Yahoo Lifestyle Severance Gets Our Goat With Its Wildest, Weirdest Episode Yet — Read Our Recap
So you have questions about the goats on Severance, do ya? Well, this week’s episode gave us some answers — and yep, a lot more questions.
Friday’s episode finds Innie Mark kicking his search for Ms. Casey into high gear, printing out “Missing” flyers with her face on them and asking his friends to help hand them out around the office. He and Helly decide to go find out what the goats they saw in Season 1 are all about, so they roam through the Lumon hallways before stopping at a certain door. When they go inside, they find a tiny model farm on the floor with a section of hay, and then a tiny hallway littered with hay (and goat poop) they have to crawl through. Once they emerge from that, they reach a room with a large grassy hill, with goats on it grazing and bleating — and a man dressed in a black goat costume (!). Then they’re confronted by a wild-eyed woman named Lorne (played by Game of Thrones alum Gwendoline Christie), who asks them, “Are you here to kill me?”
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Mark insists they’re not, and tells her they’re from macrodata refinement. This department is “Mammalians Nurturable,” Lorne informs them. He asks her if she’s seen the wellness director Ms. Casey, but she scoffs: “Wellness… we don’t abide such fripperies here.” Lorne advises them to leave, but Mark keeps pressing, so she rings a Lumon-branded cow bell, and other farm workers arrive to back her up. “You should have left,” she says ominously. When Helly asks the others about Ms. Casey, Lorne threatens to rat them out to Mr. Milchick. Mark pleads that Ms. Casey may have been killed, but she sniffs: “That’s not a Mammalians problem.” “It’s an Innie problem,” though, Mark points out. It could happen to them, too, he adds: “If one of your goats went missing, wouldn’t you go looking for it?”
Lorne softens as she considers this. She admits that Ms. Casey used to do her sessions in their husbandry tanks. She was gentle, Lorne remembers, and they all liked her. But they only know that she was “retired,” like Lumon says. They won’t stop Mark from looking for her, though. Before he and Helly leave, Lorne has one last request: “We would like to see your bellies.” Mark and Helly are confused, but they comply, lifting up their shirts. “See? Pouchless,” Lorne tells another farm worker, who isn’t impressed: “Proves nothing.”
So… we know that there’s a whole department at Lumon set up to raise goats. But to what end? And why did the Mammalians Nurturable people think that the macrodata refiners would have pouches, of all things? We’re still scratching our heads — like we are at the end of most Severance episodes.
Elsewhere in “Who Is Alive?”:
* Dylan received his first Lumon-sanctioned visit with his Outie’s wife Gretchen, played by Emmy winner Merritt Wever (Nurse Jackie). “You really don’t know me at all?” she asked, and he doesn’t. He peppered her with questions about his Outie (“He dumb?” “He a dick?”), but in Gretchen’s eyes, he just “never quite found his thing.” She pulled him in for an awkward hug at the end and told him she loved him, and on the outside, Gretchen told Outie Dylan that the meeting was “weird good, but good.”
* Irving wandered into Burt’s old studio and reconnected with Felicia, who worked with Burt for six years at Lumon. “He spent two hours on his hair the first time he went to visit you,” she told Irving with a smile — and when he showed her the drawings he’s done of a long, dark hallway, she asked, “How do you know about the exports hall?” The exports hall, eh? Hmmm.
* Milchick got a visit from board liaison Natalie, who congratulated him on his promotion (“The board is jubilant at your ascendence”) and gave him a gift from the board: a series of paintings that tell the story of Lumon through Black characters. Milchick seemed a little ambivalent about the gift, though: Instead of hanging the paintings in his office, he hid them away in a closet.
* Natalie also met with Devon’s husband Ricken, encouraging him to write a version of his book for the Innies at Lumon and telling him it’s had “a profound effect on our workers.” He loved hearing that, of course!
* Ms. Cobel was sleeping in her car and driving to an unknown destination — but something made her turn around and come back to Lumon. She met Helena in the office parking lot, insisting that she be put back in charge of the severed floor and declaring that Milchick is “not equipped for the task.” Helena resisted, though, and invited Cobel inside with Natalie to speak with the board. Cobel seemed to sense it was a trap, and she got back in her car and drove away.
* Outie Mark had a plan to communicate with his Innie, attempting to burn the message “Who is alive?” into his retinas so he could still see it at work. “It doesn’t work,” though, he was told by Reghabi, the former Lumon employee who tried to reintegrate Petey last season. “There’s an easier way,” she said, adding that Gemma is alive — at least “she was the last time I saw her.” She offered to reintegrate Mark, and he agreed (“I want to see my wife”), with Reghabi hooking him up to a machine that syncs up his brain waves. She asked him a series of simple questions, and when she asked, “What month is it?” Mark replied, “You mean what quarter?” — as his Innie and Outie selves began to merge.
Got thoughts on this week’s Severance? Share ‘em in the comments.
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