‘Severance’ Season 2, Episode 3: The Baby Goats Are Back

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they just disappeared her and if we let this happen to miss casey then who's going to step

up when it happens to us

I'm Joyner Robinson. I'm Rob Mahoney.
And we're out here looking for goats and missing wives and all sorts of stuff here on Severance. Rob, how did you feel about the fact that they were unwilling to help when he made a plea to humanity, but when he mentioned the goats, they were like, oh, okay, we'll help.
It's one of those things that seems like a bridge too far. And I am somewhat baffled by the fact that this is what got through to the goat people.
At the same time, I know people like this in the real world who need the plea to animal safety and survival above human safety and survival. So really, is it that weird? Is it that unusual? Is it that unbelievable at the end of the day? It's some real dog people energy.
And I say that with love and respect to you, a dog person. Okay, let's not do that.
I don't think that's what, I really feel like that's a dog person energy and not a cat person energy. Cat people have their own off-putting energy and I will own that.
But like, this is not our strain of, you know. It's a fair point in the sense that your cats don't care if you live or die.
And no matter what happens, they're just going to go about their business. They don't really need to be taken care of in the same way.
So I take your point. I take your criticism.
I'm listening. I'm learning.
I'm trying not to be that kind of dog person. We're here to talk to you about season two, episode three of Severance, Who is Alive, directed by Ben Stiller and written by Wei Ning Yu.
She is a writer on not only Severance, not only Gen V, but also Andy Greenwald's Briar Patch. You may have heard of it.
You might have heard of it. So what did you like? Overall, big picture.
We've got a lot. I should say.
Pineapplebobbing at gmail.com. I don't think we've ever gotten so many emails for a show.
Would you agree? The emails are a bobbin, Joe. They are.
It's like the black sludge of Irving's paint sort of spilling over the cubicle walls. That doesn't sound very complimentary.
Your emails are incredible. There were so many of them.
I read them all. We will not get to all of them, but we have a lot to cover in this episode based on everything that happens in this episode and based on all of your very cogent observations from this, that, and the other thing, dear listeners.
Please keep your emails coming. I do love them.
They're amazing. Um, but Rob sort of like big picture.

What did you think of?

We had the any only episode, the Audi only episode.

We end this episode with reintegration.

So now we know why we had to have those episodes. Cause that's the last time.

Theoretically we're going to be able to be with Mark all any, all Audi.

Now it's just going to be a mishmash.

Uh, I hope.

What did you think of this episode? I have to say, I think this one was kind of odd. And not all of it worked for me.
There's some really great moments, some emotional beats that I think really hit. But overall, for one of the most polished shows on TV, felt a little bit stilted.
There's a lot that I really loved. I would say the Irving stuff worked for me the Dylan stuff worked for me um the reintegration moment really worked for me the Milchik stuff really worked for me I thought that was wonderful the goat stuff I'm not sure actually uh with love and respect to Gwendolyn Christie like I just and and I love the weirdness of severance.
You know, we had weird masked exotic dancers during the waffle party last year. Like I'm not saying like weird off putting stuff is, uh, out of the, out of the realm of possibility of the show.
This just felt like them. I felt a little bit of like the sweat of them trying to be weird in a way that felt like it didn't quite work for me.
So, yeah. It was a little less severance, a little too much like Dr.
Seuss in terms of the language. It just felt even just like Mammalian's Nutrible is very like, you're flambazing the hornswoggle.
Like you really don't need to do it. You don't need to go that far.
And I'm a little torn on it because I get that the intention is we are stumbling into a world that feels so foreign from it from MDR. It's like, it's supposed to feel like a different show.
Yeah. But the contrast is so jarring and so grating.
And I think some of the characters actions and conversations are inexplicable in a, in a bad way that kind of took me out of the Severance experience. I agree with you.
But overall, it didn't feel like a, oh no, should we be worried about season two sort of thing or anything like that. It was just one facet of this episode that I was like, I'm not sure this works for me.
I was unsure if you were going to come to the episode and say, I loved the goat stuff. It's my favorite stuff I've ever seen on Severance.
Because my sense

is that a lot of people did really

like that stuff. Interesting.

But for me,

I don't know, it just feels like a

again, just like a slight distraction

or a slight spectacle

inside of a show that like, yes, has

weird stuff happen, but does such a good

job, as we talked about before, and inside this episode of integrating true character moments with the oddities that are happening inside this world. so it felt a little like over indexing on something that us and audiences across the world watching severance latched onto from season one which is that little goat reveal that's almost like a throwaway scene that they have now woven.
It seems like into the mythology of the show, which I'm open to that and I encourage it, but this is maybe leaning a little too far in that direction. I had a, I had a really good conversation with, uh, with CR, with Chris Ryan over the weekend where we were talking about sort of theory shows and what happens in a season two of a theory show.
And we got this email from our listener, John B. And I just really like the way he put this.
He said, Severance has entered a playground that no show has made it out of without significant injury to its ratings or Q rating. It's taken the elevator to the same floor as the Hatch from Lost, the L the yellow king the maze of westworld and the black

lodge no one has ever come out of this floor of prestige tv alive um and i i think and john's overall email was like more positive he's like but perhaps under these people this won't be the case so like overall more positive but but the degree of difficulty is what it is and it and it's just like the

intensive, I love

a theory show. You know I do.
I do.

The intensive, rabid theorizing, I can't think of a single example of a show that has survived that, to John's point. He mentioned Black Lodge.
Twin Peaks, obviously, in the long lens of history. And I personally love the Lost finale.
I'm a huge Lost fan, but in the larger culture conversations

we have about Lost,

people don't feel the same way.

So I'm hoping,

we've talked about this a little bit before,

but when I saw the Go people,

I was like, hold fast,

hold steady, Severance.

You got this.

Maybe we don't need belly pouches

at the end of the day.

Perhaps, perhaps not.

Speaking of Lost,

I did want to shout out the fact that someone on Twitter pointed this out and I felt so ashamed that I missed it. The Lost numbers, and if you don't, if you never watched Lost, there are a very famous set of numbers for 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 that show up again and again in Lost are these musical numbers.
Don't mock me, Ramon. I'm not.
No, when this was pointed out and I saw you acknowledging it, I felt such a deep

existential pain on your behalf.

Because I know that this was just racking you with guilt and anxiety for having missed it. I did miss it.
When Irving and Dylan and Helena all go to their lockers at the end of episode two,

their locker numbers align with the numbers from lost.

So a little shout out,

you know,

it just means that the people are making severance know that they are

treading in the losty and waters.

And if you've never seen lost you should,

but if you've never seen it,

I'll let you know that a very significant,

one of the most,

and Dan Erickson has talked about this and other people have talked about

this,

this moment in lost season two of lost,

We're going to talked about this and other people have talked about this, this moment in Lost, season two of Lost, where they discover they're awash on a desert island. They discover there's a hatch underneath the island.
And that opens up a whole new world of possibilities of like, we thought we were on a deserted island. What else is happening on this island? And we find a guy, spoilers for season two of Lost, please skip ahead.
we find a guy in a hatch who's pressing a button you know without knowing what that button does and if that is not mdr you know nothing is so if that's not our day-to-day life at this point joe i don't know what that is fair fair fair we got an email from uh our listener jordan who wanted to point out that in season one, when Helly first enters the severed floor, she asks Mark, am I livestock?

And he says in his classic Adam Scott way, you think we grew a full human and gave you consciousness?

How do you feel about that line, given our current theories about what's happening with Cold Harbor and Gemma and all you consciousness? How do you feel about that line,

given our current theories about what's happening with Cold Harbor

and Gemma and all of that?

Encouraged.

I think things like that speak to a broader vision,

speak to that level of callback,

even in this sort of capacity,

where it is facilitating the theories around the show,

even if it turns out not to be a straight line

from one line of dialogue

to the actual eventuality of what this is.

That's fun.

That's a delight for me.

Thank you. the show, even if it turns out not to be a straight line from one line of dialogue to the actual eventuality of what this is.
That's fun. That's a delight for me.

Are you ready? Are you emotionally prepared to talk about pineapple bobbing, Rob Mahoney?

Please bring it on.

Pineapple robbing. So in case folks don't know, because you have decided to improve your life by not being on social media.
I didn't ask. Actually, my nephew suggested.
My young nephew volunteered to bob a pineapple to test whether or not one can bob. You coerced and employed, like Miss Wong, a literal child.
I went to my sister's house. There was a pineapple there.

