‘Severance’ Season 2, Episode 3 Recap – Mysteries Are Deepening On Several Fronts

Severance has always been about a very stark dichotomy; innie versus outie, work versus home, truth versus well-sculpted simulation. This is why it has always structured itself as a ping-ponging narrative flipping in and out of Lumon, highlighting the substantial differences between the versions of the characters we know on the Severance floor and their outside world counterparts. For the first time in Episode 3, “Who Is Alive?”, Severance Season 2 returns to this structure after spending the premiere entirely within Lumon and the second episode filling in the blanks of how the Macrodata crew got back to work.

This all makes Episode 3 harder to keep up with but more satisfying and mysterious holistically, especially since the crew is all tasked by Mark with exploring different departments in Lumon to test the boundaries of the company’s supposed embrace of “openness”. It separates the cast – Mark and Helly head for the room full of goats; Dylan the break room, and Irving to Optics & Design – so they can all drum up leads about what might have happened to Ms. Casey and what other secrets Lumon might also be covering up.

For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure Helly is still consciously Helena, and I’m super suspicious of her closeness to Mark, so much so that his inability to recognize what is quite clearly a romantic advance is probably a good thing. The long stare and pause felt to me like Helly trying to re-do the kiss she watched them share on the security footage; a deliberate play for Mark’s trust that he doesn’t fall for.

The original goat room leads through a small doorway and several miniature hallways to a large room styled to look like a pasture, full of goats and obviously eccentric employees including a man dressed as a goat and Gwendoline Christie, whose Lorne thinks Mark and Helly might be there to kill her. This is the Mammalians Nurturable department.

Lorne isn’t receptive to Mark’s questioning about Ms. Casey and uses a cowbell to summon a bunch of employees who menacingly circle Mark and Helly, but Mark is able to convince Lorne that an innie problem – like, say, the complete disappearance of an employee – affects them all equally, and Lorne reveals that Ms. Casey used to host her wellness sessions in the husbandry tanks.

Elsewhere, Dylan is granted an 18-minute visitation with his outie wife, Gretchen, which was one of Lumon’s promised reforms, but it becomes clear immediately that it’s probably a bad idea. Dylan feels nothing for Gretchen, and mostly uses the session as an excuse to tentatively find out more about his outie; they have three kids, and he struggled to hold down a job before the Lumon gig, which makes Dylan worry that the other version of himself is a loser. Out of habit, Gretchen whispers that she loves him when they part ways, which throws Dylan for a loop. Later, his outie asks her how the experience of meeting his innie was, and you can tell she wasn’t into it.

Gwendoline Christie in Severance | Image via Apple TV+

Irving, meanwhile, visits O&D and runs into Felicia, Burt’s old colleague, who mostly regales him with stories about Burt which reassures Irving about how genuinely interested in him he seemed to be. And the feeling was obviously reciprocated; Irving shows Felicia all the portraits he sketched of Burt, one for each day he didn’t see him at the expense of his Macrodata output. But he also flips forward to his drawing of what Felicia reveals to be the Exports Corridor, where Optics & Design used to send many shipments in person until a guy emerged to take care of it all. Curiouser and curiouser.

Lumon’s Board Liaison Natalie also features heavily in Severance Season 2, Episode 3, firstly to communicate the board’s jubilance at Milchick’s “ascendence”, symbolized mostly through a set of Kier Cycle paintings “re-canonicalized” to depict Kier as a Black man so Milchick can better see himself in the founder.

She then crops up at Ricken and Devon’s place to butter up Ricken about how much the innies at Lumon love his book, and to pitch a slightly reworked innie-specific version with tweaked verbiage to make it more suited to innie sensibilities. Devon’s barely constrained look of combined horror and befuddlement is great here.

But Lumon’s up to something, for sure. Cold Harbor gets mentioned again when Helena runs into Cobel in the parking lot. She wants back in to “finish what she started”, with Milchick out of the way so she can take over, but Helena doesn’t seem keen and Cobel isn’t trusting enough. It’s likely Mark’s investigations will make what’s going on clear before any of the Lumon higher-ups admit it, given how deeply cagey everyone is being about literally everything.

Mark, with Devon’s help, is trying to burn an afterimage message – the episode’s title, “Who is alive?” – into his retina, but he’s surprised by Dr. Reghabi, who tells him it won’t work. Reghabi, who confirms that his wife was alive the last time she saw her, has a better idea – reintegration. Newly emboldened by the news that his wife is still alive, Mark agrees to the procedure and Episode 3 ends with the beginning of the process.