Today is Monday, February 3, 2025. And this is worth the binge, the show where Aubree and Jeff talk about shows worth binging. Today we're going to be going into season two, episode three of Severance.

I think last time, what. You did a very good job at predicting some things in this episode we're about to talk about.

I don't remember what I said.

Well, I had talked about in the. I talked about in the intro, there was some things I thought would point to reintegration. And you were like, yeah, we're definitely gonna see that.

Go me, you know? No, I. I definitely thought we would. I did not think it would be so soon.

Yeah.

As we're about to find out that it's. It's gonna be a little sooner than when. What we first thought. I think most people thought. So it's going to be interesting to see how that. How that pans out.

Well, you were thinking it was going to be sooner originally because you thought he was already severed or reintegrated.

I thought it was possible. Yeah, I definitely thought it was possible.

Not really.

Okay. I am back well rested from about a week off. Almost a whole week off. And we're gonna go ahead and get into the episode.

Season two, Episode three, who is Alive? Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan search for answers. So we begin this episode off with Ko Belvig. She's sleeping in the car on the side of the highway. She's startled by a truck that passes by that wakes her up. And then she continues driving somewhere.

It doesn't seem like anyone working at Lumen is actually making money. She was in a management position and, like, couldn't do a hotel.

Yeah, it's very bizarre.

Very.

Maybe that was just a long stretch of road to get out of here. Like, it might be far off from other cities. I don't know.

Yeah. But when you go on the highway, usually there's still a hotel.

Mm. It is very weird. Next we see Mark. He's getting ready for work. He puts on a watch we haven't seen before yet. All the other watches he wears are analog clocks, and this one seems to have Is. Seems to be digital of some kind.

Yep.

He pulls up at Lumen, and when he gets out of the car, he starts a timer on this watch and takes off running into the building faster.

Than we've seen him move. Other than the running in the first episode of season two.

Yeah. Normally he's very slow walking and looks very sad. And I remember you not liking the music that he is running to or pulls up in the car to Lumen. You thought it was very bizarre music than we normally hear. When. When Mark gets inside, he puts his watch in his locker, but we still hear him counting until he loses consciousness in the elevator.

Yeah, we're not really sure what he's counting other than time, but, like, really what that purpose is just yet.

Yeah, I thought it was really weird. I didn't understand it at all. We cut to any. Mark is printing off missing posters of Ms. Casey. Dylan seems more focused on his work, though, than. Rather than helping find Ms. Casey. Mark and Helly go to the goat department, and Irving is supposed to go to O and D to pass out this flyer.

Yeah, with a pretty good drawing of Ms. Casey's face.

Honestly, do you think that Irving drew that?

Probably. Yeah, probably.

After Mark and Helly leave to go to the goat department, Irving tells Dylan he has created this painting of the testing floor elevator that I don't think they've told Mark and Helly about yet. He tries to get Dylan to go with him to find it, but Dylan suggests he should go by himself. As Dylan's trying to discreetly explain why he can't go, Ms. Wong appears and says she needs to take Dylan somewhere. And Irving shows her his hall pass and then leaves to go to O.

D, kind of smugly.

Yeah. Hall pass.

Yeah.

We see Milchick entering the office, and he finds Natalie and the board via his speaker waiting for him. Natalie presents some paintings to Milchick from the board that happen to be black versions of Kier, which was weird. Natalie says the board wants him to feel connected and see himself in Kier.

It kind of reminds me of how your dad likes black Santas.

He does. It's. It's a bad hobby to, I don't know, collect those. Natalie shares how she received the same gift from the board. And once the board concludes the call, Natalie looks like she. She might cry, but she's holding it together. And she fights through a smile and says, congratulations, Seth. I did not think that they really liked these gifts, but they obviously can't share that. They don't know if the board's listening or not, but I just. I think it was too much.

Yeah, I couldn't really tell. Obviously there was some discomfort or some kind of awkwardness there, but I. But I wasn't 100% sure of exactly what they were feeling. I don't know. I guess I'll have to wait a little bit on that to kind of see.

Yeah. Kobelvig reaches a sign for Salt necks, which was 238 miles away. She stops, looks at the oxygen tube in the car that has her mom's name on it, and then she makes a U turn.

So was she going to salt snake or, you know, I don't know.

I don't know either. I don't know if she was going there. Maybe there was. She was just trying to get out of town and get away. Like. I don't know. It's really weird. No context at all.

Not yet.

Not yet. Anyway, we go back to Mark and Heli and they reach the goat department and find a goat sized tunnel that they crawl through. It was.

