[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers through episode 1 of Severance season 2. Read on only if you’re fine with one of your severed selves knowing that.]
Headed into season 2, Severance is on a hot streak. Picking up right where the season 1 finale left off — give or take a few months of outie time; Mark (Adam Scott) is informed it’s been about five months since the finale — Severance season 2 kicks into gear almost right away. That gear is the one we’re familiar with for the show: methodical and full of clues.
Episode 1 of season 2, “Hello, Ms. Cobel,” doesn’t betray much, but it certainly gets everyone back to work, which gets us closer to figuring out… any answers to the many lingering questions. To that end, we’ve compiled a working doc of all the lingering questions Severance is teeing up. We’ll be updating it as the series goes along, and will include everything from evidence presented on the show to wild conjecture. In the spirit of Dylan (Zach Cherry), let’s wonder aloud a little.
To that end: What is Lumon working on?
Lumon is a deeply mysterious organization. When Helly (Britt Lower) asks in season 1 how many departments there are, the guesses from the MDR team skew wildly — “probably 30,” “around five,” “no one is quite sure” are the stated answers — and the group doesn’t even know what it is they’re working on. Other departments don’t know what the others do, and seem to have strange superstitions about the very humanity of their ostensible co-workers.
From our glimpses of the outside, it’s clear Lumon exerts a lot of influence in the wider world. And as Cobel (Patricia Arquette) puts it when someone asks about what Lumon does: “Whatever humans can imagine, they can usually create.” Plus there’s the weird corporate legacy they’re all indoctrinated to: owned by the Egan company and founded by Kier Egan, who still looms over the company like a cult leader. His Core Principles and employee handbook are dense. They have their hands in a lot of pots, given their subterranean (or possibly just windowless, liminal) office includes goats, “optics and design,” art preservation, MDR, and more.
So what are they up to, and what does the severed procedure actually net them? The answer, on paper, is in its use: No longer do people have to be “aware” they work, or undergo painful experiences like giving birth. It’s not hard to see how that could have applications for soldiers (or even something more nefarious). But the larger goal… tbd. Are they doing some kind of Get Out thing where the severance procedure is just a way to transfer consciousness, prolong life, and maybe even bring Kier Egan back to life? Maybe! Why else keep a man’s house perfectly preserved in the office? And why else would Helena’s Egan CEO dad say she would “sit with” him at his “revolving”?
But these questions do bring us to…
What is the Macrodata Refinement department working on?
Technically we don’t know this, either! (Though we are pretty clear that they do not, as the rumors have suggested, “each have a larval offspring that will jump off and attack when we get too close.”)
To us it looks like numbers moving around the screen. But to Mark and his co-workers, it’s work — some of which is numbers that elicit a strange fear response (or even visions like the one Mark gets of Ms. Casey/his wife at the end of the season 2 premiere). And to the heads of Lumon, it seems pretty imperative, given the way they’re willing to bend to Mark’s demands in the opening of season 2.
There’s a popular fan theory that MDR is sensitive and high-level bit work that has something to do with refining/perfecting the severance procedure (or even perfecting one consciousness taking over another), and the numbers represent memories and personality that are getting swept away.
One thing that seems important to note: There is a technique to it. “When you see us, we really are refining numbers,” Adam Scott, who plays Mark, told The Verge. “There is actually a way to do it.”
What are they doing with Mark’s wife?
Image: Apple TV
When we’re introduced to Outie-Mark, he lives a barren, severed life because he lost his wife a few years prior to the series. In the season 1 finale, Innie-Mark discovers (and screams) that she’s alive. So… where did she go? Episode 1 doesn’t give a lot of details: We know she takes the elevator that Outie-Irv (John Turturro) keeps painting, and we don’t… know where that goes, or why she got taken.
In an interview around the season 1 finale, creator Dan Erickson only vaguely alluded to what might be going on:
There’s a lot of questions. Most of which we had answered in our minds when we wrote it, but some of which we didn’t. Like, some of which we’ve been subsequently discussing. But yeah, like, is she severed? Does she know — is she in on it? Is she a victim? Is she kidnapped? How did she go from being in this loving marriage with Mark to being Ms. Casey down from the seventh floor? And so that’s a big, big question mark at this point. […] We’ve seen that there’s some sort of experiment or something happening with [Mark] and his wife, and sort of observing them.
What did Harmony Cobel want with Mark?
There’s a lot of weirdness on Severance, but among the strangest (or at least the coldest) of it is Harmony Cobel infiltrating Mark’s life both in and outside of work hours. For as much as Milchick (Tramell Tillman) might write this off as some bizarre psychosexual “throuple,” her game seemed to be much more thought out than that.
It’s possible that she’s keeping tabs on a larger project around the severed employees (in her own way). Cobel was more concerned than the board about Petey’s severed memories being permeable; later she asked Mark’s sister if he ever “thought he saw” his wife around. She seemed to take a bit of glee in introducing Ms. Casey to the MDR room to watch Helly R., and when she found out that Ms. Casey was getting too chummy with Mark she sent her “back down to the testing floor.”
What’s the testing floor?
Oh, great question; no clue, really. But it’s scary and ominous — poor Ms. Casey has to walk down a long, dark hallway that leads to an elevator with just an imposing red down arrow — and for some reason Irv’s outie has been having visions of it and painting it, as we see in the season finale. Petey alluded to some level of the Lumon building as “a place you don’t get to leave,” which certainly seems like it could be the testing floor.
There’s some theories that this has to do with the deeper nature of Lumon, and might involve cloning (hence the goats). At the very least, that Irv and Ms. Casey seem to have some link to the floor would suggest that maybe both of them have undergone the same sort of testing. Particularly since Innie-Irv keeps having weird visions of black shadowy ooze.
Why is Ms. Huang a child?
Image: Apple TV
Is it a paid internship? Is Lumon flouting child labor laws? Is she also part of the testing floor/Ms. Casey weirdness? So far Ms. Huang — not a friend, it must be noted — has been clear: It’s because of when she was born. Hope that helps!
What is the connection with Lumon and water?
Lumon’s logo is a water drop. There’s a water tower in the parking lot (and that gets to be its own character in the Claymation introductory video the innies get shown in the season 2 premiere). There’s lot of names that link back to some sort of body of water — MDR files, housing developments the characters live in, even technically the names of the refiners. Ms. Casey tells Innie-Irv that his outie “values water.” There’s a painting of Egan standing over lakes that are shaped like the Great Lakes.
What does it all mean? Not clear yet, though some think that it nods to the alternate universe of Severance existing in a time where there is a war for water, and it’s considered a more precious (or endangered) resource.
Seriously, what is the deal with the goats?
Among the stranger things we saw in season 1: a herd of goats just being… kept? inside the halls of Lumon Industries. All Mark and Helly really know is the caretaker didn’t consider them “ready yet.”
Like so much of life at Lumon, the goats both don’t immediately make sense and also are openly perplexing as to what their possible use could be. The good news? It seems like by the end of season 2 we will have some sort of answer.