Why Did Helly Lie? And Other Severance Questions.

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Seven Severance Questions is a weekly attempt to digest the events of one of television’s twistiest shows by highlighting the weirdest, most confusing, and most important unresolved issues after each episode. There will be theories. Many will be unhinged.

Severance returned for a second season three years after its first ended and picked up almost exactly where it left off. Kind of. It picked up where it left off for the MDR team’s Innies, at least. Mark S., Helly R., Dylan G., and Irving B. all end up on the severed floor again, eventually, after a little “cause a scene, then run into the boss’s office and yell into his mysterious speaker” ruse by Mark. For them, no time has passed since Dylan flipped the switches after his waffle party and unleashed chaos. For their Outies and the people they interacted with in the real world, well, that’s up for debate. We’ll get to it shortly.

Some things have changed, though. Mr. Milchick is the boss now, through a combination of competence and attrition. He has a mysteriously youthful sidekick. The storage closet is much less spacious. Other severed workers seem to be aware of what happened and have a lot of understandable questions about the outside world. How, exactly, does one begin to explain wind to someone who has never experienced it? I wouldn’t know where to begin.

Speaking of interesting questions raised by the season-two premiere, let’s get to the task at hand. Here are the seven things I found myself asking as the end credits on “Hello, Ms. Cobel” hit the screen.

Has it really been five months since the events of the season-one finale?

I suppose the answer to this question depends on your answer to a broader and more sinister one: Should we believe anything Milchick says to anyone, ever? I lean toward “no” on that one, just as a general rule. It keeps things cleaner. So, following this to its other conclusions: No, I don’t believe they are all famous on the outside (Helly, maybe, just because of who she is and what she was doing when her Innie crossed her Outie, but not Irving, who was just banging on the door of a man who would look at him as a stranger); no, I don’t believe Lumon is showing that ridiculous video about the uprising to anyone, let alone new employees (“yes, of course we value employee-led revolutions in our secretive dungeon workplace”); and no, I don’t believe his speech to Dylan about keeping the new family meeting place secret from the team for their own childless good (lol, okay Milchick). Frankly, I do not even think he wanted Mark to enjoy those balloons.

I am willing to accept that I could be wrong about some of this, if only because blanket statements like “Milchick is always lying” are often too sweeping to be correct. Maybe it was five months. Maybe it was a year. Maybe it was the handful of hours it took Lumon’s maintenance department to wall up the wellness room. The only thing we know for certain is that it’s been long enough to start driving Milchick crazy that the billion-dollar cultlike company he works for can invent and implement a complicated brain-segmenting device but can’t (or won’t) get his screen to stop saying Ms. Cobel’s name.

What is going on in the outside world?

Everything we see in this episode takes place on the severed floor, making this a big question with many sub-questions. What actually happened after Mark shouted “She’s alive!” at the party? What happened when Helly snapped back to her Outie self at her own, much fancier party? How did Burt react to a crazed man whomping on his door while he tried to have a nice evening with his partner? Then, beyond the immediate fallout from any of these — please do stop here and imagine being at either party when either of those things happened — what’s been going on since?

These are things we will get answers to shortly, one assumes. Or at least at some point. A lot of it depends on the answer to the first question about how much time transpired. The two parts of it that interest me most right now are:

(1) Why, given everything that happened, did all four members of the MDR team choose to return to the office?

(2) What happened to Ms. Cobel, whose double life was exposed and is presumably dealing with the consequences of both being fired and being exposed as a fake baby expert who was living next to her severed employee and trying to teach his sister how to breastfeed?

A 24-hour news network could get weeks of breathless coverage out of that second thing. A sick part of me wants to see it.

Why did Helly lie?

Let’s go with the obvious answer here, just given what we know: She did not want to look her co-workers in the eye and reveal that, whoops, she’s been the heir to the Eagan fortune all along and is only down there as a kind of self-inflicted PR stunt. In a situation in which distrust is running wild, that could have been a tough sell on a number of fronts. Maybe she was just embarrassed and ashamed. People have lied for lesser reasons.

The issue with this lie, though, is that now we have this hammer hanging over everything — most notably, Helly’s auburn-haired head — that is going to come smashing down at some point. That’s going to be … unpleasant. If Helly was worried about distrust impacting her relationship with the team before she started blabbering about couches and gorilla T-shirts and night gardeners, buddy, it sure ain’t getting better any time after that.

Do you think you would get lost trying to navigate the hallways of the Lumon building?

One of the doctor’s offices I go to has similar all-white hallways that lead from the waiting room to the various examination rooms and back. There are little blue arrows on the floor every 20 or 30 feet that direct you toward the exit when you’re done. I still get turned around maybe one out of every six or seven visits.

So, yes. I would be hopelessly lost in the Lumon building, every day. They should invent a brain chip for that instead. What could go wrong?

What the hell is up with Miss Huang?

I have three theories as to why the new deputy manager appears to be a teenage girl …

(1) Lumon had her severed at her parents’ request when she was very young as part of some horrifying program to retrain wayward youths and make them productive members of the workforce.

(2) Some sort of sicko “live forever” experiment where a deputy manager in another department had her brain downloaded into a younger body in an attempt to rise up the corporate ranks by buying herself more time.

(3) She is actually 28 and has a fabulous skin-care regimen.

We will continue to monitor this situation.

What happened to the other MDR team?

I feel like we will see them again at some point. I feel like this mostly because Severance is not usually a show that introduces something then brushes it out of existence forever with no explanation. I also feel like this because it would be a massive waste of Alia Shawkat to use her for a few minutes then send her home.

That said, it is really funny to picture a world where Severance runs for seven seasons and these three remain offscreen the whole time just stewing about what an asshole Mark S. is. So let’s all pretend that’s what is happening until proven otherwise, just as a treat.

WAS THAT GEMMA AND/OR MS. CASEY FLICKERING IN THE SCREEN AT THE END?

YOOOOO

IT WAS, RIGHT?

WHAT’S GOING ON THERE?

HAS ALL THEIR MYSTERIOUS NUMBER SORTING BEEN PART OF THE CREEPY BLACK HALLWAY TESTING PROJECT THAT SHE’S BEEN INVOLVED IN AND IRV’S OUTIE HAS BEEN PAINTING COMPULSIVELY AT HOME?

OR DOES THIS MEAN SHE’S BEEN MOVED SOMEWHERE AND IS WATCHING MARK THROUGH HIS SCREEN?

OR BOTH?

OR NEITHER?

WHAT THE HELL, MAN???