I would wager that that's a human sized tunnel.

Okay.

Because they fit down it pretty easily.

Yeah, that's true. It was really weird how it looked very much like the Lumen hallways. It was just a lot smaller.

Watch out. Poop.

Watch out. Yeah, don't. Don't put your hand in it. This human or goat sized tunnel leads them to an indoor field. And we see some goats grazing and some bizarre looking people.

Yeah. Every one of them had a pretty impressively unique look.

Yes. I think one had like an animal skin on his head.

Yeah. Making the goats feel at home.

Yes, definitely.

I thought the goats were not there. I thought they were CGI'd and you were talking about the severance podcast and found out that they were there and.

They were eating shoelaces.

Yeah. I could tell there was cgi, like the outline of the goats themselves that I could really see it, but apparently it was just blanking out the. The giant tent they built around this outdoor area.

Yeah.

Where the goats were. And. Yeah, I mean, that was interesting because I didn't see the main characters interact with them at all. So I thought maybe that was kind of blended in afterwards, but apparently not. It was just a massive cell. A set built outside.

Yeah. On a golf course. A woman walks up to them with some pruning shears and she looks like she's about to, you know, fight them, but she says to them, are you here to kill me?

Which she looks like she could take them both.

Yeah. I didn't understand that. She calls the place Mammalia's Nurturable.

That's a mouthful.

Yeah, it is. I don't even think I was saying or writing it correctly, but I made that up as I went along. We cut back to Irving, where he finds Felicia in O. D. And she gives him a big hug. How sweet.

I kind of want to hug from her.

She looks very like grandmother.

Grandmothery. Yeah.

Yeah. Next, we see Mark and Helly show the lady their drawing of Ms. Casey back in the goat field. When they press her on, knowing her, she rings a bell, and all the other employees gather around them.

It was pretty menacing.

Yeah. Very scary. They, like, encircle them and.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you don't know what the goats are about to do?

No. Are they about to fight on command, too?

Maybe. I mean, would you be surprised if a Lumen goat had some offensive capabilities?

No, I would not.

Are the goats severed?

That's a good. Good question. We see Ms. Wong bring Dylan to the security office, or what used to be the security office, which has been now changed into a visitation center because of Dylan's good behavior. He gets. He has earned 18 minutes with his Audi's wife, Gretchen.

And at this point, we're still not sure if that's actually his wife, because we haven't seen her yet.

Mm.

But they have an awkward conversation, and they. You know, after a couple minutes, seems like they kind of hit it off.

Yeah. It's. You know, Lumen's always playing mind games with these innies, and so, you know, I'm just trying to figure out what type of mind game this one is.

Yeah. I'm still not sure we know that answer yet.

We go to Irving, and he lets Felicia see his little sketchbook, which we haven't seen yet until now. And it has a lot of drawings of Bert in it.

A lot.

A lot. Like, creepy dude.

You touched his hand, like, once.

Yeah. She stops when she sees a picture of the testing floor and says, how do you know about the exports Hall?

Different names for different places, I guess.

Yeah. It's crazy. Felicia explains how she. They used to send a lot of shipments there, and they used to go themselves, but now someone comes and picks them up.

Putting those 3D printers to use.

Yeah. Irving asks if she remembers where it is, and we don't see her answer.

She probably does.

She probably. We cut back to Mark and Helly in the mammalias. Nurturable, surrounded by those employees. Helly shows them the picture of Ms. Casey, and Mark finally convinces them to talk. I think he. He's a good spokesperson for them.

Yeah. Appealing to their care for Ms. Casey, because it does seem like the people there did care about her.

Yeah. They all say how nice she was and that all they know is that she retired. And before they leave, they asked to see their bellies.

It's because the rumors that MDR had pouches.

Yeah. These rumors are insane.

All these fights that are going on between departments and people having extra physical pouches on their body. I mean, and we don't even know.

If this is the only, you know, three departments down there.

It's probably not.

Insane. Ms. Wong returns to let Dylan know his 18 minutes are up. And Dylan and his Audi's wife hug. And she says, I love you. And Dylan does not reply.

Yeah, he's kind of weirded out.

Yeah, he was like, girl, I just met you, you need to calm down. Next we cut to Dylan's Audi's house. And I kind of thought Gretchen was an actor or something, but it's actually her. She's getting ready for work where while Dylan sits on the couch and watches TV with the kids, he asked her about how the meeting went with his innie. And she's very vague about it. She's like, yeah, it was good.

All right.

