Milkshake. I don't know why this was so funny to me, but every time they said Milkshake, I cracked up. Especially when Mr. Milkshake is reading the note and calling himself Milkshake. Do you think I'm a shambolic rube? Like shambolic rube milkshake is such a fucking great name. Welcome to Waffle Potty, the officially unofficial podcast for Severance on Apple TV Plus. I'm Jim. I'm Aaron. And we're back. This is it, man. We're in it. Season two, episode one.
Hello, Ms. Kobol. Aaron, I can't tell you how happy I am to be back to Severance. We don't have a ton of TV on right now. We just finished up Silo, so I can give this kind of my full attention. And I think it's going to reward it based on what I saw here. I am so incredibly happy with the way this thing came back. I was kind of like buckled in for we're going to have a few episodes of Mark with his B team and.
you know we're gonna have to get back to the old drew and and you know some of that crazy stuff in the trailer like the claymation stuff like you know like where's that gonna fit in and i was honestly impressed by how much crazy shit
from the trailer is just from this episode. I'm amazed at how they got the old gang back together, but with lots of twists. And I also am fairly certain that we cannot trust anything that we heard or saw today from this episode as far as lumen in terms of timeline in terms of who begged to come back from where in terms of Just how free they were to go. And then, of course, at the very end of the episode, they got... We got some red meat to the...
Macrodats are refining people theory people. Okay. Boy, it sure seems to hint towards this having something to do with Gemma and perhaps... The build 25 of Gemma. Yeah. Yeah.
uh just just lots of stuff and uh you know we'll piece through like i think there are evidences and tells you know that that some of this stuff is bullshit um but a lot of it's like even though i can tell it's bullshit bullshit the wet end what do they begin what are they what are they trying to do yeah that's been the constant question with the show where they pull into this Miss Huang
She's not severed. Like, there's restrictions on how much you can work at an employee that's under 15 in the United States. I don't know if that applies to peer, PE or not, but, like, what the fuck are they trying to pull here? huge ass head game is what it is why have children supervising adults I don't know there are so many things here that just feel off that
Yeah, of course. Of course. This is Lumen's game, right? You can't believe anything they're telling you. They're gaslighting. They're lying. They're doing all kinds of things. They're just doing the things they think they need to do in order to get people to work. On whatever it is they're working on. Now, let me ask you this, because you said you can't trust anything that you hear say. I know that you and I have been shared in annoyance sometimes in puzzle box shows.
have too many mechanisms for you, them to just retcon wholesale things that you've seen and heard with your own eyes and ears. Are you feeling any frustration? on that level with this season of lumen uh or severance and why or why not not yet um i could see it potentially becoming a problem in the future but not yet um
And mostly it's because they've established some rules and they're playing by them. Like I've never trusted Lumen. I expect Lumen to lie. I expect them to hide information and not give you the whole story. So something about the way that they set that company up from the very beginning just works for me. And I haven't seen them do like huge rug pulls.
where what you thought you knew suddenly isn't the way you thought it was because of this thing you couldn't possibly have known before. I just see them playing with the premise in interesting ways. And that to me really works. Especially since so much of it is in plain sight. I think there's flashing warning signs pointing to many things Milchick is doing, being like, this is bullshit, this is bullshit, this is bullshit. And the Central, I'm actually kind of surprised.
that how they're playing what seems to be the central twist, which is you coming along with me on this? Helly is actually Helena and she's playing a part. 100%. I don't know why I couldn't actually pinpoint the exact piece of acting or information that I got that told me almost instantly, this is not our heli. This is Helena. See, I... the first time through almost from the first scene almost where she busts out of the elevator yeah i'm like that that doesn't feel like heli
On subsequent watches, I clocked it almost from the beginning. But on my first time through, my first hint was when she says, I saw the inside of a boring ass apartment. I'm like. what no so i love that because there's reason for her to want to hide this from the rest of the group regardless of whether this is helena or heli right because heli doesn't want to be known as
The enemy within her group of friends. And if she's Helena Egan, that could be. Yeah, that could be. She could be ostracized from her group of friends here. So there's potential reason for to do that, but definitely I'm on board with your train of thought.
