Apple TV+’s science fiction psychological thriller series Severance continues intriguing viewers in season 2, as the strange and simply weird nature of Lumon Industries continues being revealed. In this week’s episode 3, we are made aware of another, almost farcical, department called the Mammalians Nurturable, while Outie Mark continues to try and establish some connection with his Innie in order to find out whether his recently deceased wife, Gemma, is indeed still alive. On the other side, Dylan and Irving make some discoveries of their own, while the appalling insensitivity of Lumon with respect to their employees is also on display throughout this episode.
Spoiler Alert
What is the Mammalians Nurturable department?
Severance season 2 episode 3 begins with Outie Mark driving to his office and running towards the Lumon Industries building once he has hurriedly parked the car. Monitoring the time he takes to run out of the car and into the elevator down to his office on a stopwatch, Mark is clearly invested in figuring out the usual time required before his mind gets severed as per company policy. He tries his best to continue with the count of seconds while experiencing the severance inside the elevator, but this is an impossible task. Thus, when Innie Mark wakes up, he is concerned only with the matters inside the office and has no idea about what his Outie self is up to. Instead, Innie Mark starts to act on the need to find Ms. Casey, the wellness counselor who he now knows to be the apparently dead wife of his Outie. For this purpose, he prints missing posters with Ms. Casey’s face on them and asks for the help of his colleagues to spread word of her disappearance.
Irving is given the task of going to the Optics & Design department, both because he has connections there from before and also because he has the hall pass to get there. Dylan delays his participation in this search mission as he is preoccupied with other things, and Mark and Helly take the responsibility of finding the mysterious man with the goats from season 1, hoping that he will be able to help them. Soon, they find the door that had led them to the inexplicable place but find the room empty, except for a small tunnel leading to a different chamber. Mark and Helly crawl through this tunnel, clearly built for animals, and reach the chamber, which opens up to green meadows and hilly pastures, although covered by the concrete roof of the building.
This particular chamber, which is later revealed to be the office of a department called the Mammalians Nurturable, is incredibly mysterious and borderline absurd in itself. So far, we have very little idea of what Lumon Industries actually does or produces, and its various departments have only seemed to be official fronts for some scientific, particularly psychological, experiments. Mammalians Nurturable is no different, as no mention of the purpose of such a department is made, and we are only left to keep guessing. Initially it seems like the workers at the place rear goats and maybe extract resources like milk or even meat from the animals, making the department just a glorified animal farm. But there are many more strange facets to the place, beginning with the fact that among the goats grazing on the artificial fields is also a man dressed in literal goatskin, even with the head of a ram with its twisted horns. The purpose of this man is probably to herd the goats to the pastures and then back to safety, as his physical appearance would convince the animals to treat him as their leader.
But the strangest part of the Mammalians Nurturable department is the very workers, beginning with their leader, who immediately thinks that Mark and Helly have come to the place to kill her. She is also initially very adamant against letting the MDR workers come to her department and ask questions about Ms. Casey, and it all seems to be because of the protocols in place at Lumon Industries. The company does not want any cooperation or association between its various departments, naturally because it wants to prevent any anti-authoritarian developments. Therefore, the authorities at Lumon have been spreading misinformation among their employees, in an effort to get them to develop a sense of hostility and distrust against the workers of other departments. This is evident from this episode when the leader of the MN department fears that people from MDR have been sent to kill her, and then also when Mark and Helly have to show the workers their bellies to prove that they don’t have pouches on their bodies like kangaroos. While the first instance shows how Lumon wants inter-departmental fear to exist among their workers, the second instance proves how the company has been spreading misinformation to develop a sense of ‘othering’ in the minds of all their employees.
More significantly, the workers at MN, or rather their leader, initially refuse to speak about Ms. Casey and just want the MDR representatives to leave. She even threatens to inform Milchick about their unauthorized presence at her department, but then Mark’s short speech about the need for the workers to take agency and not fear the authorities quickly makes her change her mind. The ease with which the MN workers open up to the duo still makes me wonder whether all this is also a part of Lumon’s plans and if they are indeed monitoring everything, as revealed, or rather threatened, in the previous episode. Ultimately, she and a few other workers reveal that Ms. Casey did often come down to the department for psychological evaluation sessions, and she would give the workers some information about their Outie selves, which would give them a lot of mental peace. It is quite obvious that the counsellor was much loved in this department as well, and the leader states that they had been notified of her retirement as if it was a very normal occurrence. Ultimately, the Mammalians Nurturable workers do not know what happened to Ms. Casey and are not too concerned about it either, although they agree to not hinder the search of Mark and Helly.
What discoveries do Dylan and Irving make?
In Severance season 2 episode 3, Innie Dylan remains obsessed with the idea of being able to spend time with his Outie family, which had been proposed by Milchick in the previous episode. While the reintegration experience had taught Innie Mark and Innie Helly that there were too many secrets being kept from them, the same incident had made Dylan realize the sweet feeling of having a family. Therefore, he remains engaged with this very thought at present, and Milchick and Lumon fully capitalize on this opportunity. Later in the day, Ms. Huang tells Dylan to follow her and takes him to the security room, which has been repurposed to serve the purpose of a meeting room temporarily. Soft and tranquil music is played in the background, along with the sound of waves by the seaside, and these are clearly important characteristics of spending cherished time with one’s family, as believed by Lumon.