And I turned to my nephews and I said,

do you think someone could bob?

And actually, they had never heard of apple bobbing.

So it was a whole educational process for them.

He bobbed the pineapple.

You've seen the video evidence of him bobbing the pineapple successfully.

How do you feel?

How does this change your point of view on pineapple bobbing?

Successfully, you say.

He bobs this pineapple in like a four-quart pot. It's a four-quart pot, Joe.
There's nowhere for that pineapple to go. That's not true at all.
He crushed it. Crushed the pineapple bobbing.
It's not his fault. He did an amazing job.
Okay. His technique is impeccable.
I salute him for successfully bobbing the pineapple within the parameters of what's been established here, which is not regulation bobbing, not authorized by the bobbing authority. You have to have a big body of water so that the pineapple can move around.
That's the whole point. You can't speak for the bobbing authority.
You have no credentials to do that. Says who? Are you telling me you're fully bob trained like you you know all the parameters

of bobbing prove that i'm not okay great uh that's an that's an interesting philosophy that i'm not okay um also on on the pineapple front we got a couple of those uh our listener christina b uh was talking about how much the visual uh imagery of like let's say these boxy old cars and the

cure, you know,

mural. the visual imagery of, let's say, these boxy old cars and the Kier mural that we talked about looking very Soviet.
The Soviet vibes of the Bell Labs where they're shooting this show reminded her of stories about what it was like to grow up in the Soviet Union or in East Germany. And so this idea of the pineapple is this sort of symbol of a luxury fruit that does not make it past the blockades.
you know this sort of like you know and it's not it's not like people who live in this town

called Kier inside of the show

seem like they're wanting specifically, but there are potentially some luxuries like, say, a waffle or an egg or a pineapple that, like, they can't readily access. It's possible.
Also kind of telling that, you know, the accommodations for the people who work at Lumen, like Marx, for example, are pretty Spartan, like pretty basic in terms of the structure of those houses and places. And then even when we see the characters who are supposedly doing well, there's very convenient narrative reasons for why we don't see a lot of decadence, right? Like the no food dinner party is a great bit, but maybe it's also like a matter of dealing with the realistic circumstances of something like this.
We just honestly haven't seen people indulging really in a lot of different ways. Last but not least on the pineapple front, and this is, I think, the most important pineapple fact that you and I have learned over the last week, unless you already knew this.
Someone who emailed us under the name Van Life, which I presume is sort of not their actual name, said, I couldn't help but wonder if you were all aware of the use of pineapple, specifically upside down pineapple, as an identifying symbol indicating an openness to non-monogamy or partner swapping. I found this fact out recently and then started to notice pineapples all over the place.
So inside of an episode, Rob, where Gretchen, a character that we meet for the first time, Dylan's wife, is maybe feeling a spark of something. She's lost with her husband on the outside, with the version of her husband on the inside.
So, I mean, another erotic throuple has entered the chat. How do you feel about the use of pineapple in this show? I think we're going to need some authority.
I do not have authority in this particular matter. I may be on the bobbing council, but as far as what constitutes partner swapping, if it is indeed still your partner's physical form occupied by another consciousness, look, it's a question that TV has grappled with since the dawn of time.
A lot of body swapping hijinks out there. This is a little bit different though in the sense that it is still Dylan or still Mark.
It's just a slightly different version of them. And I love that we are getting to the point with Severance where we're engaging with what happens when you meet a version of your husband, but one who hasn't been like weighed down by the world.
Yeah. And that's, that's a question that's asked inside of this episode.
When Gretchen played by the great Merit Weaver, we'll talk about it in a second. Let's talk about Dylan and Gretchen.
When she shows up and she's talking to him and she says you, and then she corrects herself and she says he like really trying to keep the two of them separate. But this is a question we've asked ourselves throughout as we watch what we believe to be Helena impersonate Heli, or as we watch the two marks.
Is there a massive difference between the two? What makes your Annie a different personality than your Audi? Is it just they're missing the heaviness of the world, the grief of a lost spouse or the failure that Dylan feels like he's surrounded by on the outside? And so when we meet you on the inside, you're just sort of like a lighter, purer version of yourself. Is that a possibility? What do you think? I think so.
Or at least one that isn't burdened in the same way. We latched on to last week, this sort of detail of Dylan's Audi going on these job interviews, being very concerned about whether these jobs would have health insurance as maybe a tip for his family's circumstances or something going on with his kids.
After this episode, I see it a lot more as sort of the pressure of providing. He is trying to keep these jobs in a way that he hasn't found a passion for anything, a consistency with anything.
And so Gretchen has seen this version of a person she loves deal with all that, grapple with all that, be ground down into just like a lump on the couch reading Midlife Driver magazine, which I think is a fantastic little bit of set deck. Wonderful.
He can't even slice the cookie dough. You know what I mean? He can't slice the cookie dough.
Sugar cookie is not that hard. He should be able to bake a sugar cookie from scratch, much less the tube.
I was wondering how you, Rob, felt about cookies out of a tube. I will say they do slab, you know? Like a store-bought Walmart-style giant lump of icing sugar cookie or your Pillsbury slice and bake.
I'm going to eat it. You're into it.
I'm not turning it down. All right, let's talk about Merit Weaver.
Genuinely one of my favorite actresses. The casting news with love and respect against Gwendolyn Christie and other people, the casting news I was most excited about in this season.
In case you are listening to a Prestige TV podcast, don't know who Merit Weaver is. Or in case you, unlike me, you don't have to watch awards shows for a living.
I want to remind people who may not know that Merit Weaver, who has won two Emmys, gave the, canonically the best Emmys acceptance speech of all time. Kai, will you play this, please? Oh, no.
Thanks so much. Thank you so much.
I gotta go. Bye.
That's it. Tremendous.
That's the iconic Merit Weaver Emmy acceptance speech

You may know her from Nurse Jackie

For which she won an Emmy

From Godless, Unbelievable, The Walking Dead

Run, a very mixed bag of a show

But a very like Rob and Joanna show

Donald Gleeson, Merit Weaver

It should have been great

True to form

That is exactly what I remember her from

Yeah

And a short-lived show in the sense that even I bailed on it

Like two-thirds of the way through the season

I know, it started out so strong

Thank you. that is exactly what I remember her from.
Yeah. And a short-lived show in the sense that even I bailed on it like two-thirds of the way through the season.
I know. It started out so strong.
I was really promising. Anyway, Merritt Weaver is here.
I loved everything about this. Yeah.
This sort of seduction of Dylan, like another day, another finger trap, only this time the finger trap is, you know, you've got this really cool wife.

I think Merit Weaver is a perfect casting choice for this. I think what she conveys about the discomfort, but also somewhat excitement of this interaction, I think she does so perfectly and so subtly.
I think watching her be watching her deliver the the reality of dylan on the outside but also not in a shitty way in a like loyal kind way like she cares about him she's she's not he dumb he a dick like she's not calling him dumb or a dick. But when he asks if he's a fuck up, she doesn't deny it, you know? And so it's just...
But also doesn't answer it. Yeah, she just doesn't answer it.
Not her words. Yeah, yeah.
What do you think? I loved this exchange. I love the setup.
And I love the finger trap element you're describing for both of them. You have our most perk-obsessed character on this show being shown the tastiest perk of all, not just time with his family, but secret time with his family that no one else knows about.
How enticing. And for Gretchen, she's having to overcome, as you mentioned, the overwhelming weirdness of what is happening.
And she's clocking in in real time. Who is this child who is speaking in over the loudspeaker, observing our session? It's clear that she's really uncomfortable, but that she's so at least intrigued on a baseline level by the chance to meet this version of Dylan and figure out what he's like.
She's somewhat mystified by the fact that he doesn't recognize her despite that severance working as intended. It's another thing entirely to encounter it and to experience it and to see this version of your husband not know you.
I think that's a great place to put these two characters. And it helps explain, too, why when she does get home with Audi Dylan, she doesn't even really want to talk about it.
I don't think she wants to indicate how interesting the exchange was for her. She's keeping a secret too, right? Absolutely.
It gives a fair because neither of them are telling the other people in their lives about what's happening here. The fact that the sinister, in my view, fact that they've built this visiting center in the security room in the location of Dylan's Great rebellion.
And they're like, this is where we're going to put the thing that's going to pacify you. I think is incredible.
The design of that place, the fact that you hear ocean and gull sounds the whole time that he's in there, and then it cuts off as soon as she leaves. He's still in there.
As soon as she leaves, that sound cuts out. Sweet, sweet Pavlov.
We're really going places. I was very soothed listening to it.
The gulls and the crashing waves, it was working on me. That's my favorite setting.
It's either heavy rain or crashing beach waves are the best white noise sounds one could ask for. Plus the beautiful oil painting beach vista behind them.
Very well manicured for this corporate visitation suite. I think it's so clever.
And I think this idea of, again, there are, we've talked about love triangles and love quadrangles and all this stuff on the show. There are story opportunities here that one could pursue perhaps in an episode of Black Mirror, but one cannot pursue in your standard prestige TV show.
So to give Gretchen the opportunity to meet her husband, not just her husband, not weighed down by the things that have happened in their life, but her husband and that idea of like meeting someone for the first time. Yeah.
And like that excitement that like leads plenty of people to stray from their marriage of like,

uh,

the,

the,

the chase,

is this person

going to like me?