And there's like, yeah, I mean, if that would feel anticlimactic, if that's the case, she's just afraid of sticking it because I yeah, we can talk about that when we get there. But there's other possibilities. You know, there's a lot of administrative functions of the severed.
program. We don't know. They could have reinstanced a version of Heli because like, you know, we know that Helena is chipped. So how I mean, can they I guess they can. Yeah, obviously, they can just turn that shit on and off at the elevators. Right. Yeah, like just send Helena down the elevator and don't turn the severance chip on. But if that's the case, then that that's a whole other mechanism for.
you know, them to like fuck around and jailbreak, you know, if there's a way to turn off the severing process in the elevator. Yeah, yeah. Or if it's not necessarily a proximity thing. But it also makes a lot of sense of why they're like, oh, we don't need cameras and microphones and all that because we've got a man, a wool man on the inside. Yep.
That's my theory. She's a spy. I think there is some truth in some of the things that Milchick is saying. Yes. But it's couched in Lumenspeak and half-truths and pure gaslighting at points. And I think part of that is maybe there are no security cameras or microphones and that would serve to put them at ease around this spy who's going to be their camera and microphone inside the group. So.
Right. They might not need them. Yeah, I'm 100% with you. I think there are other things to point to Heli being a spy here, or being Helena, at least. The way she fumbles for her computer power switch. i'm like you don't hmm you really have to fumble around for that that doesn't feel right to me somebody who's been doing this for weeks or months would know where their power switch is by feel And the visceral anger she responded with, the innies and allies are not anything alike.
i thought was i mean it kind of makes sense for heli to have that viewpoint too but like especially knowing Like I said, I'm with you. Like, there's a lot of subtle acting at first blush to seem like that's such an outsized reaction to this. And then like the second half of the statement, she's like, you know, and fuck him, fuck him anyway. We don't owe them anything. That sounded like helly. But the first part.
sounded more like a rich, wealthy, privileged person being like, are you comparing me to a peasant? To a severed person? Yeah. And the other thing is like this hasn't like one of the things I was worried about is a lot of shows that start off as darkly comic like Breaking Bad, for example. As the narrative progresses, it becomes less funny, less goofy, less kind of this seems to like that sense of humor is fully intact in this first episode. Like I love.
Dylan having big belt beef with Melchick. I love how his whole energy. Yeah, milkshake. Milkshake cracked me up. His whole energy is different because his last memory is being tackled to the floor by Milchick. Uh-huh. Um, everybody else is different stages of like fucked up and, and, and, uh, golly, golly, uh, golly whopped by the revelations they had or the subterfuge to play in, but he's just.
you know, is one of us more famous than the other? And yeah, it's Dylan through and through, you know, it's like Milchak could come here anytime. Good. I got to pay him back for the belt. Like it makes me think that Milchak's going to get his belt cut sometime this season. Oh yeah. I would think so. Yeah. Your shoulder might heal, but that belt, that Italian leather belt I'm going to cut off you, that's forever. Mm-hmm.
Time to go to the break room for mandatory promotional material to opt out of future break room sessions. Check the relevant portions of the employee handbook at support.baldmove.com. Break time over. Back to Severance. All right. Well, maybe we should get into the recap. I could talk forever about the generality, but let's get into specifics. All right, we start season two, episode one. Hello, Ms. Coble, by being treated to an extra traumatic severed elevator descent.
mark coming out of it like a desperate man he's running pell-mell for wellness which is like gone man before he arrives at mdr to a weirdly different macrodat team Mm hmm. There's also the note that we talked about last episode in the preview, because we saw this in a trailer. There's some man standing in the hallway behind him. I looked at the credits of this episode.
It credited as Adam Jepsen. I don't know really who that is. Seems like a relatively new actor. Huh? So I don't know. It seems like what was he credited as the man in the hallway in the hallway? Yeah. Okay. Well, you were more on it than me because I completely forgot to look into that. But I mean, this thing is, is this is fantastic camera work. It's a long pseudo one or.