Yeah, it was fine. I kind of wanted more, but, you know, it's fine. Then the weirdest scene of them all. Natalie is at Rickon and Devin's house. She's reading his book the Uur. And Natalie wants Rickon to make a version of the book for the Enies at Lumen.

Yeah, make some propaganda. Don't do it.

Don't. Yeah, don't do it. But Rickon, you know, he's, he's feeling himself right now. He's like, oh, they want, they want me.

He wants to go do a book reading down there probably.

Yeah. Devin leaves and meets Mark and they're working on a project, writing the words who is alive? On a light. I think it's a UV light. Is that right?

I don't know. I don't think so.

I don't know. Some fancy light.

It, it did look fancy.

They need Mark to be able to see the after image for 2 minutes and 18 seconds so his any can read the message.

Yeah, because he was counting earlier.

Yeah, so he, he counted those 2 minutes and 18 seconds to when he loses consciousness in the elevator.

And that of course being where we get the title of today's episode, who is Alive? Because he's trying to ask himself, is any. Who was he talking about when he was yelling she's alive to his sister? Yeah, I think he already knows. I think he knows.

I think so too.

Because if he really believed it was the baby or, you know, believed it was something else, I don't think he'd be still hunting the truth down.

Yeah, he seemed like he didn't want to know at first, but I think he really did. Inside.

Yeah.

We see Milchick finishing up some Work on his computer as he's getting ready to leave. He puts the Black Cure paintings in the back room on a high shelf.

Be gone.

Be gone. Get out of here. This is too weird.

Yeah.

Mark drives out to the middle of nowhere. We don't know where he is. He's by some shed. I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know if he knows where he is. He was just driving.

Yeah. He uses this time to. He uses this time in the middle of nowhere to practice the. Keeping the after image from the light.

In a pretty awkward looking little set up. Putting the blanket over his head.

And.

You don't want somebody to like, pop up on you while you're shining a light in your eyes with a blanket over your head in your driver's seat.

Yeah, that's.

But that is exactly what happens when Rigabe is there as he pulls the blanket up. Where did she come from? How did she know he was there? He didn't know where he was at. How did she know where he was at?

I have no idea.

Is she like tracking him with the. The chip?

Maybe.

I mean, she seems pretty important to deal with these chips.

You know, they might be trackers too. You never know.

I'd be. Honestly, I'd be shocked if they didn't have that capability. Now. Whether or not she can use it, I don't know. But I bet. I bet Lumen can.

Was this a jump scare for you?

Yes, but not because of her. Because of you responding to her.

O.

Yes.

We go back to Lumen and Cobelvik shows up. As Helena is leaving for the night. She tries to get her job back and get Milchick fired because she wants him gone. Helena tells her that they can go talk to the board about it, but when they. Helena tries to go inside. Kobelvig doesn't follow.

Yeah, she looks spooked. She sees something she doesn't like. I don't know if it's the. The driver or she saw someone behind heli or she just got a vibe, you know, something happening, something going down didn't feel right. So she. Kenny Rogers did. She knew when to hold them and when to fold them and she backed out.

She gets in her car and drives away.

Yeah, her piece of crap car from the apparently super small salary that she made.

I don't know. All the cars are very out of date. It feels like. I don't think anybody has a nice fancy car and cure.

She should.

She should. But nobody does. Even Helena's car didn't look that fancy. She Just had a driver.

Yeah, I guess. I guess so. When I talked about Rigabi earlier and how she met up with Mark, she starts talking to Mark, and he's, of course, asking about Gemma, like he was asking Cobell, and she's like, is Gemma alive? And she. It's like, last time I saw her. Which she didn't actually say when that was. Yeah, that would have been my very next question. Last time I saw her. When was that? Yeah, you know, like, I was like, want, like, yet wanting to yell it along for him, but he didn't ask, but took that as to as, hey, she's. She's alive now. And he was instantly in. Let's do this. Let's reintegrate. Doesn't matter the consequences. And it doesn't. If you got a chance to win your wife back, you're gonna do it. Your dead wife, you're gonna. Gonna try to get her back. You take the steps.

Yeah.

And we get a cool couple minutes there as she's calibrating the machines to hit Mark's brain ways. You see the two lines on the oscilloscope. They're trying to line those up and combine them or get them to at least match. And, you know, he. You can see he's already having trouble because he's having. He couldn't remember his mom's name or eye color. What was it? Eye color. And then we get a cool shot of him waking up on the table like he did his first time at Looming, which I kind of hope we get a little bit of a flashbacky kind of episode for this next one.