Like,

you know,

the,

the early flirtation,

like anything like that.

Uh,

but inside of,

it's also still

kind of her husband

is,

is a really wild,

uh,

concept to explore.

And the fact that

when she hugs him,

when she says goodbye, she says, I love you and says it's sort of habit and instinctual, but, but outie Dylan on the couch does not get an, I love you when she goes off to work. So, you know, it's a stuff.
The most cursory of pecs between them. And, and we should say Dylan G doesn't even know what to do with being loved, but he is clearly so giddy at whatever it is that he's feeling, whether that's just attraction, whether that's just curiosity.
I'm sure it's some blend of all these things, but he's feeling a lot in a way that we've never really seen that character feel before. I think it's also important for us to see that outside scene, not just to see the contrast, which is important, but also bless

them for doing that because then we don't have to endure a week of theories of like,

is that actually his wife?

You know, that is actually his wife.

So we know that.

We saw that his kids play with Kier dolls on the floor.

There were dolls.

Totally normal.

Not scary at all.

It also just like in general, she's working the night shift. Like they don't, they don't spend time.
Like what time do they spend together at home? He's, he's on the severance, severed floor during the day. She works the night shift, like ships in the night.
Very sad. All right.
But, but like that takes us to the cost here of this shiny new finger trap lore for Dylan is the very intentional and it's working division that it causes between Dylan and his cohorts. The reason they were successful in season one in their uprising is because of the common cause that they found together.
And here in season two, the division between Irving and Dylan, who we saw share that extremely tender moment in episode one that made us very emotional. And then the fact that we believe that Heli is actually Helena.
So who's an ally to whom? Nobody. They've successfully scattered this impenetrable foursome to the wind within mere days.
It doesn't take a lot, yeah. A couple of carrots here and there, a hidden boss there, and all of a sudden, the whole team is broken up.
And I think to do it with Dylan specifically, who, whatever you may think of that character, and he can be very edgelord at times in a way that I find endearing within the context of this show, if not necessarily in the outside world, does something very selfless at the end of season one by volunteering to be the person to stay. And so to turn this person who made that sort of, like, he didn't have the chance to meet Gretchen in the way that, you know, the other members of his team, at least theoretically, could meet the people around them.
Yeah. Hallie could have met her night gardener, you know, if in fact that had happened.
It's a very real thing. Lots of people employ night gardeners, Joe.
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That's athleticbrewing.com slash R-I-N-G-E-R to find award-winning athletic n-a brews near you athletic brewing company fit for all times near beer let's talk about irving or uh everybody's talking about birving everybody's talking about birving felicia definitely is heli definitely is. We gave Kai a full license to hit that sound drop, whatever he did, and you did it perfectly, Kai.
Thank you so much. I was hoping you would.
Okay. Irving Bervie in the O&D department.
Okay. You mentioned Helly, or as we believe, Helena.
What did you make of the exchange between Helena and Irving when she was trying to say, when she said, we've got you, and give him affection and a kind touch? She just continues to do and say things that Heli would not do, including asking questions about things that Heli would know. And the hand touch felt very corporate-approved physical contact of assurance in a way that feels consistent with Helena to me.
To me, it felt like an alien visiting Earth trying to approximate a human. Well, what's the difference between corporate policy and aliens at the end of the day? How does one comfort exactly? What is your read on how Irving received this gesture from her? He seems overall the most skeptical of what's happening.
And I would say that going back to episode one of this season, there's just little bits where you see him seeming to catch something in his facial expression, like a little moment of recognition that, huh, this is a little weird. And granted, everything is weird enough right now that I don't know that he's consciously registering, oh, this is an imposter, but that something seems off with this person he knows.
Yeah, I agree. We also got like a Dylan eyebrow sort of in the foreground of that moment.
And I couldn't tell if that was him also clocking something weird. And it would make sense to me that Mark would be the last to know.
But, you know. It's also hard to say because Zach Cherry does tremendous eyebrow work in this show there's just like a constant oscillation of what's going on up there like i who knows what means what before irving goes to ond he has this conversation with dylan that we already sort of referenced which was another clever bit of and i and i will continuously praise the show for this exposition wrapped inside of a character beat so he's talking to d Dylan about like, you know, the hallway, I managed to draw it.
We can go find it right now. And what we're discovering inside that exchange is that Dylan is holding something back from Irving.
And that's the character beat that we talked about of like the division and their unity, but also reminds us the, the, the audience, what that hallway is, why he would have a drawing of it in his notebook notebook so when he then shows it to felicia and o and d we're all prepped for that and that those are like the little economical beats inside of an episode of severance that i so admire uh versus you know whatever mike critiques the goat stuff we will get back to in a second um felicia nerving what do to say about that? I mean, it's just nice that we get this moment to commiserate about Bervin, if also talking about Bervin. Everybody's commiserating about Bervin.
A lot of commiseration needs to be done. There's a lot of admiration for what Burt brought to O&D, and clearly a lot of affection between him and Irving, as we get this very charming anecdote about Burt fixing his hair for literal hours before going to visit him but what jumped out to me for this scene is actually before Felicia shows up and we get Irving walking into O&D for the first time and very kind of sweet and tender moment as he's perusing the paintings and like taking stock the scene.
And the score as ever on Severance is wonderful, wonderful stuff. And here it hits like half noir, half elevator music, which is basically the show to me.
I have a lot of admiration for so many of the very precise points that they're striking between these. What should be extremes or things that have nothing to do with each other.
No one has ever looked more longingly or tenderly at a flat file cabinet than Irving does in this episode. His little smile when Felicia tells him the hair story, the long hug between the two of them, especially in contrast to that awkward effort from Helena, just mere moments before.
Although Helena, I mean, our girl, she just wants to jump Mark S's bones so bad and doesn't know how to do it. I want to talk about that a second.
But last but not least, I will just say that we get all of this, which is emotional character stuff. And then inside of that, we get, boom, lore dump, the exports haul.
Felicia knows knows about the exports hall kind of what it is

and also significantly where it is so hi felicia welcome to the party you are now part of the coalition welcome to the resistance um all right let's talk let's talk about mark and heli and uh and the freaky goat shit.

Okay.

So,

what I like about this,

the episode opens,

well,

I'll- and Helly and the freaky goat shit. Okay.
So what I like about this, the episode opens, we'll obviously get back to Mark on the outside, but the episode opens with this very heisty Ocean's Eleven, let's time the entry to the building moment from Mark. And when we see Indy Mark, he's also on a mission.
They're both Marks on a mission inside of this episode, which I really like, which again, speaks to this idea of they are kind of the same person. There are ways in which they're different, but there are ways in which they're the same.
And they're both like, we're going to spearhead a heist and it's going to happen. And the loot is Miss Casey.
So we have Mark showing the sketch and he says, do not leave it behind, which when someone says something like that, I'm like, oh, someone's going to leave something behind.

On the one hand, yes.

And on the other hand, I don't know.

Helena is just there observing all of it.

So it's not like they're successfully keeping any secrets at all.

And as they point out, Lumen is listening, which they did tell them.

Yeah.

Very, very we hear for you.

I thought it was what I hear every time I hear Lumen is listening.

