Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Severance S2E9, “The After Hours” (written by Dan Erickson and directed by Uta Briesewitz)
I mentioned last week that something felt off about how long it took Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) to drive to Salt’s Neck, and I don’t want to belabor the point, but it’s worth noting that S2E9 implies that she drove back to Kier in less than a day.
Mark (Adam Scott) and Devon (Jen Tullock) meet Cobel at a location in the woods so that they can go to the birthing retreat and talk to Mark’s innie. It would seem that they meet in the morning since it still makes sense for Mark to call out from work, but Cobel insists they wait for nightfall to go to the cabin. I’m not sure if that really makes sense, and spending all day doing nothing in the woods sounds pretty awful, but so it goes.
The powers that be at Lumon are very upset at Mark’s absence from work, as they’d planned on this being the day he completed the Cold Harbor file. It’s at 96%, so that’s a reasonable estimation, but without Mark the numbers are not moving. This leads Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) to berate Milchick (Tramell Tillman), but Seth’s right that he can’t make Mark come to work. His domain is the severed floor.
What’s more interesting, though, is how angry Milchick is becoming with his superiors. I think his reasons are legitimate. They haven’t been showing him respect, they made him feign gratitude for some vaguely racists paintings, and so on. But, more than anything, being chastised for using big words seems to have stuck in Milchick’s craw. It’s a part of who he is—devour feculence, Mr. Drummond.
It’s not clear whether any of this will lead Milchick to truly turn against Lumon or if it’s just exemplifying the frustrations of middle management, but it does lead Seth to be a bit more gracious with Mark than expected when he calls him. First, after Mark says he’s gone to a clinic, Milchick tries to bring him in by insisting he should be under Lumon’s care, but when Mark admits he’s not sick and just needs a day for life stuff, Milchick gives in. He’s disgruntled and doesn’t have it in him to push. Just promise you’ll be here tomorrow.
The delay surely makes Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry) immensely unhappy. “The After Hours” begins with him visiting Helena (Britt Lower) to watch her eat some eggs. He wishes she would eat them raw instead of hard-boiled, for reasons I won’t speculate about. I’m not going to speculate about the eggs at all, actually, but it’s clearly some kind of ritual that is at play as Helena arranges them on her plate around the face of a boy, with Father there to watch her. They’re marking what should be a triumphant day.
Helena tells Jame that they’re seeing to Mr. Bailiff (John Turturro), which he doesn’t respond to directly, but we can infer that Lumon views Irving as a threat. When Irv returns home, he finds Burt (Christopher Walken) waiting for him, and Burt insists that Irv take a ride with him. Radar comes along.
In the car, Burt tells Irving that he never hurt anyone; he’d just drive them somewhere. There is the implication, though, that he knew he was driving these people to their deaths. Irving wonders if that’s what’s happening to him, but as it turns out, Burt takes him to a train station, buys him a ticket, and tells him to leave and never come back. He got severed so some part of him could be innocent, and that innocent version of him fell in love with Irving.
It’s a touching scene in the train station, as Irving says he’s never been loved and he wants to know what that’s like. But Burt is right that they can’t pursue it for a variety of reasons. Burt clearly still has connections to Lumon, so if we take all of this at face value, he’s going to be in trouble. Though, I suppose some possibility remains that this will turn out to be a double-cross.
If not, one has to wonder if we’ll see Irving again in Severance. He’s on a train to parts unknown, so it could make sense for this to be the end of his story. I hope not, if for no other reason than my love for John Turturro’s portrayal of this character. But, it would also be a little disappointing if we don’t learn anything further, either about how Irving has been investigating Lumon or about his past. I still think he must have previously held something like Milchick’s position in order to know about that black hallway.
Speaking of the black hallway (or Exports Hall), innie-Helly commits herself to finding it in S2E9. She goes to the breakroom and takes Irv’s note from behind the Hang in There poster, then starts trying to memorize the series of directions provided. I’m not sure why you’d do that as opposed to carrying the note with you as you take them one by one, but there’s also the problem of getting access without the right kind of key card anyway, which I’m not sure Helly is thinking about.
Regardless, she’s interrupted by Jame Eagan coming into the office. He claims that she tricked him, which innie-Helly doesn’t understand at all. She has met Jame before, in the Season 1 finale, so she knows who he is. What’s less clear is whether Jame notes a distinction between innie-Helly and outie-Helena.