Yeah, the. That shot on the table. I love how his clothes. It's going in and out from any Mark's dress to, like, his dress. And it kind of reminded me the intro of season one and.

And what Petey was going through, too.

Yeah.

Especially when he was in Mark's basement bathroom. You know, he was kind of there and not there. And I think Mark's gonna have a similar experience. I feel like it won't be quite as chaotic as it was for Petey, hopefully. I mean, she says Regatti said that she's done work. You know, they've got it more perfected the process, and he should be following the. The rules that apparently Petey wasn't that. Some people think maybe it was just that he wasn't going back to work to. To get that reintegration, to see both sides and let the halves meet. But it's. It'll be interesting to see how much he lets that Harm him by giving away too much? By letting Lumen find out that he's even doing this?

Yeah, she says that she's better at it now. How did. How do you think she became better at reintegration?

Yeah, that's a really good question.

Is there someone else that's reintegrated?

That's a really good question. Yeah, there must be someone in between him and Petey. At least one.

Mm.

I mean, the only one I can think is Irving because of how much we. We saw the bleeding through for him.

Yeah.

And then him making that phone call to someone saying that his. Any got the message.

Interesting.

So maybe that was Rigabe.

Yeah, maybe.

And then you got two people on the. On the team here.

Yeah, that would be. That'd be cool.

Raging against the machine.

Yeah. So we'll have to figure that out. So I have some observations about episode three. So when Natalie comes to Milchick's office and she's talking to him and presenting these paintings, I wrote down a quote that I thought was interesting. She said, the board is jubilant of your ascent. She says, the board is jubilant of your ascent. It wants you to feel appreciated. Why would she say it instead of they want you to feel appreciated?

It was weird wording. It could be simple as just. It is. The board is one singular entity, but it could mean something else. You know, Is this. Is it a computer? Is a computer with the brain waves of a previous Egan? Or is it something different? Is it Mega Goat, where four goats are formed together into one entirely abnormal goat?

That would be something, but also, like.

Not out of the realm of, you know. Yeah, they're not ready yet. The guy said the goats aren't ready to, you know, what are they not ready for?

Yeah, we still don't know that. Also, in Mamalia's nurturable. Again, don't know if I'm saying that right, but the badges for those severed employees are lime green, which we. I thought we'd have a department with red badges because of the Lumen colors. Red, green, and blue.

I feel like we definitely will. It might be on the bottom floor.

Maybe, but I just thought it was weird they were lime green instead of a totally different color.

Yeah, it could be a lime green. I know you pointed that out, and I don't disagree that it looked that way, but it was also shot a little differently. So I'm wondering if it's possible, the lighting. Although they're pretty serious about their color grading on this.

Yeah.

So I don't know. I I could see that being that kind of going either way.

And then I feel like we've had a couple days, you know, since Mark has come back. He's come back several times into Lumen. And Milkjack comes in the office and finds Mark's balloons that have deflated in the hallway that apparently no one has picked up since he got mad and let him float to the ceiling and left him in the hallway. I just.

There's so little supervision. I mean, you got Melchick and you got Ms. Wong now in his old job, but it doesn't feel like anyone filled in Grainer's old job.

No.

And it doesn't feel like there's anyone else doing anything. They're, like, watching over them. So if Milchick wasn't there, Ms. Wong doesn't feel like she can do much.

Yeah.

So I. You know, it kind of feels like they can get away with whatever they want anyway.

Yeah. I don't. I don't know. We don't even know if we have a new security office or anything like that. I don't know. It's. We have a lot of unanswered questions, but those balloons just still be in the hallway was weird to me.

I agree. I agree.

And then last, we have Dylan's best quote of the episode. Yeah, I have a couple written down. So when Dylan is in the visitation center with his Audi's wife, he looks at her and says, nice sack.

Yeah. And just the. It's just like the clear bag that you'd bring until, like a sporting event.

And then he also says in that encounter, he dumb.

He dumb.

He dumb.

Talking about really himself.

Yeah, his Audi. Then when he's walking to the visitation center with Ms. Wong, he says, is it mean to keep asking why you're a child? Like, we're all wondering it. But I'm glad he said it. Yeah.

I think the best one is still he dumb.

He dumb. Yeah, me too. Okay, so that's the best one of the episode for sure.

I agree. I agree. Good choice.

Thank you guys so much for listening to another episode of Worth the Binge with our Severance series. If you're wanting to call in and give us questions or have comments or your own theories about severance, please call in or text us at 415-podline. We'd love to hear from you.

Absolutely.

All right, see you later.

Bye.