Okay, that's what I felt like when Helena comforts Irving and she says, we've got you. I was like, they've got him.
You know what I mean? That's pretty good. That's pretty good.
Okay. Let's talk about their little moment in the hallway.
Helena and Mark have this little moment in the corner of a hallway. My interpretation of what's going on here is, yes, Anne to you, she definitely wants to jump his bones.
She does not know how to initiate. She's hoping he'll initiate.
He's used to a Helly who is the one who grabbed him and smooched him in the first place. So he's sort of waiting for her to initiate.
And then the moment just kind of passes and he sort of remembers what he's supposed to be doing, which is looking for his wife. Oops.
But I love this moment and Britt Lauer's performance, especially in terms of what we talked about last week, which is Helena's sort of longing to find out what's, I don't know, has she ever kissed a boy? What's it like to kiss a boy? I don't know. Who knows? Helena Egan has gotten to do that.
So how do I do this? Awkward middle school vibes from Helena Egan here, which I really liked. Just making eyes at him.
And I think you pinpointed exactly, like the difference in assertiveness between Helly and what we assume is Helena and the grabbing of the lapels versus the shuffling awkwardly. It could not be more clear.
And maybe the rug will be pulled out from us down the line. And this is just all of a sudden, I guess, Helly turned very sheepish for no reason whatsoever.
But every bit of evidence tells us this is Helena. Speaking of sheepish, let's talk about goats.
Another thing that happens inside of this moment when they're going into the goat room and all of this sort of stuff is she's like, are you sure? Oh my God, what are we doing? Whereas I feel like Heli, the Heli that we knew would be like leading the way. She'd be first down the goat hall.
The unmistakable being John Malkovich image of the two of them crouching in front of the hallway. And again, I don't like to assume that any of our listeners are our age or anything like that.
So if you are younger and you've never seen being John Malkovich, just Google image search being John Malkovich. You'll see the most iconic image.
Or better yet, remedy that fact. Oh, watch it.
And do go watch being john malkovich the charlie kaufman like early aughts david o russell sort of uh off kilter quirky uh sci-fi realism stuff that is floating around this episode we're going to talk about eternal sunshine in a little bit but like I was really glad to see a being John Malkovich illusion here.

When they get to the goat room, though,

if this is...

They become John Malkovich.

Yes, when they become...

When they're just like, Malkovich, Malkovich.

Being Seth Milchick.

They climb into Milchick's consciousness,

and we go from there.

And they're like, blackface Kier Egan.

I'm not sure that's what I want.

Thanks so much.

We're going to have to circle back to that big time. Not sure.
When they get into the goat room, Helena, if that is Helena, I mean, we think it is. I'm just going to keep caveating now.
Helena looks genuinely confused and perturbed. Like, I don't think she knows about the goat room.
About mammalians, naturable. How much do you think Helena knows in general about what goes on, on the severed floor, et cetera? I mean, she's big picture, right? Like she knows in a general sense, probably what they're trying to accomplish, but not all of the means by which they're accomplishing it.
So I think she probably knew there were, there were goats and there's some process by which goats and human beings on the severed floor are interacting or related, but maybe not that, oh, there's this giant ass like meadow within the floor itself. A knoll fully staffed with a bunch of goat people weirdos and frankly, like a whole herd of goats.
Yeah. What's the plural of goat? Oh, like what's the group name for a goat? Yeah.
I would say a flock of goats. No, a herd of goats, goat herder, a herd of goats.
I guess, help us out if you're out there and you know the answer. If it's really murder of goats, we would love to know it.
Just let us know. An ecstasy of goats.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think if she had encountered what we saw in season one, which is just a guy bottle feeding some goat, a guy in a suit bottle feeding some goats, which is weird, but not as weird as the rolling grassy knolls of what we see.

As Gwendolyn Christie in like fashionable business wear, but also a kerchief of Gwendolyn Christie with her face smeared with dirt, but also a really heavily applied smoky eye. I have a lot of questions about a lot of choices in here.
We've got a guy... Find you a mammalian who can do both, Jo.
We've got a guy who looks like Black Phillip stormed the capital on January 6th. There's a lot going on

in this room.

Something that Petey

says in season one

and his little map

that he drew, he had this

sense or idea or knowledge that

some people never leave

the severed floor, that they live down there.

Would you say you

think the goat people live

on the severed floor? It feels like they've been

in there pretty long and they've certainly seen some shit. Yeah.
All of that is conveyed quite simply. But I think from there, it gets a little muddled.
You know, like Gwendolyn Chrissy's character approaches them with shears in hand, asking if they're there to kill her, but then later insists that she's not afraid of them at all. And they don't fear these interlopers from the outside world.
Well, I don't believe her when she says that. I mean, I don't either, but I'm just like, I don't have any sense of what's going on here or why or how.
And here's the thing that bugs me most about the entire goat sequence. Yeah.
A real and surprising lack of curiosity on Mark's part.

Like this is a person who has never seen grass before

and is just walking in matter-of-factly

in a way that can we not get one Terrence Malickian beat

of Mark bending down to touch the grass for the first time?

Is that something that we're not entitled to?

And then once we do get into conversation

and they're being interrogated about their bellies, we have no follow-up questions to that? Well, no, no. Okay.
I was a little weirded out by this, but then I remembered in season one that Dylan had all these senses of what the O&D people were. He had all these weird, like the O&D people are these weird, freaky creatures.
So there's just this like the... Because when you sever someone and they don't know what wind feels like and they've never seen grass you can tell them that like literal monsters are working in the other departments and and don't go there because they'll kill you and that's how they divide and conquer right and so like the the thing that we saw in season one between burton Irving.
Everybody's talking about Irving.

Everybody's talking about Irving.

Be very careful, Joe.

I'm done.

I think that's it.

I think,

I think that's enough Billy Bush for all of us inside of this episode.

When,

when Bert and Irving make their connection,

their romantic connection,

their Romeo and Juliet as connection,

it is the only thing that combines the O and D and the MDR department

otherwise.

And they like,

Thank you. If Bert and Irving make their connection, their romantic connection, their Romeo and Juliet as connection, it is the only thing that combines the O and D and the MDR department otherwise.
And they have all these suspicions of each other and hatred for each other as perpetuated by Lumen to keep them to divide and conquer. I mean, personally, if I were Lumen, I would just keep them on separate floors entirely.
But you do you, Lumen. Yeah.
We also had some questions, a couple email questioning why everyone arrived at different timing to get down to the elevator. And they talked about this in season one, that they are specifically asked to stagger their arrivals into the building so that nobody sort of interacts with each other outside of the floor.
Makes sense. These are sort of some of the unreliable ways.
Because what if you're running five minutes late? These are the unreliable ways in which Lumen tries to keep people separate and divide and conquer. But I think that's the source of, do you have pouches? Are you here to kill us? Because that's the propaganda we've heard about MDR or something like that.
It's still... I apologize to Gwendolyn Christie.
She had the smoky eye. The sequence still doesn't work for me, but maybe some of the internal logic is more sound than I thought.
I think it would have been good to have a slight reminder of that. It was a bit jarring for me as well.
I want to shout out, in addition to watching Being John Malkovich and perhaps Merit Weaver's Emmy Acceptance Speech and all the other homework that we've thrown at you uh watch the first couple episodes of run they're good not the whole season um i was watching have you ever seen the francis ford coppola movie rumblefish i haven't i watched it for the first time this last week uh really cool movie i really loved it uh but it's filmed in but it like kind of blew my mind it my mind. It's Mickey Rourke, Matt Dillon.
It's filmed in black and white, except for there are these fish in a pet store that Mickey Rourke's character is obsessed with. And they're red and blue and they're kept in the tank and they're kept separate because the idea is this breed of fish, if they were allowed to be in the same team together,

they would fight each other.

So they're divided.

And the imagery of the blue and the red fish was not only Dr. Seuss,

but very severance to me.

Mark on the outside has a fish tank in his house

that has one red fish, one blue fish in it.

And so this idea of like,

we have to keep them separate or they'll fight.

Spoilers for Rumblefish,

the conclusion of that film,

they put the fish in the river and the fish

don't fight because they're

sort of... Anyway,

it's a very

heavy metaphor. A movie that I really

love but it's very weird. It's really cool.

Very weird. But I was like,

are we rumblefishing?

This is the idea. Keep everyone separate in their department so that they can't you know the workers can't unite and overthrow uh right you know yeah the messaging from lumen is we're doing this so you don't fight we're doing this so these incredibly violent scenes that have been painted will not happen again right but yeah the reality is obviously they're trying to keep everyone separate from consolidating

power and perspective and information.

