The following recap contains spoilers for Severance S2E2, “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig” (written by Mohamad El Masri and directed by Sam Donovan)
Through the first two episodes of its second season, Severance is cementing its place as one of the best shows on TV. I lauded the season premiere for the way it sealed us within the perspective of the Lumon office, and now I have to praise S2E2 for spending its entire hour on the outside. Structurally, it’s perfect—far more effective to make each perspective self-contained as Season 2 gets going than it would be to immediately cut back and forth.
We begin again in the aftermath of the events of the Season 1 finale, but this time with outie versions of our friends.
Irving (John Turturro) presumably just drove himself home after he found himself outside of Burt’s door, but there are some indications later in the episode that perhaps he and Burt (Christopher Walken) have been colluding on the outside. At least, I presume that’s who Irv calls from a payphone, and we see Burt watching him after Irving leaves a message. That’s intriguing since I had assumed these two didn’t know each other in the outside world.
Whoever Irving is calling, he wants that person to know that his innie got their message. It makes sense to me to think this would be Burt, and that the message was simply to shake innie-Irving from his dogmatic slumber, but we don’t know for sure. Either way, the whole thing does raise some interesting questions about Irving’s attempts to communicate with his innie.

Dylan (Zach Cherry) leaves work with an ice pack on his head, and we don’t see much more with him until Milchick (Tramell Tillman) shows up at his door to fire him. Dylan is upset about that (as is Irving), which lets us know that what Milchick told innie-Mark in Episode 1 was not just a lie but the opposite of the truth. Dylan ultimately tries to get a job at a door factory (a cool little shoutout to where Dan Erickson worked when he conceived of Severance), but is denied the opportunity because he’s been severed. Is that discrimination? Maybe, but it is also another entry point into how people in this world have strong feelings about the severance procedure. It’s not like everyone thinks it’s fine; it’s just that those who think it’s wrong are losing, politically. Hard to imagine.
We first see Helena Eagan (Britt Lower) in this episode rubbing her neck in the bathroom, presumably remembering how her innie tried to commit suicide/murder her in the elevator in Season 1. In short order, Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) enters the room, followed by Helena’s father, Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry).
Jame doesn’t have much to say to his daughter—he just calls her a fetid moppet and leaves the room—but we can see how Helena is motivated to get back into her father’s good graces. She takes the lead on damage control, recording a video where she says her comments at the gala resulted from drinking while taking a non-Lumon manufactured medication, and tasking Milchick with getting things under control with regard to the severed employees.

She also talks to Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) to thank her for her loyalty and offer her a new job on the Severance Advisory Board. It is not clear by the end of S2E2 whether Cobel takes this job. She seems to feel a bit disrespected and wants her old job back, but she’s not getting it. In the closing scene of the episode, Mark (Adam Scott) is finally able to confront Cobel/Selvig, but she really doesn’t tell him anything and it’s hard to predict what path this character make take as Severance proceeds.
As for Mark, he awakes after yelling, “She’s alive!” and that appears to be the end of the party/book reading, which Ricken (Michael Chernus) plans to reschedule. Devon (Jen Tullock) seems to be the most open to the idea that the “she” innie-Mark was referring to is Gemma (Dichen Lachman), but Ricken figures he must have been referring to baby Eleanor (who you’ll recall briefly went missing during S1E9), and Mark is pretty insistent that this is the only thing that makes sense. As he tells Devon later at Pip’s, he identified Gemma’s body. He saw her dead.

Whereas Milchick told innie-Mark that his outie was champing at the bit to return to Lumon while his fellows refused to come back, the opposite is shown to be the case in S2E2. Irving and Dylan are fired and unhappy about it, while it is Mark who isn’t sure he wants to return to work. Ultimately, Milchick is able to persuade him with a pineapple, a promise of reforms, better pay, and the insistence that his innie lacks the sadness he can see written all over Mark’s face, but it’s a near thing.
This isn’t terribly surprising to me, but it does raise the question of why Lumon wants Mark to come back to work, and S2E2 provides an answer. Helena says that they need him to complete the Cold Harbor file, which is interesting because we learned in S2E1 that the Cold Harbor file is Ms. Casey. This might also relate to why Cobel took such a special interest in Mark.

I speculated on our podcast last week that Mark’s new team might have been composed of individuals who had previously been kept in the testing area and activated in parallel to how Ms. Casey was deployed as Wellness Counselor in Season 1. S2E2 makes it clear that this is not the case. They were, indeed, transferred from other Lumon locations, even if Drummond thinks transferring people from 5X is a bad idea for some reason. Mark W. (Bob Balaban) is mad when he’s let go (again?) because he broke a lease in Grand Rapids.
So, I now wonder if Ms. Casey is Lumon’s first attempt to bring someone back from the dead, and if they think that Mark’s connection with her on the outside provides him with an ability to mold her into a person that others would lack. I feel like that’s what we’re being told.
Since Mark is important to Lumon’s goals, the Board agrees to his demand to get his original team back. We never see or directly hear from the Board, of course, but this part of S2E1 appears to be true. Milchick’s attempt to get Mark to work with a new team didn’t work, so he’s been overridden. The old team comes back, including Helly R.
Now, I theorized last week that the Helly we were seeing wasn’t the innie-Helly we’d come to know and love, but rather Helena Eagan posing as her innie. I don’t think the events of S2E2 disconfirm that theory, but they don’t confirm it, either. We do see Helena watching a recording of her innie kissing Mark, which is worth noting, but my theory still stands on Helly not quite seeming like Helly, and that she lied about what she saw in the outside world.
It’s not just “my theory,” of course. I’ve seen any number of others float this idea in the wake of Episode 1. I even saw someone on social media claiming that Helly was never severed, so I feel like I need to note that we saw her undergo the procedure where they implanted a chip in her brain back in S1E2.
If they’ve removed that chip, innie-Helly would be functionally dead, which would be sad, but it’s also possible that they’ve just deactivated it in some way. Or, maybe that theory is just wrong and Helly R. was too embarrassed about being an Eagan to tell her comrades the truth of what happened for her on the outside. I’m not expecting an immediate answer.
Either way, the outie version of Helena is motivated to make things work inside Lumon, and she thinks that it is important for Mark to finish Cold Harbor. From what we saw in Episode 1, he appears to be 68% done with that file, so it seems likely that he’ll complete it before the end of Season 2. I wonder what happens then.
I suppose Ms. Casey’s time as Wellness Counselor had to be a part of the overall plan, if we’re wondering why Mark wasn’t refining Cold Harbor in Season 1. Additionally, I can’t stop thinking about how Irving’s outie seems to spend all of his free time obsessively painting the hallway Ms. Casey went down after she was fired, and how the perspective from which he’s painting parallels the perspective of Milchick in that scene.

What is Irving up to in the outside world, with his files on severed employees and that call from a payphone that went unanswered? And how does Burt factor in?