Signs point to no if we think about this scene in conjunction with the one where he calls Helena a fetid moppet early in Season 2. There, he seemed to be holding her outie responsible for what her innie had done. Here, in S2E9, he seems to be chastising the innie for the failure of the outie’s plan to complete Cold Harbor that day.
We know that Jame didn’t invent the severance procedure, so I have to wonder if he even understands it. Could there be a significant difference between what Lumon is actually doing with Cold Harbor and what he thinks they are doing?
Innie-Dylan (Zach Cherry) isn’t helping Helly R. because he’s just too upset. Gretchen (Merritt Wever) decided to tell outie-Dylan that she’d been making out with his innie, which pisses him off to where he threatens to quit his job. So, Gretchen breaks things off with innie-Dylan, but that leads him to file a resignation request. This isn’t resolved by the end of the episode, but it does make me fear that we could be losing innie-Dylan moving forward.
My hope is that it will go the other way, with Gretchen convincing Dylan to keep his job, but that wouldn’t in itself shift how innie-Dylan is feeling. Something else would have to happen to bring him around, though maybe anger at his outie would be enough to make him amenable to innie-Helly’s arguments about what they owe Irv.
“The After Hours”
Severance S2E9 shares its name with The Twilight Zone S1E34—“The After Hours.” That might just seem like a wink and a nod, and it surely is that, but given that Ms. Cobel references the Twilight Zone episode when she’s talking to the gate guard (Jeanine Marie Flynn) at the birthing retreat, I can’t help but wonder if there’s more at play than an homage.
Towards the beginning of S2E9, Mark expresses his distrust of Cobel to Devon. They told her everything, and she didn’t tell them virtually anything. So, when the three meet in the woods, Mark pushes for more information. He doesn’t get much besides the idea that if innie-Mark has completed the Cold Harbor file, that means Gemma (Dichen Lachman) is already dead. As viewers, we could read into that, but I’m also not sure if we should believe it.
What is motivating Harmony Cobel at this point, and what is her plan?
I don’t think we know. It’s true that we’ve seen her turning against Lumon to some degree over the preceding episodes of Severance, but we’ve also learned that she invented the severance procedure. At the beginning, she certainly seemed to be zealous in her devotion to Kier Eagan and his principles. How much of that lingers?
Devon wants to take Mark to the birthing retreat to talk to his innie, and Harmony says she’s an ally at this point, but I continue to wonder if her move will be more of a power play within the structure of Lumon—an attempt to reclaim her position in the company—as opposed to a true move against it.
When they arrive at the gate, Harmony first says that Devon is “one of Jame’s,” which implies that Jame Eagan impregnates various women in secret. I’ve wondered who Harmony’s father is, and there could be a whole thing here with Eagans trying to spread their lineage outside the confines of wedlock. At the moment, though, I want to focus on how Harmony’s line about this doesn’t quite work in order to get them through the gate. So it’s on to Plan B.
“Miss Marsha White. Ninth Floor.”
– “Specialties Department.”
“I’m looking for a gold thimble.”
This is a direct reference to the aforementioned episode of The Twilight Zone, which sees Marsha White (Anne Francis) taken to the ninth floor of a department store, where she buys a gold thimble. It’s already a bit weird because the ninth floor is totally empty of anything else, but after Marsha discovers that the thimble is damaged and goes to file a complaint, she’s informed that the store only has eight floors.
Marsha sees the woman who sold her the thimble, but she turns out to be a mannequin, and at this point Marsha lies down to have a rest. The staff apparently forgets about her, and when she wakes up, the store is closed and she can’t get out. Then, the mannequins in the store all start saying her name, and the ultimate reveal of the episode is that Marsha is, herself, a mannequin. Each of them gets to go spend a month out in the world as if they were a real person, but she was a day late coming back. She forgot who she was.
The thematic parallels to Severance are clear, but I can’t help but wonder about Harmony mentioning this episode of The Twilight Zone to the gate guard as code. The implication is that someone has forgotten they’re not a real person, and that this has happened before. There is a process in place that Harmony is invoking.
This does not bode well for Mark or Gemma, because it points in the direction of Harmony trying to get back into the good graces of Lumon. Mark has started to think he’s a real boy; it’s time to remind him that he’s a mannequin.
See you next week.