And for example, the fact that the people of the Mammalians Nurturable have met Miss

Casey before is a pretty big reveal in this episode.

And that she has a gentle way about her.

She does have a gentle way.

All right.

I'm ready to talk about Melchick, Devin, Rickon, and perhaps the star of the show, Natalie. Oh my God.
What a Natalie episode. What a Natalie episode.
Okay. So let's talk about the Milchick thing first.
We have arrived at the great revolving of Akir, and the revolving is Milchik turning that box around on the top of a shelf never to be seen again. This was so good.
We referenced, I think, last week or the week before, we referenced Get Out as sort of like this possible, what are these creepy billionaires doing with this technology? Are they trying to achieve immortality in some sense?

Is it as it is in Get Out, this idea of let's put the consciousness of a decrepit old man

into a younger, healthier body?

And the Get Out vibes were off the charts here.

They certainly were.

When Natalie gives Milchik a series of paintings of K cure egan as reimagined as a black man and uh milchik's reaction is phenomenal natalie's reaction is even juicier natalie saying she was gifted something similar and as soon as the board hangs up the look she gives him of like, I can't,

I can't describe it, but this shared look of like, how fucked up this is. Yeah.
And then her plastering that trembling. Oh my God.
Broad corporate smile on top of it is like ice water in your veins. It's so good.
Anything, what do you want to say about this? Yeah, Sydney Cole Alexander, who plays Natalie, and I mean this as a compliment, just has like such a perfect vacant smile. Like, as you're saying, absolutely plastered on.
And I think a lot of it is what she's doing with her eyes, which are just so wide and dead as she's trying to like basically grit her teeth through doing this. And the board insists that she found the gesture very meaningful when she was gifted the paintings.
Everything about that character in this episode, I found to be wonderful in terms of the performance and the usage. The Milchik stuff, bizarre as fuck, very strange, for all the reasons we're kind of circling around as far as why Black-facing Kier might be a little weird and off-putting to some

people in this world. Joe, I have concerns.
You've very astutely brought up in our earlier podcasts that there are all these hints and little blinking lights and arrows and severance pointing to the Civil War and Civil War names and iconography and little bits and pieces, little breadcrumbs along the way as As a broader metaphor for the idea of severance, great. No harm, no foul.
We've had the theory floated, including in our inbox at pineapplebobbing at gmail.com, that maybe severance takes place in not just an alternate reality, but maybe an alternate butterfly-affected reality where, say, for example, the Confederacy won.

This kind of like the re-canonicalized portraits of Keir made me a little concerned that that could be something

that the show is interested in exploring.

And if that is really the case,

I hope Severance has not bitten off more than it can chew.

Okay.

I agree.

You and I both don't really want

exactly

that.

Like there's reckoning with the general

ideas in a broader sci-fi

sense, and then there is literalizing

them in the world in a way that I think could be

quite thorny. I hear you.
I love

the scene.

Yes, I agree. I think the scene is wonderful.

I think, to your point, if the idea is to get more literal with it elsewhere, is that something that Severance is the show where we really want to see that examined? I think that's a good question. Something I think is interesting is that Tremel Tillman, in the official Severance podcast, which I told you I've been listening to, He said that he asked the creative team early in production of season one, does Milchik know he's Black? That that was a question that he asked about his character in season one.
Does this guy know he's Black? And should I be playing him with an awareness of, inside of this oppressive environment, Should I be playing him with an awareness of what he brings to the table as a black man or should is this uh you know are we alleging that this is like a race blind uh situation and so i think the answer is very clear uh here inside of uh this exchange here also um inside of this sequence natalie calls the board it uh helena later says them we've heard them used for the board yeah natalie says it which is not grammatically wholly grammatically incorrect you are supposed to refer to like corporations as it rather than they that's like gramm what you're supposed to do so but it did ping i think for some people this question of like is the board which we've never seen we've heard as a disembodied voice the very mention of sends cobell sort of hightailing her way out of her exchange with helena which we'll talk about in a second. Is the board actually a board of people or is it an AI conscious? I don't know.
A circuit board? Who knows? Is it a head in a jar? A surfboard? A cheese board? No, like, is it like an AI consciousness? Is it Keir's brain in a jar? Like, what is the board, you know? I love that we don't know. I love everything about the way the board communicates.
And to your point about the grammatical constructions there, I think also makes sense virtue of their relative status, right? To Helena, these could be people, maybe not peers, but people she knows through her father. And to Natalie, they are this amorphous, disembodied voice who has clearly rung out a level of control over her and her life that her eyes and smile would tell us she's not 100% comfortable with.
This is not all Natalie gets to do in this episode. She also gets to go see Rick in and have a top- tier exchange with him about his book and with Devin.

I just want to say, and maybe I'll write out a post-it so I can remind myself when we record.

When she says remarkable, so astute, and he goes, is it?

That's what I was going for.

I feel like we should make that part of our podcast.

It really is what we're going for. Remarkable, so astute.
Is it? That's what I was going for. I feel like we should make that part of our podcast.
It really is what we're going for. Remarkable.
So astute. Is it? That's what I was going for.
Incredible stuff. What do you want to say about Natalie and Rickon in this exchange? I mean, for one, the kind of subtle differences in what Natalie is delivering here.
And I think we have all the reason to assume that there's not like an innie and out-y version of Natalie that there is one consciousness because she's operating in the same way that like Cobell for example was operating on the floor and Milchick but the way she delivers things to Milchick in that kind of very tense exchange versus I mean just the ease with which she has Rickon eating out of the palm of her hand by saying one nice thing about his dumb book.

She knows in the same way that Milchik knows

how to play this to the outside world,

how to say the right thing,

how to put the gentle touch,

how to pamper the people who need pampering

and compliment the people who need complimenting.

And then all of a sudden,

she has Rickon himself believing

that this adaptation of the book

in which all the language has been changed to serve Lumen's needs could be a real game changer, Jo. Um, and it feels like Rickon's just gonna tumble along uh, and do whatever they ask of him.
Rickon, who was sort of posturing that he had a problem with Severance in season one is now like, oh. You wanna put it out in paperback? Me? I'll write the new foreword.
Me? So we have this Devon exchange with Natalie, which Devon continues to be the best person in this town. Something that one of our listeners pointed out to sort of circle back to your idea of how literalizing we're making some of these Civil War-esque illusions.
I listened to Lizzie Jean C. pointed out that the term, I think it was Drummond used for Devin, was uppity.
And that uppity is a very racially coded word, a slavery coded word. This idea of an uppity person who is acting above their station.
If we're not talking literal Civil War slavery, we're talking about a slavery of a kind or a slavery mentality that Lumen has. A modernized techno-slavery.
Yeah, exactly. Devin, Mark, Ragabi.
Actually, before we do that, let's do Helena and Cobalt. It's 23 miles to Salt Neck, but we're not going to Salt Neck.
It's more than that. I think it's 238 miles to Salt Neck.
It's 238 miles to Salt Neck, but we're not going to Salt Neck. It's more than that.
I think it was 238 miles to Salt Neck. 238 miles to Salt Neck.
But we're not going to Salt Neck. We're going back.
We are turning around. Patricia Arquette has had to do a lot of driving acting this season.
She's great at it, though. Very dramatic.
The dramatic cassette push into the tape deck. No one does it better.
And then we get this Helena-Cobel exchange, where Cobel once again insists that she be back. This is her second attempt to insist that she belongs on the cyber floor with MDR and that they got to get Milchik out of there.
And her second failed attempt to intimidate Helena. we have a lot of Cobel theories flying fast and furious around this joint.
Anything you want to say before we sort of get into that theory corner about Cobel? I think the theory corner is the natural place to go. There's so much happening in which Cobel is just kind of spinning her wheels at this point, basically begging us to theorize as to what her role in all of this is.
And the one that grabbed me, Joe, was one that a listener, Wendy, emailed us about. In particular, we get this moment between Cobell and Helena in which Helena asks her, why don't we go in and reset? And that, that made my, it registered my interest in lots of different ways, in particular, the fact that Cobell knows not to go inside after that conversation takes place.
And what Wendy emailed us about was this theory that Cobell herself could be a permanent innie, you know, someone who's stuck in that condition for whatever reason, that maybe she either became brain dead in the outside world,

that there was some kind of event,

that the feeding tube she is carrying around is in fact

not one of a mother or a relative,

but maybe it was her own at one point

in time. And she's

always wearing turtlenecks to kind of conceal

potentially some sort of wounding, some

sort of scarring

that may have taken place from whatever she was going into.

