In the Scientology-esque lingo that permeates Lumon, a company that puts the “cult” in “corporate culture,” a contention is an issue with an employee’s performance. Each contention requires a certain amount of “atonements and approbations.” The process takes hours; in the case of Seth Milchick, who just had to terminate an employee for attempting to kill a member of the company’s founding family, that amount of time is probably warranted. Severance itself would have a couple of contentions at the moment, if it were sitting in front of Drummond and Natalie for its performance review. (Making the show sit for its own performance review in front of its own characters does feel very Severance.)
The first contention is that all the praise I heaped on the show for fast-forwarding through Mark’s reintegration plotline must now be retracted. We finally find out in this episode what happened to him after the procedure took effect: nothing. Well, next to nothing, anyway: both Mark the outie and Mark S. the innie occasionally glitch out, catching glimpses of their other lives at random moments. (And sometimes not-so-random: Remember how the face of Mark’s wife Gemma was superimposed over the face of “Helly” when she and Mark S. had sex?)
Reghabi, the ex-Lumon surgeon who performed the reintegration, is now holed up in Mark’s basement. (It’s a popular vacation spot for Lumon fugitives.) She’s deliberately slow-walking the procedure to avoid the sickness and death that befell Mark’s colleague Petey afterwards, which is probably why Mark’s cough has her nervous. For his part, Mark is anxious to undergo another round of reintegration because he barely remembers anything — until the end of the episode, that is.
Meanwhile, his innie, Mark S., is struggling with life on the inside. He and the others have lost Irving, who was fired for dunking Helena/Helly under the water during their outdoor retreat. He knows his wife is alive down there, but he doesn’t really know that she’s his wife in any visceral way. Rather, he’s romantically interested in Helly — or was, until he discovered he’d had sex with her evil outie without even noticing the difference. He keeps the whole thing a secret from Helly upon her return (Board-mandated, over Helena’s strenuous and bigoted objections).
For her part, Helly — who feels violated to learn her outie hijacked her body, even though she’d obviously just done the same thing — never manages to tell anyone that she caused a major incident at a corporate press conference. Dylan is still keeping the secret of the visitation room. Mark doesn’t tell Helly his outie’s wife is down there until Dylan forces his hand. (He doesn’t trust her now that he knows she was previously Helena.) Needless to say, we still don’t know what Cold Harbor is because no one will ever say so, or who Irving is working with on the outside because he gets interrupted by Burt (who asks him over for dinner, having put two and two together about the nature of their innies’ relationship).
In other words, the show is doing a lot of the stuff it seemed to avoid doing early on, when Mark S. just came right out and said everything that happened to him while he was on the outside. No one’s saying the things that need to be said, the things anyone in their position would reasonably be expected to say, the things you’d shout “EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LISTEN TO ME” about, then immediately spit out so no one could miss it. Mystery boxes are no fun if people have to act like idiots to keep the lid on the mystery. Dylan literally yells “ANSWER MY QUESTION!” at Milchick at one point, so it’s not as if the show is unaware that it’s doing what it’s doing. Instead of hanging a lampshade on it, how about not doing it at all?
Similarly, it’s a disappointment that Mark’s reintegration didn’t turbo-charge the narrative the way it seemed poised to do. We went a whole episode where it wasn’t clear he’d been reintegrated at all, and now we learn it mostly occurs in split-second snatches of mixed consciousness. That changes right at the very end, however, when his outie suddenly finds himself in the office, then in the sinister Export Hall. (We caught a glimpse of it earlier when an unseen delivery man brings a cargo of surgical tools from O&D into its sinister down elevator.) All the while, Mark is hearing snippets of Miss Casey telling him about his outie’s life, until finally she appears before him, speaking directly to him before he glitches back out. Now Mark, the outie Mark, knows for certain his wife is alive down there. “Alive,” anyway.
Three more quick notes before we close the book on this mixed performance review:
• Tramell Tillman’s work as Milchick is really extraordinary, isn’t it? To be blunt, this kind of self-consciously quirky character would normally make my skin crawl with cringe, but Tillman makes his every throwback styling choice, every unnecessarily stiff and formal sentence, every bit of tendentious bullshit, every deeply weird thing he does (including authoring the entire “kindness reform” for the severed floor) feels like the product of a three-dimensional (if cartoonishly deranged) person’s mind. Contrast this with Patricia Arquette as Cobelvig, a collection of Disney-villain quirks that never congeals into anything solid.
• While we’re singling out people for strong performances, holy moley, Sydney Cole Alexander is playing Natalie, the Board’s coldly cheery mouthpiece, like the good part of her is trapped deep inside of her, occasionally reaching all the way to the surface in her struggle to get out, only to be forced back down again by that unceasing wide-eyed smile. It’s quietly some of the best acting on the show.
• John Turturro and Christopher Walken playing off each other as actual people, not the strange facsimiles thereof who work on the inside? Sign me way the hell up for that.
• Helena Eagan recounts the time her innie tried to kill herself and Irving dunked her under the water to bring the innie back, chalks this up to the innate savagery of innies. “They’re fucking animals,” she says. I think she’s in charge of the Justice Department’s civil rights division now.
• What the hell is up with Devon and Ricken? Why is she with this guy? He’s a moron, and a know-it-all, and a blowhard, and now a sellout, bowdlerizing his own work to collect a Lumon paycheck. She doesn’t respect him, she seems to like him only in the way you like a mildly incontinent dog owned by a relative, and they have no romantic or sexual chemistry whatsoever. Is she indeed just with him for the money, as he angrily implies when she calls him out for working with Lumon? If so, that would be interesting, since it sits at such an odd angle with her whole affect and demeanor — but that’s why I doubt it’s the case. I think she’s with him because the writers thought he was funny.
• I have to hand it to the show in one regard: Every time I think they’ve done all they can with the “Lumon office parties are really weird and depressing” bit, they outdo themselves. This time around they stage a funeral, or “bereavement event,” for Irving B. at Dylan G.’s insistence, the centerpiece of which is a horrifying watermelon sculpture of Irving’s head, which they then partially eat. This counts as body horror, watermelon or not.
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.