You know, where you're just following Mark and the way they do that camera thing where the camera kind of equally and opposes the the angle of his head as he's looking. It gives it just like really dynamic swoopy thing. Got Adam Scott.
Tom Cruise running down these nondescript light hallways. I assume on a treadmill or something, right? And they're just CGing all this behind him. I don't think it would be... crazy that they built all those hallways and they're like super module module they can just kind of move around and connect them in different places like a lot of hallways is that is that cheaper than than cg and everything i kind of feel like it would
Plus, you got to think that the actors would prefer it. But I just thought the camera stuff was just beautiful. Maybe for this sequence they did. It is a different style than we've seen from Severance, I think. They kind of do, you know, that I forget the term for it. But when you push the camera in and zoom the camera out at the same time, they've done that before many times in the elevator. Pulling focus. No, but they use that.
here quite a bit and then they also use some different techniques like you said the head tracking stuff is is new and it's interesting i don't know i'm kind of open to severance expanding their style but i guess Slowly. I don't want them to just go buck wild Breaking Bad style, right? I don't need a washing machine cam or something going around. But maybe. Maybe they get there. What do you think about wellness being gone and the way it was gone?
I. I. Because because here's the thing, it looks conspicuously gone. Like if you want to make wellness disappear and you've had five months to do it. that door should be dry walled over. There shouldn't be any vestiges of it to say, cause you could see wellness. The letters are kind of peeled off. You can still see the sticky stuff. And then when you go into the room,
They have removed the interior doors and dry walled it, but they left like all the chair railing up and the the fancy green couches, but all the paintings and there. But it's like conspicuously gone. It's not gone in like the way it's, you know, well, wellness has always been gone. It's I thought that was interesting. It's like designed to. Fuck with Mark.
Does that betray... So it could either be by design or it could be haste. Does that betray the idea that five months is a lie? That it's literally the next day? I think the Hello Miss Kobol is the... the number one tell that that's a lie. There's no fucking way it takes five months. Also, he's unpacking, I mean... yeah he's moving into his office it took him five months to unpack his desk stuff no
Yeah. And they packed Miss Casey away like, you know, three episodes to go last season. So I think there's a lot of tells that they're this is this is bullshit. And. you know this this is one of the bigger yeah this is one of the ones the fact that like they just haven't some of this is like is it intentionally sloppy is it telling or is it just because they're scrambling to try to fix this pr disaster that they've caused yeah
Good question. I don't know what the investors think. I really want to know what happened in that room after Heli told him about the torture. In the hell that it is. How long will we have to wait? Because, you know, they put that in her mind. Like, that's why we're fading in from black to get Mark's perspective. You hear all the, you know, Helly saying it's hell down there and we're being tortured and you hear.
Bert slamming on the door. Not Bert, Irv slamming on the door and screaming for Bert. Yep. Yeah. The team's different. You know, there's Mark W. He's been in a lot of things. I know that he was like the oceanographer from Moonrise Kingdom, the Wes Anderson. He plays a lot of these kind of intellectual. nabish little roles um and he's like very you know there's again this is like very
Through the looking glass, Mark's MDR team, because he's broadly playing Irv. Yeah. And Gwendolyn's broadly playing Helly. And then, you know, you got the Italian. Dylan. Yeah, Dylan was an interesting choice because I think the other two you can squint and vaguely see physically what they're going for. Dylan's stand in here is just completely the opposite of him.
I'm sure that's the joke. You know, obviously we haven't, I haven't time to see, and they didn't, they didn't translate any of this stuff. Like when he speaks Italian, it says speaking Italian. I know from the fact that we've had those eight minutes out for before, that what he says here is, why is this guy standing so funny? Which is...
It's funny because he is the least like Dylan, you know, again, the others, like you said, you squint and you can kind of see it in the attitude. But he's got the Dylan. That's exactly what Dylan said when Mark's manner is a boss for the first time. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And he. he does a lot of, you know, the weird Dylan isms, but physically he looks nothing like him. Yeah. Um, middle check sweeps in.
before Mark gets a chance to catch his breath with a bouquet of balloons in lumen blue with Mark's face emblazoned on them and invites him down to his office where he explains the five months of painful transition the company has been through. Yeah. There's some weird stuff going on in the office that I'm not quite sure what to make of. There's a crate. Like a big crate.
that's open like you could pull a dishwasher out of this crate or something I can't see anything in that room that would require a crate that big other than a computer but there's no way they replaced his computer because Ms. Coble's screensaver is still on there her welcome screen Who knows? Because he's got a secret hallway in that room. Did Kobel have that secret hallway?