And there's these little bits and pieces of evidence, for example,

Harmony's name being

on one of the control boards

Thank you. sort of scarring that may have taken place from whatever she was going into.
And there's these little bits of pieces of evidence, for example, Harmony's name being on one of the control boards that say maybe, in fact, she was an innie at one point in time. Maybe there is a history there

beyond just wanting to be a manager and her interest in getting back on the floor and running

the floor and ultimately completing the Cold Harbor project could have a personal bent in a

very different way than we've been talking about. Love that.
I always love to track. I'm always on turtleneck watch.
I love that for us. There's a number of others.
So this idea that she was an innie at one point, that the breathing tube was hers, that this has to do with her own desire for reintegration or something like that, because she's the's the one we talked about this already but she's the one who's the most adamant about this idea of reintegration and whether or not the science is working there something like that okay uh there's a couple other popular theories going around we got an an email from listener deb who wants to propose the idea that uh this is this reminds me i have so many Targaryen emails, that Harmony is- How many have you fielded over the years, Jill? Countless. The limit does not exist.
Harmony Cabell is actually, okay, these are the two prevailing, is actually Helena Egan's mother. Yeah.
Let's do some quick age math on this. Patricia Arquette is 56.
Britt Lauer is 39, which would mean that Cabell would have to be around 17, which is gross, but not outside the realm of possibility because we see that she was at the girl school, the Myrtle Egan school for girls. By the way, on the shrine that was in her house that we saw in season one, among the many juicy little Easter eggs on there, there is an award that she won for, quote, use of mealtime condiments.

That's one of my favorite details.

But she was a child at an Egan school.

Was she groomed in some way?

Was she used?

Because we have not heard anything about Helena's's mother no so uh what goes on there um in season one this is this is per the email we got from uh deb in season one irving quotes helena's father jamie egan uh when they first entered the perpetuity room and says quote come now children of my industry and know the children of my blood. So this idea of like using girls that come through the Egan school as sort of like, sorry for the expression, like broodmares, like I can kind of see that that could be something that could happen.
It's a compelling idea. Another idea sort of given Helena's father's advanced age is that she is uh an illegitimate daughter like actually like a sister and inside of this scene that harmony and helena have where she basically calls helena nepo baby and she's like i earned everything i had it was given to you it could read very much like um i was you know sort of the the bastard child and cast aside, and you are the sort of the legitimate heir sort of thing.
Or conversely that she earned it through childbirth, or she earned it through this sort of grooming ordeal that she went through, right? Right. So sister or mother, that's a potential theory.
I'm most compelled by to go back to the breathing tube this idea that people are assuming that the breathing tube belonged to her mother because it says charlotte cobell in it and the date seems like it would be again we don't know when this show takes place but seems i think it was like 1940 something so it seems like it would be the mother of harmony cobell right so this idea, and there's this kind of cheating a little bit, but Severance put out extra show material around season one, and there's something called the Lexington Letter that has lore in it, and that's not really fair to give extra reading to the class, but that's what the podcast is here for. But in the Lexington letter, there is a language about a breathing tube defects as, you know, manufactured by Lumen.
So Lumen manufactured these breathing tubes that had defects. And perhaps that is why Harmony's mother died because of a Lumen defect breathing tube.
Yeah. And that she's vowed revenge on Lumen..
So she's really like the ultimate mole in there to get vengeance for her mother. And this whole like true believer thing is an act and part of her spy mission to get vengeance.
And the fact that she, when she turns around from, what was it? 238 miles from Saltz Neck? 238 miles. yeah.
I mean, a long way to go still. When she turns around, like, it's the breathing, it's looking at the breathing tube on the front seat of her car that makes her turn around, so, yeah.
And there's something in there with both Cobell, and I think this is true of Milchick in his scenes, too, where, yes, Lumen is this gigantic corporation that seemingly makes everything, including a lot of medicine and medical equipment, has the severed floor business doing whatever it is that they're doing. But every character in the show has their sort of relationship with Lumen the company, and they have their relationship with Lumen the cult.
And I think we see that tested with Milchik a little bit. He seems like a pretty loyal employee, but also, what is this shit? Yeah.
And with Harmony, we have kind of assumed some of her allegiances throughout based on the way she's acted or tried to infer based on how erratic she's been. But I think it's fair to say that even though she may subscribe to the cult side on some level, maybe she does have that vengeance against the company that you're describing, where it is something that's more personal that happened to someone that she knows in which a piece of equipment, for example, defected.
And how long has this sort of infiltration mission been going on? Many people noted on that shrine that we see in season one that there is a frolic mask. One of the masks from the waffle party is on her shrine.
And so someone was like, was she a former waffle party erotic dancer at some point? Was that all like part of the long game? Who knows? I would love to hear the backstory of Harmony Cobell and how she got here and how she keeps her hair so frizz free. Anything else you want to say? I know there was another email you wanted to read about Miss Wong.
Do you want to talk about that? I do want to talk about this one. I think it rings true in this episode, too, to some extent, although we're still getting to know Miss Wong in lots of ways.
But overall, David emailed us about Miss Wong as sort of a stand-in for being a working professional, specifically a middle-aged or older working professional, and all of a sudden having to manage having a much younger boss. And if we take that to a cartoonish extreme, it turns into Miss Wong escorting you to the security room and then listening in on your conversation and butting in whenever you don't address her specifically by name.
I think it's a very smart thing for the show to wrangle and to wrestle with in the same way that it does with a lot of random little workplace angst and anxiety. And we have no idea where the plot lines are going with Miss Wong.
She's still such a mysterious character, but everyone, including Dylan and Gretchen, both in this episode, are asking, why is this a child? Why are you a child? Why are we pretending this is normal?

Yeah.

All right.

We're going to move into our last sort of section here

that we need to talk about,

which is the Devon Mark Ruggabi situation here,

the reintegration.

Before we get there,

lest I get embarrassed again,

I do want to point out

that if it's 238 miles to Salt Snake,

eight and 23 are lost numbers.

There you go. So, you know, save your emails, but send all other emails to pineapplebobbing at gmail.com.
Okay. Reintegration time.
Okay. First of all, I love the heist plan, the burning on the retinas, all of this.
I love a heist, personally. I'm a huge heist fan.
So, like, all this stuff really worked for me. The fact that, like, Devin and Mark are doing it secret.
This, like, sort of arts and crafts-y science like let's talk about our teacher

sort of conversation

all of it's great

and then I also love that

it's just like immediately

Oh this is a bad idea

debunked by Rigoni

This is a terrible plan

Immediately like

I'm sorry

first of all

she knows exactly

what he's trying to do

and secondly

she's like it's absolute bullshit

sorry

but the fact that she knows

that it wouldn't work

or has thought it through

makes me want to circle back

to our question about

the phone call that Irving

Thank you. sorry.
But the fact that she knows that it wouldn't work or has thought it through makes me want to circle back to our question about the phone call that Irving made last week. Cause our question was like, is he, when he said, when Irving last week said to someone on the phone, he got the message and we were like, is he talking to Ragabi? It's, it's worth thinking about this idea of like burning an image on your retina is like an after image versus what irving on the outside has done which is paint the same thing over and over and over again and as one of our listeners pointed out uh joseph d one of our listeners pointed out that irving on the outside was drinking night coffee oh he's chugging chugging night coffee So like this idea that he's like keeping himself awake, painting this image over and over again to induce, you know, is this a Ragabi medical plan of like, okay, if you make him sleepy as an innie, he might fall asleep on the inside.
And if he falls asleep on the inside, perhaps this image will be burned on his subconscious and it will seep through into, you know what I mean? Like that seems like something a scientist might have advised. Why are you swirking at me? It's just very like Philip K.
It's like, do androids dream of electric sheep is where we're going. Yeah.
Well, I mean, listen, we got, we got, okay, listen, I love everyone's emails. We got a few emails from people who are like, that's not how cloning works.
And I just want to encourage you to remember that this is a sci-fi show.

It's a sci-fi show.

You know, it's a sci-fi show.

I appreciate that it is soft enough

and grounded in a kind of a reality

that we're grasping at,

oh, is severance a theoretically possible thing

within the human consciousness?

But I'm telling you it's not.

And that's okay.

