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Severance S2E1 Recap: Enjoy Your Balloons

“Hello, Ms. Cobel”

Mark carrying a bunch of balloons down a hallway
Courtesy of Apple TV+

The following recap contains spoilers for Severance S2E1, “Hello, Ms. Cobel” (written by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller)


Severance’s first season aired in early 2022, so it’s been a minute. I don’t have any balloons for you that have your face on them for some reason, but I can remind you that the Season 1 finale saw the innie versions of Mark (Adam Scott), Helly (Britt Lower), and Irving (John Turturro) taking the place of the outie versions of themselves, while Dylan (Zach Cherry) stretched to hold two switches in the Lumon security office to make this happen.

Irving awakes to a halfway done painting of the dark hallway we saw Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman) go down after she lost her position as wellness counselor, and we’re still not sure why this man is painting that hallway. Regardless, Irving further discovers that his outie has been keeping tabs on severed Lumon employees. He finds an address for Burt (Christopher Walken) and proceeds to Burt’s house, but he does not talk to the outie version of Burt, so far as we see (yelling, “Burt!” outside the door doesn’t quite count).

Helly discovers that her outie is Helena Eagan, and she’s set to give a speech in defense of the severance procedure. There’s a scene where her father mentions something to her about his “revolving,” which seems worth remembering, even if we have no idea what he is talking about. Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who has just been fired from Lumon, arrives at the gala too late to stop Helly from using her opportunity to speak against severance. Yet, the audience just laughs at her anyway.

Speaking of Ms. Cobel, Mark comes to as his outie in the midst of a hug with the same, though she is here going by Mrs. Selwig, outie-Mark’s neighbor. Mark ultimately discovers that his outie’s deceased wife, Gemma, is one and the same with Ms. Casey, and he yells this information out to his sister Devon (Jen Tullock) just as Milchick (Tramell Tillman) manages to disrupt Dylan and end the whole thing.

Milchick holds up a folded note
Courtesy of Apple TV+

The smartest thing that Severance S2E1 does is to deprive us of any experience of the world outside Lumon whatsoever. We begin with innie-Mark coming to in the elevator, and he’s frantic. He runs through the nondescript halls of the Lumon office, and it’s not entirely clear if he’s lost or just disoriented in this space without landmarks. Maybe he’s just moving too quickly until he stops to get his bearings. Regardless, he eventually finds what used to be the wellness office, but it’s stripped bare. His mind was, first and foremost, on finding Ms. Casey, but instead he finds nothing.

It is worth noting the figure in the background during this scene. Who is that? It doesn’t look like Milchick. With no evidence at all, I’m tempted to guess it’s Graner (Michael Cumpsty), but Graner is dead… right?

More disorientation ensues as Mark makes it to the MDR office, where he finds not his team but three people he (and we) have never seen before. These would be Mark W. (Bob Balaban), Gwendolyn Y. (Alia Shawkat), and an Italian fellow who I believe goes unnamed (Stefano Carannante).

Milchick arrives, gives Mark some balloons, and they proceed to have a conversation, during which Milchick says it’s been five months since the events of the Season 1 finale. I’m not sure I believe that. Milchick further says that Mark and his team have become famous heroes for severance reform. He shows Mark a newspaper where they are together on a parade float, but given that most of the page is redacted and the paper is named something like The Kier Chronicle, I’m not sure I believe that, either.

According to Milchick, the other members of Mark’s team (the outie versions) could not be persuaded to return to Lumon, which is plausible. However, he also says that Irving made contact with people on the outside, which seems to be false. Add in the fact that Mark’s team shows up at Lumon a couple of days later, and I’m really not sure what to do with any of this.

Before that happens, though, Mark S. makes a pitiful attempt to frame Mark W. for writing an anti-Lumon note to his outie. He then runs to Milchick’s office to hook up the intercom that putatively allows him to speak to the board and demand the return of his original team. Milchick finds him and really kind of seems to be firing him, but the next thing Mark knows, he’s back in the office, and his team returns.

Miss Huang standing in the Lumon office
Courtesy of Apple TV+

We’re only about ten minutes into Severance S2E1 and there are so many questions. I haven’t even mentioned Miss Huang (Sarah Bock). Why is she a child?

“Because of when I was born.” OK, let’s leave it at that for the moment.

Where did Mark’s new team come from? Were they really transferred from other offices? Did those offices really close? And what happened to them after Mark threw his fit? (I have some thoughts that I’ll return to later.)