As Innie Dylan fears that he might be in some kind of trouble once again, a woman appears and greets him, and she turns out to be Gretchen, the wife of his Outie self. Ms. Huang allotted the two of them eighteen minutes to catch up, and although the conversation is a bit rough and awkward on account of how Innie Dylan does not know Gretchen or about their life together at all, the experience is quite fruitful. Gretchen admits to the man that her original husband, Outie Dylan, has not had the best time in his professional career, and that it is only thanks to the service of Innie Dylan that the family is able to survive with their three children. It is later revealed in the episode that Gretchen also has to work night shifts at her job to make ends meet for the family. While this subplot is still too fresh, it already seems to suggest that there might be trouble between Innie and Outie Dylan because of Gretchen, as she might end up admiring and loving her husband’s Innie self more than his actual, or Outie, self.
Meanwhile, Irving has to nervously make his way back to the O&D department, where his beloved Burt used to work earlier, in order to spread word about Ms. Casey’s disappearance. The reintegration experience had made Irving wonder what was really up with his Outie self, as the man kept making paintings of a dark corridor with an elevator at the end. Innie Irving tells Dylan that he has finally recreated the painting from memory in his small notebook, and although Dylan does not show any interest in taking a look, his old friend at the O&D department, Felicia, accidentally sees it. She explains that the dark and sinister-looking corridor appears to be from the Exports Hall, an actual place inside the Lumon building, where she had gone a number of times earlier, in the course of her work. Felicia says that although the authorities send a man to get hold of the shipment sent to the Exports Hall these days, she definitely remembers the way to the place, confirming that we will see Irving journey to the place sneakily in the next episode.
How Might Lumon’s Horrible Treatment Of Their Employees Backfire In The Future?
Back in Severance season 1, we had mostly witnessed Lumon Industries’ mistreatment of their lower-level employees, particularly the ones whose minds had been severed as per the professional agreement. But season 2 is gradually giving us an idea of how the position of the higher-level employees, who are not severed and are given the responsibility of overseeing the severed employees, is also not safe from the insensitive and harsh treatment of the company. Severance season 2 episode 3 especially gives us a good insight into this and also makes me wonder whether this very mistreatment might ultimately backfire against them later in the season. To begin with, the mysterious representative between the Board and the employees, Natalie, appears to Milchick once he returns to the office, and he immediately senses something to be off.
Natalie has come to congratulate Milchick on behalf of the Board and to hand him a set of gifts that the Board has sent him for the praiseworthy promotion he has recently earned. Milchick is initially quite excited too, but his emotions visibly change as soon as the gift is unpacked. As it happens, Milchick is probably the first Black person to have reached the position of manager at Lumon, and the corporates are hilariously confused about how to appear inclusive. Therefore, in an extremely insensitive move to make Milchick more motivated towards his job, the Board decides to send him a series of paintings of the founder of Lumon, Kier Eagen, from various important junctures of his life. But the catch is that Kier’s face has just been blackened, and he has been given a mustache similar to Milchick’s, in the worst act of tokenism that can be thought of. In an even more disrespectful move, a picture in which Kier Eagen is turned backwards has not even been bothered to be changed. Milchick is shocked and seemingly irritated by this gift, although he is coerced into saying that he is very satisfied by both the promotion and the gift, and he is seen stowing the paintings away later on.
On the other side, the vengeful ex-employee, Harmony Cobel, angrily drives to the Lumon office one night, very determined to take back her position as floor manager, as she believes that she deserves it. Harmony meets Helena as the latter is about to leave the building at the end of a workday and demands to be given back her old job. She talks about how close Mark is to completing Cold Harbor, the program that we still do not have any idea about, and states that she wants to oversee the completion of the program, for she was the one to have come up with it. Harmony tries to arm-twist her way back to being the floor manager initially, and asks for Milchick to be fired, but Helena is quick to remind her that she is not really as important to Lumon as she believes herself to be.
Ultimately, Helena offers to set all prior differences aside and give Harmony another chance at starting afresh, and she even seemingly sets up a meeting with the Board, but Harmony Cobel suddenly seems to realize that this is a trap. Perhaps she knows all too well that the board would not agree to a meeting so quickly, and she possibly feels that Helena will basically have her killed if she follows her into the building. Thus, Harmony leaves the place in her car, meaning that the animosity between her and the company still exists. But if her demands are met by Lumon and Milchick is fired, then the incident with the paintings will surely turn him against the company, meaning that Lumon is currently at a disadvantage with regards to its high-level employees.
Can Mark finally reintegrate his severed selves?
The most unexpected turn takes place near the end of Severance season 2 episode 3, while Outie Mark desperately tries to communicate with his Innie self. When Devon tells him that her husband, Ricken, is now also being approached by Lumon to write a customized version of his self-help book for the severed employees, he grows all the more determined to somehow carry in a message for his Innie. This is why he had been recording the amount of time required to reach the elevator from his car in the parking lot, but none of these calculations or techniques are of any help. As he tries out some more methods, the former Lumon surgeon-turned-vigilante, Dr. Asal Reghabi, suddenly comes to his house with a new proposition—to test her improved reintegration device.
Although Outie Mark is initially somewhat unconvinced, Reghabi’s mention of Gemma being Ms. Casey completely changes his mind. It was to cope with Gemma’s untimely death that Mark had agreed to get severed, and now that he has learned, through his Innie self, that his wife is still alive, he wants to naturally investigate the situation completely. Thus, he agrees to Reghabi’s procedure, which takes place in the basement of his house, and ultimately, at the end of the episode, Mark does succeed in reintegrating his severed selves, which is initially quite a jarring experience. This means that from the next episode onwards, we will be seeing Outie Mark take over the consciousness of Innie Mark, and the whole situation will surely be a treat to watch.