That's true. Some of this could be like construction. Did they ship Miss Huang here in a crate and they just uncrated her? Maybe. She's ready to go. And this is standard like Lumen passive aggressive double speak. Like we are the ones that hurt you, but it really hurt us. You know, it's got big. Your dad say, I'm going to give you something to cry about or. After they discipline you, it hurts me worse than it hurts you. Like, well.
I don't know. I can't hook us up to nerve conductors, but I think my red swollen ass is a little bit more painful than whatever emotional pain you're going through. I could be wrong, but the whole, like, you know, it's just very much like Coble throwing an, you know, something at Mark and being like, look what you made me do. You know, you've, you've, you've made me lesser, but with a little bit.
of a kinder thing through it but you can also see like you know he's milchek is trying to be this kinder gentler guy yeah but every once in a while the mass drops and his eyes become unkind oh yeah they're mostly unkind i would say uh and that's the beauty of it and and the beauty of the show with lumen is i'm not like part of me wants to say everything he's saying is bullshit
Right. And I think most of it is. But I could also see him saying things like, you know, the cameras and microphones are gone. Well, because we have this spy in your midst or. we're doing some reforms here, not because there's pressure from the outside, not because you're the heroes of Lumen or whatever on the outside, but because we think that's the thing we need to do to manipulate you further.
We've tried this one road. We're switching gears. We're giving you, you know, family visitation wings or at least the promise of one. We're giving you better snacks and better perks because we think that that's the next phase of your motivation. Yeah. Not because you forced our hand. Let me go through a few of the claims here and you tell me what's bullshit or not. It's been five months. Bullshit.
yeah pretty certain it's bullshit and we'll outline the reasons why um the fact that the lumen for the face of severance reform are internationally famous bullshit
Why? I believe we talked about this in the last episode. You brought up the fact that this photo... in this newspaper is a photoshopped version of like a jfk procession or something yeah some kind of central american south american presidential visit that they photoshopped okay hell he's day one group photo into right right it's a cure newspaper it's heavily redacted milchek gives him like a half second to see just you know and take in the headline and it's gone uh-huh
I did like Milchick referring to himself as an unsevered man. It sounds like a person talking about the circumcision state of their penis. Oh, okay. Yeah. As an, as an uncut man myself, like I can't, I can't empathize with the non turtleneck owning men of us, but, um, okay. Cobal erotic fixation. thruple with any and outie mark that's almost plausible plausible yeah from season one there was some stuff going on there but i don't know if it was that serious
No, I at the most, I think that like if you if I go through my wildest theory that Mrs. Coble is some kind of reincarnated, you know, spun. What is it? Swab girl. She's Keir's reincarnated wife that she sees Mark as a vessel. for okay here spirit i can see that but like just being erotically fixated on mark and wanting to have a throuple with his audi nah nah
The fact that he tried to get the team back for weeks and none agreed. No obvious bullshit. It's not even it's not doesn't even, you know, withstand contact with the the. this episode, you know, cause obviously it's, they, they get them, they get them back. Mark begged to get back right away. Nope. Bullshit. Yeah. Gotta be bullshit. So pretty much everything's bullshit except for.
kobold because she's weird enough that we'd buy sexual deviancy from her and maybe the lumen is at least uh image wise for these in ease is changing their tune But I think it's for their own purposes, not because they were forced to. I got to say, though, there's some mind-blowing information in this scene. Did you analyze this paper very closely?