On the other side of things, did the outies of Irv, Helly, and Dylan really refuse to come back, or was Milchick just making that up? If they did refuse to come back, how were they persuaded to change their minds? I don’t think I buy some kind of reversal here, or that Mark has convinced the board of anything. So, I’m led to ask: Why is Lumon doing all of this to Mark?

I do not think it has been five months since the Macrodata Uprising, primarily because Milchick is still in the process of moving into Cobel’s office, and he’s frustrated by the thing that gives the episode its title: a message on his computer screen that reads, “Hello, Ms. Cobel.” You want to tell me that Seth Milchick has been putting up with that for five months?

Mark holding a ball with both hands
Courtesy of Apple TV+

Milchick shows our MDR friends a video he says will now be shown to all new innies, and wow is it something. New snacks! Bobbing for pineapples! OK, but the big question is whether Lumon is serious about reforming their policies at all, and I think it should be pretty obvious that they are not.

Milchick says it’s the innies’ decision this time about whether to stay to work at Lumon, but by this point they’ve been a bit manipulated through their separation and reunion. It’s an illusion of choice unless they can themselves decide to quit at any point in the future, and that’s unclear at best. But, it’s an intriguing turn to the story of Severance to set things up in this way and have them decide to stay.

Mark wants to stay to figure out what happened to Ms. Casey, and the others agree on that front, but the motivations of each character differ in ways that are believable to them. Surely Dylan is swayed by the idea that he’ll be able to visit with his (outie’s) family. Irving needs to be talked down from the ledge but he also remembers being happy when all he knew was MDR.

As for Helly… well, I don’t think that’s Helly R. I think it’s Helena Eagan. Of course, I could be wrong, so let’s consider each possibility.

After Milchick shows the team the aforementioned new training video, they have the opportunity to tell each other what happened when they were on the outside. And Helly lies. She straight-up lies. She tells the others that she woke up alone in a boring apartment and that’s it. Why not tell them the truth?

I’m speculating that it’s because this is the outie version of Helena and that she’s part of a plan being enacted by Lumon to undermine MDR’s attempts to figure out what is really going on. Helly’s mannerisms further seem just a little off to me, but I landed on this theory so immediately that maybe I’m experiencing some kind of confirmation bias.

Maybe this is a red herring. It could be that Helly R. is so embarrassed by the fact that her outie is an Eagan that she can’t bear to tell her friends about it. Maybe she’s being genuine when she tells Mark that she doesn’t think they owe their outies anything. The team already knew that outie-Helly was despicable from the video of her telling her innie that she isn’t a person in Season 1, but maybe Helly fears they won’t trust her if they know the extent of it.

But, then, why would Helena Eagan be up for giving more life to this innie who has betrayed her multiple times?

Helly stands before a display that includes her name and picture
Screenshot/Apple TV+

The biggest question in Severance remains that of what Lumon is up to overall. What is their goal? How seriously should we take the stuff about Kier, the tempers, etc.?

At one level, all of this stuff is clearly ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean they don’t believe it. Indeed, I think all indications are that they do, which makes Severance all the more terrifying and all the more effective as satire.

I’ve long had the thought that maybe what MDR is refining are people, and the closing shots of S2E1 bolster that theory. Mark happily sorts some numbers, and then we flash to Ms. Casey with her head shorn. I failed to match numbers in a way that felt definitive, but I’m not sure we need to. The message feels clear.

Ms. Casey on a screen with numbers and bins at the bottom resembling Mark's MDR screen, labeled Cold Harbor 68% at the end of Severance S2E1, "Hello, Ms. Cobel"
Screenshot/Apple TV+

Thus, I wonder if Mark’s new team has been sent underground to wherever Ms. Casey is and if he condemned them to that fate. But what fate is that?

If I’m right, the idea would be manipulating the tempers of these subjects through numbers on a screen. That’s why some of the numbers are scary. And beyond that, I’d guess that all of the severed employees are a part of the same experiment in differing ways. The pseudo-religion isn’t a supplement; it’s the point.

An animated Kier flies off a mountain
Screenshot/Apple TV+

“Hello, Ms. Cobel” is a brilliant beginning to Severance’s second season, and that’s mostly because it withholds. It withholds any information outside of the Lumon office, which could provide some kind of confirmation about what’s going on. It even withholds its title character, as Ms. Cobel does not appear. It’s hermetic. We’re thrust back into the delightfully bizarre world we came to love in Season 1 and given no answers, only new questions.

See you next week.

Written by Caemeron Crain

Caemeron Crain is Executive Editor of TV Obsessive. He struggles with authority, including his own.

Caesar non est supra grammaticos

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