Rewind Review: Severance, "What's For Dinner?" | Season 1, Episode 8

In the lead up to the second season premiere of Apple TV+’s Severance, I’m sending subscribers my reviews of the first season, which were the first I wrote for the newsletter.

Review: Severance, "What's For Dinner?" | Season 1, Episode 8

A few weeks ago, I complained about “Hide and Seek” as a half-finished episode of television: cliffhangers have an obvious narrative value, but they depend on the feeling that there was some type of resolution or revelation in the episode that preceded it, and that was absent in that case.

Episodic MediumMyles McNutt

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A few weeks ago, I complained about “Hide and Seek” as a half-finished episode of television: cliffhangers have an obvious narrative value, but they depend on the feeling that there was some type of resolution or revelation in the episode that preceded it, and that was absent in that case.

“What’s For Dinner?” is inherently flirting with the same criticism, built as it is around the anticipation of a moment that you can sense from the word go—and the episode’s runtime—will be put off until next week’s finale.1 But whereas “Hide and Seek” was embedded in the season’s rising action, Severance has clearly signaled that we have entered the climax of this chapter of the story, and with that comes a heightened energy to a situation that we know will not be resolved before the cut to black.

Not shockingly, that cut to black comes just as Dylan manages to stretch his arms far enough to flip the switches and activate the Overtime Contingency, waking up his coworkers in the world above. Having set up this “heist” last week, Severance skips over the planning stages, dropping us directly into the day of reckoning in some ways we’ve anticipated, and other ways we haven’t.

The choice to linger in the moments as Helly scrambles to refine the last bits of data to meet MDR’s quarterly quota heightens the tension for all involved, with Mark hovering over her desk and Irving and Dylan stressing in the break room—the good one, not the bad one—about whether they should be doing more to help her. But we also see Harmony and Milchick hovering, but over whether they will meet their quota at all, reminding us that while our heroes are stressed over setting a plan to overthrow Lumon, Lumon is stressed over…whatever Macrodata Refinement is.

Helly’s success gives us the 16-bit glory of the Kier animation sequence that comes with 100% completion, and it sets everything into motion: Mark will give Dylan the Waffle Party, everyone else will go back to their outside lives, and Dylan will use Graner’s key card to activate the Overtime Contingency. None of this gets us any closer to answers about what data they’re refining, or why there are goats, or really anything else about Lumon’s operations. To return to my discussion of the show’s similarity to Lost, this isn’t the opening of the hatch: even the truly alarming bacchanalia performance that Dylan earns as part of his Waffle Party is mostly just one more mystery to add onto the pile.

Where things start to shift within Lumon is with the pieces of this puzzle the MDR team had no control over. The first is Ms. Casey’s “retirement,” with Mark receiving one last wellness session before whatever or whoever Gemma currently is departs the severed floor. We’re still short on answers, but the added details—the idea she has only ever been “awake” for 107 hours total, the ominous hallway to the “Testing Floor,” and the elevator that goes down instead of up—are unnerving, and reinforce that nothing we learn about Lumon is going to make any of this better for our heroes.

The second is Harmony Cobel’s firing. She may be the truest believer of all, but Harmony’s actions are clearly in opposition to the Board, and once they learn of Helly’s suicide attempt and the fraternizing with Devon and Ricken, she’s immediately suspended and removed from her position. Initially, it seems like this might disrupt Devon’s plan from the inside, with Milchick—who Cobel expects shared the images with the Board, though we never get confirmation—frazzled by the circumstances. But in the end, Cobel ends up being a wild card on the outside, with Mark showing up with a last-minute invite to Devon and Ricken’s dinner party. As a result, there’s a very good chance that Mark is going to wake up in his sister’s home to discover the woman he knows as his boss standing in front of him.

It’s all an effective setup that alone would have made this a thrilling anti-climax, forcing us to wait a week to see how Mark’s situation plays out. However, after largely resting the relationship between the Outside and Inside on Mark’s shoulders for the entire season, “What’s For Dinner?” consciously opens by giving us our first look at Outside Irving, and ends with our first glimpse of Outside Helly since we saw her intake experience back in the second episode. And although neither gives us answers, these glimpses are an important part of why this anti-climax still resonates as a complete experience, as we have enough to chew over and react to between episodes to sustain the stall in momentum.

When they’re preparing to leave for the day, the message is clear: when you wake up, find someone that seems safe, and tell them everything. We’re conditioned to read this primarily through Mark, and indeed the show builds this out by sending him to his sister’s (safe!) but alongside Harmony (danger?). But when we find Outside Irving, he’s alone with his dog, in what seems like a perfectly normal walk…until he returns to his apartment, pulls out a piece of what looks like plywood, and begins painting the elevator to the Testing Floor in a room filled with such paintings on every imaginable type of canvas.

The globs of black paint are an answer to the question of the black goop that Irving has seen when he “dozes,” although how this specifically ties into the Testing Floor is an open question. The name implies this is a space for some form of experimentation, and we have now seen two products of this process: a woman who is supposed to be dead whose “Innie” is seemingly alive, and a man whose “Outie” is hyper-fixated on the space, as though he has no other forms of consciousness to speak of. Was Gemma a test of posthumous severance to save a braindead individual? Is Irving’s “outie” some type of collateral damage of their experiments, left to live a half-developed life once the after effects of severance played out?