And it can be fuzzy

and it can be functional within the show. But all neuroscientistsists too, please keep emailing me because I'm learning a lot.
Pineapplepuffing at gmail.com. Why was Mark practicing this with his car? I know why his car was running for heat, but he's sitting in a running car by a barn.
It looks like a barn. And how did Raghavi find him there? I like much of what happens once Raghavi shows up, in a sense.
We're moving forward. We're keeping things propulsive.
As you say, her quick debunking of this plan is terrible. I enjoyed quite a bit.
It was great. Her showing up with no explanation whatsoever in front of his car, with no way to track him other than, I guess, just following him from his house.

I don't know about that.

It just felt like a jump scare for the sake of a jump scare.

Yeah, I mean, I understand.

No, I don't have a good explanation for it.

I'm not mad about it.

I just don't have a great explanation for it.

Just slightly shabby.

How did you feel about the fact that Ragabi apparently

already knew

that Gemma was alive

on the severed floor?

Well, that's my question.

He's like, is she alive?

And she says,

she was the last time I saw her.

Right.

That's vague enough

that it can mean

a lot of different things.

A lot of plausible deniability in that.

I also am not sure I know.

She has such an agenda here

that like it did read to me

like she was telling the truth,

but it's possible

that she was trying

to keep her language vague enough

so that like

Thank you. sure I know she's she has such an agenda here that like it did read to me like she was telling the truth but it's possible that she was trying to keep her language vague enough so that like again plausible deniability that there is some version of that that's true what is alive in this context what is alive and and frankly does she even know anything about it or is she yes anding a subject because she needs a subject that's I mean that's that was was my first thought.
She's lying because she needs him to do this. But re-watching it, there was enough emotion in the way she played it that I feel like she's not lying.
But she might be stretching the definition of alive in order to serve her needs here. I think it's a good reminder regardless that all of these characters have their own agendas.
And we have a sense of what Dr. Ragabi wants to happen, which is to successfully reintegrate somebody.
We don't really know why. We don't really know the lengths to which she has gone to this point or how many subjects before Petey may have met unfortunate ends or injury or scrambled brains.
I think there's a lot of mysteries around that character as much as there are around Lumen. What is very important on a character level is the speed with which Mark agrees to reintegration.
Just straight up. Just like cuts her off and is like, I'll do it.
Knowing everything he knows about what happened to Petey, it doesn't matter if there's a chance that he could see Gemma, he's going to do it. And that's devastating.
You know, like absolutely demolishes me. And again, just like complicates this like really funky love quintet quadrangle whatever it is you know that we're dealing with because like i am rooting for mark and heli but like mark on the outside is just like so devoted to gemma uh it's it's worth mentioning mentioning we talked about orpheus and eurydice as like greek and you Sympathesius, which I thought was so smart.
We got a lot of emails from people, and I think it's, I didn't point it out, but it is, of course, worth noting that Persephone, which is the Greek reference that kicked all of this off in the first place, Persephone was the daughter of the goddess Demeter who was stolen down into the underworld and forced to live there forced to live there half of the year. Yeah.
Did she eventually grow to love it down there? Uh, accounts vary, but, um, but she's down there half of the year, uh, cause she ate some pomegranate and, uh, don't eat pomegranate, don't eat pomegranate and, um, eat pineapple, maybe pomegranate. Never.
Um, they mean very different things we're learning. And her mother, Demeter, goddess of the harvest, in protest when her daughter is underground, that's when it's fall and winter.
And it's spring and summer when her daughter comes above ground. And so this idea of this perpetual winter that we're in inside of Severance, is that related to any of this? That's a Greek mythology corner for your episode here.
Okay, Rob and I are wearing red, not necessarily, but kind of in honor of Mark's incredible red sweater that he wears in order to reintegrate at the end of this episode. I mean, the red and the blue motif throughout this series has been so clear, but this is like the reddest red he's ever worn.
This is the most Audi Mark color we've seen so far. And it's fitting because we're about to sort of say goodbye to this pure form of Audi Mark.
Like this is perhaps the last we will have ever seen of purely Audi Mark and purely Audi Mark mark r.i.p. to both of them now they are a stew um anything you want to say i'm excited for what the neuroscientists email us about all of the uh the science jargon that gets laid on us here anything you want to say about the five different brain waves or anything that ragabi says here i mean i think the five brain waves and the five little little buckets in the macro data, that's a call out that kind of naturally draws us in.
Yeah. I will say just the aligning of the two waves felt very CAPTCHA to me.
It might scramble his brain, but you also might at least get into this website. So things are happening.
You might get tickets to Taylor Swift. You never know.
Anything could happen. If you can identify all of these stoplights, you too can be front row.
Okay. One thing I've been wondering about reintegration since watching this episode.
You know, we've been approaching it, I think, largely from the perspective of people like Mark. Would Mark, would Petey want to reintegrate? I think Gretchen's appearance in this episode raises a different perspective, which is, would she want Dylan to reintegrate at a certain point? Like, I think there's the version of the relationship she's developing with Dylan G, or at least kind of interested by him.
Is that a way to relieve some of the weight that's been on the outie Dylan's shoulders in order to like, you know, find this happy medium between those two versions of himself? Similarly with Helena and Helly, like if we don we don't like are we rooting for a reintegration path forward for that person or given the shit that we've seen helena egan do are we sort of rooting for her demise and the and just pure heli are uh going forward you know like which characters we want to see reintegrate which innies and outies do we want to see sort of like win the battle for the body like what what do we what do we want going forward. You know, like, which characters do we want to see reintegrate? Which innies and outies do we want to see sort of, like, win the battle for the body? Like, what do we want going forward? I'm kind of, like, pro-reintegration for everyone, but, you know, we'll see.
I think it's... Reintegration, I think, for everyone could create some narrative simplicity that I don't always love, but it depends on how you execute it.
It depends on what a reintegrated person looks and feels like and how conflicted those two sides of them are.

I mean, like, Audi Irving,

you know, provided that Eddie Irving

is willing to, like, care for the dog

the same degree that Audi,

like, what does Audi Irving have to live for?

We don't know anything.

We know, like, dead dad stuff in a box

and, like, artistry that Eddie Irving seems to possess as well. Given like all of his beautiful sketches of, of Bert.
Who do you think did the Miss Casey, uh, poster? Because I will say Irving style seems a little more like wall street journal headshot to me. And that one is a little more crude sketch.
I'm not, it's better than I could do, but it's still a little crude.

It's definitely Mark. You think that's Mark? Yeah.
I mean, he would

know best.

Well, straight

I mean, is it not?

Yeah, it is.

In the reintegration process,

we get, we came

from Gabby saying, so

confidently, I'm much better at it now.

Don't worry, I'm so much better than I was when I did PD. It's going to be fine.
Zero patients have died this week. And then she says, oh shit, something I think a scientist should not say during the course of some experimentation.
And we get what I'm calling Chekhov's hand spasm. We get this very prominent hand spasm from him.
if uh as we we wonder if maybe next week is going to be sort of like an all reintegration episode we'll talk about that in a second but if we're watching mark throughout the rest of the season or the rest of the series have to pretend that he's one or the other and will the twitching hands give him away? Just silo all over again, Joe. We're right back into it with the twitching hands.
I like that tell. And I have to say, I like overall, as with many things in Severance, the overall analog, complicated, wired-in feel of this procedure.
It reminded me a lot of seeing First Man, the movie First Man, and you get a sense of the tactile nature of early space travel, and it's like, holy fuck. This screw coming loose is just the difference between life and death.
And in here, the formations in this, I guess it's like salt, or whatever is the conduit kind of vehicle there that's indicating that something is going wrong. All of this very analog technology being the way to potentially unsever and hopefully not scramble somebody's consciousness.
It's just such a fun way to go about this world. And one little asterisk I want to put on that, we've talked about the vintage cars.
We talked about the old tech inside and outside of the severed floor.

Helen also just like

casually pops out an iPhone

to make the call to the board

when she's talking with Harmony Cobell.

So I don't know where we are

or what we are as usual,

but it's confusing.

I love the salt

or whatever that was

bouncing around very like

rings of power opening credits. That's for the house of our listeners, not for you, Rob Mahoney.
She asked him a question about love and it doesn't really seem to be the thing that is working, but when she asks about shame, it does. And that's something that makes me very sad about Black.

The eye color question. We're getting a lot of the same questions we get to start the series.

The sprawled out on a conference table questions to start everything off.

When we cut to... I felt like this was probably going to work.

