Severance: 5 Burning Questions We Have After the Season 2 Premiere
Warning: This post contains spoilers from Severance’s Season 2 premiere.
Severance is back at work — and so are our brains, trying to untangle all the mysteries that Friday’s Season 2 premiere threw at us.
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Apple TV+’s sci-fi thriller returned in fine form, with Mark first getting to know a new set of Lumon colleagues before being reunited with his friends and contemplating an offer to leave Lumon for good. (Read our full premiere recap here.) The premiere answered some of the questions we had coming into Season 2, like what kind of repercussions Mark and company would face for their “overtime contingency” rebellion last season. But it also gave us a whole new set of questions to consider — and that we’re sure we’ll be puzzling over all season long.
Since we’re obsessed and we’re going to be thinking about Severance until a new episode airs this Friday anyway, we thought we’d use our time efficiently (praise Kier) and pull together the five biggest questions we have after the Season 2 premiere, including a little fib from Helly… and a seemingly big clue at the very end. Read on to see what we’re still trying to figure out about our Lumon pals, and then join us in the comments below to share your own questions — or your answers to ours, if you have any.
1. Where’s Ms. Casey?
When Innie Mark returned to the Lumon office at the start of the premiere, the first thing he did was sprint — down an endless series of corridors — to the building’s wellness center, where Ms. Casey (aka his not-really-dead wife Gemma) works. But Mark arrived to find the wellness center completely cleared out, and Ms. Casey was nowhere to be found. Did Lumon get rid of her? Or are they just hiding her from Mark, now that he knows their secret? (And side note: Who was that creepy figure looming over Mark’s shoulder watching him? It didn’t look like Mr. Milchick, did it?)
2. Where did Mark’s new co-workers come from? (And where did they go?)
When Mark got back to his workstation, he was faced with three new members of the macrodata refining team: Gwendolyn (Alia Shawkat), Dario (Stefano Carannante) and Mark W. (Bob Balaban). We were as puzzled as Mark was, and we never got a clear explanation of where they came from, although Mark W. alluded to having worked at another Lumon branch that shut down. (We know they’re severed, too, because Gwendolyn peppered Mark with questions about the outside world: “How’s wind? Is it just like getting breathed on, kind of?”)
Then when Mark demanded his old team back, Lumon obliged and brought back Helly, Irving and Dylan, much to Mark’s relief. But where did the three newbies go? And will we ever see them again? It’d be a shame if we didn’t. We were just starting to like Mark W.
3. What’s the deal with Miss Huang?
Yes, we understand that she’s a child because of when she was born — good question, though, Mark W. — but what is a child doing serving as the new deputy manager of Lumon’s severed floor? Miss Huang (played by new series regular Sarah Bock) is incredibly precocious for her age, but it still seems like an awfully odd fit. Is she a Lumon prodigy? Or does she have some connection to our heroes? Some fans are even theorizing… she could be Mark and Gemma’s daughter (!!!).
4. Why did Helly lie?
As Mark caught up with his Lumon pals, they all exchanged stories of what they saw in the outside world, with Mark sharing his revelation about his Outie’s wife Gemma. But Helly — who discovered she is actually Helena Eagan, daughter of Lumon CEO Jame Eagan and descendant of founder Kier Eagan — told them she just saw “the inside of a really f–king boring apartment.” Why would she lie? Is she ashamed of being an Eagan, thinking her friends would reject her if they knew? Or (as some fans have speculated) is she actually Helena just pretending to be Helly and trying to cover up her true identity while pumping them for intel?
5. What did we see of Gemma at the end?
By the end of the premiere, Mark and his friends all agreed to stay at Lumon, and they got back to work refining macrodata at their computer terminals. But as Mark was manipulating those dancing numbers, we saw flashes of Ms. Casey/Gemma, including the image above, of what looks like surveillance footage of an imprisoned Gemma. Is she being held captive by Lumon? And the numbers on Mark’s screen seemed to connect to what’s happening to Gemma, with some of the same numbers being duplicated and the code name “Cold Harbor” being prominently displayed. What does it all mean?!? Well, we have nine more weeks to figure it out — or to find even more mysteries to solve.
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