‘Severance’ Episode 3: Behold the Goat People
This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Severance, “Who Is Alive?” now streaming on Apple TV+.
There is a whole lot to discuss about the third episode of Severance Season Two, but where else can we start but with the goat people? Innie Mark and Helly’s discovery of a room with baby goats was perhaps the most memorably odd moment of the first season(*). Why are there baby goats on the severed floor? What could they possibly have to do with the inscrutable work that our heroes perform in MDR, and why is it so secretive that it would require severed employees to handle the adorable creatures?
More from Rolling Stone
(*) It also set up Christopher Walken to deliver one of the most indelible and idiosyncratic line readings in a career full of them.
Severance owes a big creative debt to Lost, and the goats feel like this show’s equivalent to the polar bears. The explanation for why there were polar bears on a tropical island ultimately didn’t amount to much (as was the case with many mysteries about the island), and maybe the goats won’t turn out to be a significant part of Cold Harbor and Lumon’s nefarious plan involving Innie Mark. But Mark and Helly’s visit to a larger goat room — which they have to access through a Being John Malkovich-ish crawl space — feels notable for a few reasons. The first is that one of the new severed employees they meet is played by Game of Thrones alum Gwendoline Christie, who 100 percent understands the assignment and gives off abundant weird energy as the leader of this team. The second is that the whole team of goat-sitters comes across as feral, so deeply attached to their wooly charges that they don’t seem to like or even understand human beings. They even make Mark and Helly lift up their shirts to prove that they don’t have marsupial-style pouches underneath, as if the goat people aren’t sure what human anatomy is like outside the confines of their group(*).
(*) UPDATE: I’ve been reminded that this is actually a callback to a scene in Season One where Burt says that there’s a lot of gossip on the severed floor about people in MDR having pouches. Which still speaks to the matter of what severed employees do and don’t know about how life works.
This raises a whole lot of questions, first and foremost is what the goat people’s outies are like. As we’ve seen with the MDR quartet, often the only real change that severance creates between innie and outie is in their respective memories. But we’ve also seen, with Helena versus Helly, that the two people can behave very differently. The innies retain some knowledge of life outside the office — Irving was able to drive a car during the Overtime Contingency, and the innies know that there is a sky, even if most have never seen one — but perhaps that can be fine-tuned depending on the job each is being asked to do? Or maybe the goat people’s outies are all perfectly normal, and their innies have just gone native after spending so much time in the company of these adorable little critters?
Those explanations will have to wait for later, if they come at all, but the innie versus outie issue stands out in the season’s first episode to feature both groups.
First, there’s the ongoing question of the newest member of MDR — specifically, whether she’s even newer than the others think. While the season’s first two installments offered various moments suggesting that “Helly” might really just be Helena posing as her innie (the lie about the night gardener, her fumbling around for the power switch on Helly’s computer), this one trends more towards it really being Helly. Certainly, Britt Lower is playing her with the looser physicality of Helly, and the contrast between the two is more obvious in the season’s first episode to feature both versions. (Helena scenes are also lit differently, so that the red in her hair seems to vanish, turning her into a full brunette.) But Helena might just be a good actor, or the version she presents to her family and the world is the act, and the gangly goofball is who she really is when nobody important is looking?
While Mark, Irving, and Helly (Helena?) are all roaming the severed floor in search of clues to Ms. Casey’s whereabouts, Dylan decides to be a good little serf, in order to earn the family visit that Milchick promised. And for once, at least, our new floor manager proves true to his word, introducing Dylan to his outie’s wife, Gretchen, played by two-time Emmy winner Merritt Wever. It’s a strange encounter for both parties. To Dylan, this is a stranger who acts like she knows him intimately, because in many ways she does. To Gretchen, this seems like her husband, only it isn’t quite him. When she closes the visit by whispering that she loves him, he’s thunderstruck, because how would an innie ever expect such a wonderful and intimate declaration from their half-a-life? But he’s also not sure how to respond, because he has just met her and can only start to imagine what his outie’s relationship with her is like. He smiles, because the thought of her loving him makes him happy, just as knowledge that his outie had a family inspired him to join with the others on their rebellion. But we don’t know what he really knows about love, and family — it’s not like Milchick screens rom-coms in the break room every other Friday — and all of this is new and overwhelming for him. This series has asked so much of Zach Cherry, whose prior best-known roles were all comedic, and he’s been wonderful at these small and complicated dramatic moments.
