinks they were on to what his innie was doing, or anything.
- That last shot of Cobel in front of the fire! So good! We are not being subtle with her and the fire imagery! She saved her notebook from Sissy’s attempt to chuck it into the fire, though; what if her long game is destroying Lumon but saving her work, only to start anew?