All of this adds additional layers to Irving’s forthcoming “wake up” because he is, realistically, not going to find someone he trusts: he’s only going to find a dog and a lot of paintings, all of which will raise more questions than answers. But although I was probably most interested in the show shedding light on Irving’s outer life—Is he queer? Is he in a relationship?—heading into this episode, it ends up being Helly’s brief glimpse of normalcy that’s most disruptive to the story being told thus far.

We’ve seen more of Helly’s outie. The first time it was in the severance process itself, where she was understandably somewhat nervous or at least on-edge. The second time was in her video to her inside self refusing her resignation, a cruel statement but one that we naturally assume was either coerced or heavily manipulated by Lumon in order to serve their goals. I never read Outside Helly as a bad person for what she said there; I just presumed she had a very good reason to be going through severance, and was told that the best course of action was to come down harshly on her Inside self.

And yet in this all-too brief glimpse of Helly right before Dylan flips the switch on the Overtime Contingency, we learn that she isn’t just operating under Lumon’s guidance: she is Lumon, dressed to the nines at the Eagan Family Gala foreshadowed in last week’s episode, and which they were setting up for as Mark was leaving work earlier. Suddenly, Helly’s whole deal folds out into a complex scheme: why was she severed instead of, like Milchick or Cobel, simply taking on a supervisory role? And whereas Mark waking up with Harmony is a wild card—will she help him in order to burn Lumon down, or will she use this as leverage to return to her job?—there’s no question that Helly is about to wake up in the lion’s den.

It’s a great reveal because, unlike even last week’s “big twist” of Gemma and Ms. Casey being one and the same, it immediately escalates our expectations. We knew about the Overtime Contingency. We’ve been fully embedded within Mark’s outside life enough to build a set of expectations on why it’s significant, and the work done on the inside has created a clear narrative arc for the MDR team leading to this point. But with those few seconds of Helly in formal wear adds an entirely new layer, which we’re forced to process as Dylan flips the switch and we go to black. It’s a moment that makes me regretful that—although Apple’s weekly schedule allows us to have these conversations on the same page—the lack of a linear airing means we won’t have the shared experience of witnessing moments like this at the same time.

Stray observations

• I wondered for a long time if Dylan’s mystery box—his gift for “winning” the quarter—was turning into a Se7en situation, but then it was just the very sweet reveal of the Photo Cube of their group picture, a token by which to remember the only people he truly knows, and the people he might never see again. Touching moment, even if I was imagining some sort of MacGuffin that would play a role in the heist.
• I legitimately forgot about the Mark and Helly kiss, to be honest, so I’m not really sure how I feel about it—it’s a little too cliche? But I get that it would also sort of be inevitable given how little socialization they have.
• After slogging through 60+ minute episodes of Bridgerton over the weekend, I have to say that it was refreshing to see this move at such a quick clip, and I really had to show some restraint not to go onto the finale with it sitting there on the screener site. My guess is that most critics with screener access would have just kept going, but I’m committed to being on the same page as y’all at least until we have a chance to talk about this a bit.
• We get a closer look at Harmony’s Lumon shrine as she’s destroying it, which really has an “arts and crafts” vibe with all the different sections on her walls.
• According to the soundtrack—which has been on Spotify and I presume other streaming services since the show debuted—the Bacchanalia performance where Dylan puts on a mask of Kier and witnesses the barely dressed dancers is meant to embody the “four tempers.” I continue to have many questions, but some things about Lumon are definitely not really “answerable” in a traditional sense.
• While he doesn’t confirm it, it does seem probable that Milchick was the only one with the information necessary to get Cobel fired, but what was his motivation? Simply concern for the company and her reckless behavior? But also, if Helly is involved with Lumon on a corporate level on the outside as well, how did word of what happened to her not extend beyond Helly herself? There’s lots more to unpack there, but in the meantime my sense is Milchick simply values the company above all else, and felt Cobel was becoming a liability.
• I wonder if “Ace of Spades” is Irving’s Innie Retirement Song. (I have to admit, I only think of Triple H when I think about Motorhead).
• So the eight hours Ms. Casey spent overseeing Helly was the longest she was ever awake: presumably, she was always woken up simply to complete the Wellness Sessions, which makes me wonder how many of those there have been, and how long she has been in the rotation. (To do any kind of math we’d have to know how many employees are on the severed floor, a fact we simply have no access to).
• Was anyone else super stressed out by how Dylan’s syrup pour only got to like half the waffle holes, and he didn’t put any syrup down the edges to get to the waffles lower in the stack, or for dipping? Also, were they cold? How long had they been sitting there?
• The waffles and the delivered eggs go back to the idea of food being particularly weird in this world, and the way the first time we really see the Innies eat—like, enjoying and completing meals—is after the end of the quarter through this reward-based system.
• “I knew you could do it, Helly R”—I wish my job gave me 16-bit renderings of a Christ figure flying off the top of a mountain after expressing his belief in my abilities.
• “Tonight’s just the first step”—I’m fully prepared that the finale is just going to be a jumping off point for a second season, but I still think they’ve done a nice job of making this first step seem really momentous, and I really do deserve a medal for not having already watched the finale. Please clap.