As for Mr. Milchick himself, he is not a severed employee. But he has always come across like a man who has divided himself in two. There is the smiling, soft-spoken, unflappable manager who believes devoutly in various things we know to be untrue, from him being the Fun Boss that all the employees love, to the various gospels of Kier. But there is also the angry brute who will hurt anyone or anything that stands in the way of this company in which he has invested so much of himself. Because he is unsevered, either Milchick can appear on the severed floor, often within a few eye-blinks of one another. But “Who Is Alive?” suggests there is yet another Milchick, who answers to his first name, Seth, and whose feelings about Lumon and the Eagans are more complex than he makes it sound whenever he’s lecturing the MDR group. Praised by Natalie for his recent promotion to Harmony’s old job(*), his reward is a collection of paintings of great moments in the life of Kier, but with a twist: In the paintings, Kier is a Black man with more than a passing resemblance to Milchick. Like Dylan with Gretchen’s expression of love, Milchick is stunned by this gift, but also not entirely sure how to feel about it. He uses Lumon cult-speak to respond at first, saying, “It’s meaningful to see myself reflected in…” but he trails off after that. And when we see him studying the paintings again later, he seems less enamored of them, and places them in a closet in his new office. Perhaps he is simply not allowed to take them home with him, in the same way that the severed employees can’t sneak anything but their clothes into the elevators. But perhaps the paintings have had the opposite of the intended effect: Rather than making him feel like more a part of this business run by a powerful white family, they remind him that he could never be mistaken for an Eagan, and would never be considered to be their peer. This is not an image of himself as Kier Eagan, but of Kier in blackface to appease a useful Black underling. As always, Tramell Tillman has to say a whole lot with his eyes and his body language, because Milchick really does not want to talk about how many different ways this job is pulling him apart.
(*) Harmony continues to linger, returning to again demand that Helena reinstate her as manager of the severed floor. Helena isn’t interested in that, and from this vantage point, Severance has made the right choice in leaving Milchick as the active, present boss character. Through no fault of Patricia Arquette’s, Harmony feels like a much less well-rounded and interesting character than Milchick, and his interactions with the severed workers feel more varied and unexpected. So it’s more satisfying, at least for now, to have him still in the middle of the action, while she only pops up occasionally to yell at people.
Which brings us, finally, to Mark, who ends the episode attempting to put his fractured psyche back together, with help from Reghabi, who swears she has solved the problems with the reintegration process that eventually killed Petey. Like Reghabi herself(*), the idea seems to come out of nowhere, especially in an episode that, outside of the goat people scene, hasn’t given Innie Mark a whole lot to do, and thus feels like a strange moment at which to potentially eliminate him as a separate entity.
(*) When I wrote a Season Two cheat sheet, among my primary motivations was to remind people of the existence of Reghabi, a character I had completely forgotten about in the three years since she last appeared. She did some significant things in Season One — she’s the one who attempted to reintegrate Petey, and she murdered the head of security for the severed floor and gave Outie Mark his badge, which allowed Innie Mark to pull off the Overtime Contingency stunt — but so much time has passed, and so many other things happened in that first season, that all memory of her had long since fallen out of my head by the time she popped up again here.
But in the moment, the idea of reintegration seems to create as many problems as it solves. Yes, it would make it easier for Mark to find his wife. But there is the rather thorny problem that Mark is involved in something of a love triangle. (Or is it a love quadrangle, while Gretchen has a potential triangle with the two Dylans?) Outie Mark loves Gemma, and wants to liberate her from whatever captivity Lumon has placed her in, but Innie Mark’s feelings for Helly continue to bloom. If you stitch the two halves of Mark back together, does he love both? Neither?
And if you were to do the same for any of the goat people, would they behave normally after, or just run around the outside world demanding to see people’s pouches?
Best of Rolling Stone
Sign up for RollingStone's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