I'm excited that it's happening so early. I thought it was going to happen much later.

I'm excited that it's happening here.

I'm excited for the possibilities going forward.

When she asked him, I think what month it is or something like that, right?

And he says, do you mean which quarter?

That's so chilling.

That's so upsetting.

What are you, a Netflix employee?

What's going on?

Q1, Q2, when are we dropping Squid Game?

And then was that PD's voice on the monitor, Do you think? It sounded like it to me. My hope is that, so if episode four, and neither of us have seen episode four, but if episode four, which a lot of people, a lot of the critics who reviewed the season, who saw, watched all of the screeners, said that episode four was an absolute banger.
um so episode four is like an eternal sunshine of the spotless mind tour through i i we talked about this when you talked about our season one rewatch i loved the pd reintegration stuff i thought stuff was so cool the way that like to turrell would like walk in and out of a scene or like we're flashing costumes or flashing locations, just like a real surreal bonkers tour through the muddy method of reintegration. If we get to do that, especially like rewatching the season two opening credits, like it just feels like we could just, you know, in which we physically go inside of Mark's brain.

So if we are inside Mark's brain for all of episode four.

We can only be so lucky.

I mean, I would be thrilled. And if that involves us seeing Mark's first days on the severed floor, and so maybe we get like a whole and healthy, you know, PD appearance.
That would make me really excited. Love you, Yul Vlasquez.
How would you feel if we got some Mark and Gemma on the beach, dead wife footage? It's a no for me. Okay.
Look, I'm just throwing it out there. It seems possible.
Seems like it's something that could happen. You're so right.
It's dead dog wife o'clock. Okay.
I have some questions about this. So like, will any Mark be devastated to be burdened by Audi Mark's grief? Wouldn't you? Yes.
It seems like a lot. He's like, life was already kind of complicated for me.
And now this. I do not consent to this.
He doesn't even have alcohol. He has no medication privileges whatsoever other than fruit leather from the vending machine.
It's true. Also, I think we need to redraw the parameters of our love polygon between Gemma and Miss Casey and Mark and Mark.
We're getting into geometric proof stages of having to redraw this thing and I'm not qualified for it. The fact that we are going to be watching, I believe, Helena pretending to be Heli.
Yes. Interacting with reintegrated Mark pretending at any given time to be Innie Mark or Outie Mark.
Probably mostly pretending to be Innie Mark. I would think outside, at least with Devin, he can be himself.
Yes, but if Natalie's around, if he has to hide it from Rickon, because Rickon's now a company man, if Milchik rolls up on his motorcycle again, there is a scene from the trailer, there's just a shot in the trailer of Helena and Mark, or Adam adam scott and print lower whoever they might be playing in that moment in a bar and when mallory and i were looking at the severance trailer we were like it's brief but we were like is that is that helena on the outside trying to approach mark on the outside without him knowing about heli and mark that was our guess but now it might be Helena on the outside, trying to approach Mark on the outside without him knowing about Heli and Mark.

That was our guess.

But now,

it might be Helena

on the outside

trying to approach Mark

on the outside

and he knows who she is

and has to pretend

that he doesn't.

This is juicy stuff.

It's like baklava.

Layers upon layers

upon layers.

You know what I mean?

Very delicate pastry work

happening.

Yeah.

Or it could be something

that we get, for example,

in a journey of the mind

And baklava layers upon layers upon layers you know what i mean very delicate pastry work happening yeah i mean or it could be something that we get for example in a journey of the mind episode four where maybe it is a is a memory of him with gemma or something with brit lauer flickering in and out in the way that the show loves to do totally totally the question though is at what point will mark on the outside, now somewhat reintegrated, however successfully, perhaps bleeding profusely from his nose, time will tell, when will he see Helena Egan on the television or something and go, uh, what? I mean, that is the reveal. The next level reveal we're waiting for is how the innies become aware of who Helena and Heli is.

And it's gotten backburnered because there's eight different mysteries happening at once, and we're juggling them all, and there's a lot of plates spinning, safe to say. But that's one that could further divide an already quite divided team.
And I, at this point, don't know how the members of MDR get back on anything resembling the same page. And I'm not saying I want them to.
I think the tensions of the show are more interesting if they're not. But it's hard to see how their interests would align at this point.
It's just a very credible way in which you scatter them, which you do need to do narratively. And so we've got, and again, this is very lost of them to give each person their preoccupation.
We've got Dylan is preoccupation with Gretchen. We've got Irving with the preoccupation with like Bert slash the elevator.
Uh, uh, and, uh, we've got Helen is whole subterfuge. And then we've got Mark's now reintegration nightmare.
Um, okay. We've got a little long as we might always do with these severance uh episodes there's just a million things we didn't get to and i'm so sorry please keep sending your emails i'm reading them all uh but we're gonna we're gonna end the episode with sort of a reverse of the prompt that we talked about last week which was sort of like what would you sever we got a we got an email listener, Andrew P., who said, I like the idea of figuring out which thing you would want to sever out of your everyday life, but I'm even more curious about the inverse.
What mundane work or life tasks would you most tolerate being severed into and forced to do for your entire conscious existence? Lake room aside, I think you could do a lot worse than long-haul flight severed life. This is insane.
Watching movies, looking out your window, drinking cheap wine. These are all things I do regularly in my apartment anyway.
Sounds fun, Andrew. Invite us over.
We'd love to hang out. With all due respect, Andrew is 5'7".
I can tell you right now. This is just not the reality for those of us who are crammed into airplane seats.
Rob is very tall. It's true.
Do you have an answer for this? What would you like your severed life to be? Honestly, cooking would be a great one. Cooking but never have to do dishes.
I knew you were going to pick that, but that's not that you, Rob, would never want to sever out. What you're saying is...
Why want to eat it eat it. No, what you're saying is, if you, Rob, were to pick to sever yourself something around your favorite hobby, which is cooking, it would be doing the dishes.
Your innie would be doing only dishes and never getting to eat the food the rest of his life. I mean, am I being nice to my innie? No, but am I getting rid of the thing that I want to get rid of? Yes.
Okay. What made Monday tax? Yeah, yeah.
What are you thinking, Joe? Where are you on this? I guess it's like errands. I don't like to run an errand.
What kind of errands do you dislike? All of them? All? Like, I don't mind a grocery shop. I know.
There's a certain kind of errand. That there are certain errands that are worse than others is all I mean to say.
Yeah, sure. Like DMV is worse than anything.
I guess anything having to do with my car. Tire rotation, engine issues, a recall that I have to like, I have to go to the deal.
If I have to buy a new car, I'd never want to go to the car lot. So I want a car, I need to deal with all.
You just want a car to show up at your house when you need a new one. I want the gas tank to always be full, but I'm not responsible for doing it.
That's very true. You know, that's a good one.
That's a good one. Or if I get, I really want to get like an electric car, but I am so afraid that I will forget to plug it in.
So if that's my Annie's job to make sure that the like electric car is always charged

and all the maintenance is done.

Aren't you just doing

normal severance then?

And you're delegating

all the car stuff

to your Annie?

Well, isn't that what you just said

when you said you're going to

make your Annie do dishes?

But I think we're trying

to find things that you would enjoy.

I'm trying to figure out

what reverse severance is

per the prompt of this.

Like what are we trying

to create for ourselves?

I think basically you and I

are too narrow-minded

to think of a mundane task

that we might

Thank you. is per the prompt of this? What are we trying to create for ourselves? I think basically you and I are too narrow-minded to think of a mundane task that we might that wouldn't be the worst thing for someone to have to do.
Let's spend a week to think about it. We'll come back to this prompt, Andrew P.
Meanwhile, our innies will be doing dishes and servicing the cars, I guess. And perhaps night gardening, who's to say? That's been it for season two, episode three of Severance.
A slightly mixed episode, but the highs outweigh the lows in every regard. I'm really excited for episode four.
I cannot wait to watch it. I'll say two, as far as mixed episodes go, one that really moves the chains, one that feels like we're still advancing and answering questions.

And, you know,

they're not all going to be absolute hits every second, but I think we're still propulsive enough

and we're still invested enough

in all of these things

that I'm having a great time.

That's remarkable.

So astute.

Now it just feels insulting.

God damn it, Natalie.

Thank you to Kai Grady.

Everybody's talking about Bur Grady everybody's talking about

Burby

everybody's talking about Burby

we'll see you next week

bye