The world outside Lumon’s basement is less visually engrossing than the world inside. I mean, naturally — the outside world isn’t a nightmarish cross between Squid Game and Office Space. Not visually, anyway. 

The labyrinthine workplace from which our heroic quartet of innies have been trying to escape stays safely tucked away this episode, relegated to the premiere. This time around, we’re seeing life on the other side of the elevator, rejoining our innie heroes’ outies shortly after their reemergence into consciousness.

Mark is the only character we rejoin right that very moment. Turns out his cry of “She’s alive!” was considerably less disruptive to the party than you’d think, since most people assumed he was talking about his sister Devon and brother-in-law Ricken’s (Michael Chernus) baby daughter, nearly kidnapped by the sinister “Cobelvig,” as Ricken dubs Partricia Arquette’s character(s). (Cobelvig herself is completely MIA.)

Devon, however, is not so sure. Mark S. was holding a photo of Mark and his late wife Gemma at the time he screamed those words. Could he have meant Gemma, and if so, isn’t Mark obligated to keep going to work so his innie can uncover the truth? Mark is so offended by Devon’s suggestion — he identified his wife’s body himself and has lived with the grief ever since — that he storms out on his sister at Pip’s, the Lumon-owned diner in town. Neither of them notices that Drummond (Darri Ólafsson), a mountainous Lumon official who works closely with Helena Eagan, is spying on them. 

We catch up with Helena herself some time after her revival, as her bizarre father Jame (Michael Siberry) calls her a “fetid moppet.” Helena has to perform cleanup duty for her innie’s actions: overseeing the confiscation of footage and the massaging of the media, promoting Milchick and putting Cobel out to pasture, tasking Milchick with handling the outies and Drummond with spying on them afterwards, recording a bullshit video in which she blames her innie’s cry for help on a bad interaction between booze and “a non-Lumon medication.” (Gotta specify that kinda thing, kinda like how you’ll never see an Apple product in the hands of a villain on any show ever.) And eventually, she’s forced to go back to work by the Board, who have power over even Helena and her father, it seems. 

Milchick springs into action, immediately firing the outies of both Irving, who feigns ignorance that anything unusual had occurred, and Dylan, who (since he stayed in the basement while the other innies escaped) was sent home from work with a bump on the head only to be fired summarily later that night with no inkling anything had happened at all. 

Mark, who went through the transformation in the middle of a party full of people and talked about it with someone he trusted, can’t be handled that easily. After acting like a real asshole to Mark and Devon in an attempt to find out what Mark S. said (neither they nor Ricken mention the whole “she’s alive” thing, instinctively realizing that would be a bad idea), Milchick approaches Mark alone. This time he takes a softer, slimier approach. He reminds Mark how much pain he’s in, and promises him Mark S. feels none of his outie’s grief. In fact, he’s fallen in love, a feeling that will surely filter upwards if Mark just returns to work and allows his innie life to blossom. (Milchick is counting on Mark not to question why the feelings elevator would only run in one direction.)

It’s not just the comparatively public circumstances of his innie/outie flip that have the Lumon execs in a tizzy, however. They need Mark back so he can complete his work on Cold Harbor, the project pertaining to Gemma/Ms. Casey. Perhaps everyone in MDR — including the character played by Bob Balaban, whom we see getting unceremoniously fired after just a few days at work once the company gives in to Mark S.’s demand and brings back his old team — is reanimating the corpse of a loved one to provide the Eagan clan with immortal slaves. 

While he does return to work, Mark is not without his doubts, particularly where the sinister Cobelvig is concerned. He finally catches her just as she’s packing up and moving out, demanding answers that, this being Severance, she doesn’t give. When he asks if she knows something about Gemma, however, her silence speaks volumes — as does the terrifying scream and frantic horn-honk she unleashes to frighten him out of her car’s way so she can drive the hell out of there. It’s so uncharacteristically bombastic for this subdued show that I’m still kind of shaken by it.

This being Severance, what we don’t see of the outies’ lives is at least as notable as what we do. We never see Dylan’s family, for example; we simply hear his wife’s voice on the phone, which (again, this being Severance) likely means her identity is notable. We never see how Irving got home from banging on Burt’s door, although Burt is now driving around in the shadows, keeping an eye on him from afar. We also never learn why Irving had a dossier on other potential severed workers; the surreptitious call he makes on a payphone late one night (while Drummond spies on him) seems to indicate he’s part of an anti-Lumon activist group when you put two and two together. 

And we see next to nothing of Helena beyond her robotic professional persona. We’re not given a single glimpse of her home life, as she’s never shown outside the Lumon campus. It’s hard to determine if her discovery of her innie Helly’s office romance with Mark S. makes her feel empathetic shock or uncanny disgust. It’s similarly unclear whether it’s the prospect of continuing that romance or enduring the obviously horrific conditions she knows for a fact exist that she’s visibly dreading as she gets back on that elevator. And the extent of both the PR damage done by her innie’s outburst and the extent of Lumon’s response to it is fuzzy. (We never see any of the other real-world characters talk about it, not even Devon, so perhaps Lumon managed to cover it up entirely, but if so, who was that video for?)

We do, however see Dylan go on a funny job interview at a door manufacturer hosted by a guy who could be his own older doppelgänger (Adrian Martinez), which feels like a Seinfeld bit, up to and including finding out the guy’s an anti-severite. And we learn that Milchick, who does not feel in any way like a real person but who’s pretty entertaining, drives a bitchin’ motorcycle. 

But the main benefit of an episode like this is to take us out of the, for lack of a better word, zany world of the severed floor. Down there, Mark S., Dylan G., and Irving B. are basically empty shells, or maybe characters in a one-panel gag cartoon about office life. (Helly R., who never buys into the bullshit for a second, is considerably more vibrant.) Up top, however, Mark is a real guy, a guy who hangs out with his sister a lot and gets real angry about his wife’s death. Irving seems to share his innie’s vocal pattern, but his military background, music taste, obsessive painting of a secret location in the basement, and potential link to anti-Lumon activities mark him as a very different guy from his lovesick but largely comical counterpart. I wish we weren’t being kept in the dark about Dylan and Helena’s lives at home, but at last there’s some dark to explore. I’m interested in these people, not the meticulously constructed world around them.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.