uh i know it was heavily redacted and it had a really shitty photoshop what did you find uh so the other stuff that's in here there are a couple of other articles there's um an article about plastic waste management breakthroughs at lumen i don't know if that's gonna be important um there's the well it's funny because uh it's funny because like one of my hobby horses is the fact that plastic recycling is the world's biggest sham
like everyone that's dutifully rinsing out their plastics and separate them you are doing busy work like yeah aluminum gets recycled glass gets recycled a lot of paper and cardboard get recycled plastic never gets recycled it might get reused a tiny fraction they might shred it up to put it into filling or something but you don't recycle plastics and lumen claim like i think that's interesting that they might be claiming
like a breakthrough in a, in a sham kind of like corporate field. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Um, but that's on one side and then flanked on the other side, there's a, an article about Baird Creek bandit. has done another break-in. If you don't know, Baird Creek Manor is where Mark lives. I wonder... if they're talking about like Ms. Coble's house, like maybe they broke into Lumen broke into Ms. Coble's house to check up on her, right? To see what she's been up to.
Yeah. And Baird gets name checked in the background later this episode. There's one of those motivational posters says grin and Baird it. And it's got a picture of Baird's face. He's the fourth, right? The fourth CEO of Lumen. Is he? Okay, that would make sense. I've got the details in my notes later, but I believe that's the case. But here's the big thing.
So I wrote down some of the things it says in the wake of last week's revelation. Lumen has begun implementing global reforms to ensure the happiness and safety of their innies. They've given them top of the line recreational facilities, sexual liberation. which i mean a waffle party how do you get more liberated than a waffle party but all right uh improve snacks and the possibility for field trips i assume um it cuts off at the end of that
The thing that really struck me is apparently there was a benediction delivered during their parade or something delivered by Rick and Hale. Author. Of such hits as the UUR, which we knew about, his other book, These Values 9, How I Let Kier in. Mmm. God damn it. I do not like that the Rickon people might be right. Rickon is a key acolyte.
that's that's as much of bullshit as recycle recycling plastic you could be right you could be right because he knows who rick and hail is now so this is all for mark's benefit right right yeah they're telling mark your your guru your guy is actually one of our guys so yeah follow his why not why not let him soak up the redacted newspaper so he gets all that detail yeah good point um take it away quick
Oh, man. Come on, Rickon. Come on. Just be your own weirdo cult. Don't suck Keir's dick. Right. You don't need Keir. You can be weird on your own. Yeah. But I thought that was big news, if true. So Mark gets to enjoy his balloons, but he abandons them in the hallways between the management MDR. And the new macrodats are understandably fascinated by Mark's story. They crave more details. But before he can give the mini, Miss Huang leads them to an ice ball. You know, when those.
ball ice breaking games you know just break the ice first day pass the ball yeah we saw him play that with heli There's also like there's I like how they make the comparisons between because Gwendolyn and Mark W work together at this branch and then. the uh what's i forget what the italian dylan's name is dario dario right dario of course dario nah harris um
Apparently their branch was like dirt poor. They didn't have an elevator. They had a rope. This is bullshit. This is Dylan-isms. This is him making up stories about how bad his branch was. There's no way. They're using fucking brooms for what he claims they're using them for. Yeah, they got a fully functional severance system, but they're using rope elevators and CPR dummies or brooms.
It is definitely, it is definitely that. Now, my question to you is, are these people severed or are they actors brought in for Mark's benefit? Uh, that's a good question. I, I was watching, assuming they are severed employees, but maybe not. Guess I don't have enough info either. I don't know either because they're not like they're not even an MDR team from this facility. They're all from different branches. But.
Yeah, and the other thing about Miss Huang is she says that until recently she was a crossing guard. I think that's an interesting detail because like... In our school, I'm sure like most schools, if you got elected to be a crossing guard, you were kind of like an overachieving brown noser teacher's pet. Sure. I should know because I was a sixth grade crossing guard. Really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I was that guy.
So they're telling me that she is telling me something with the school uniform, with their youth and inexperience. But, you know, the fact that she corrects Mark, I love that Mark is like playing a conscious effort to be the most. looming guy he's like a fun fact about me i made four new friends that's nice mark but i'm your supervisor not your friend and then The 30 second pause as all of the kindness drains from his eyes, but the smiles plastered on three new friends. Yeah. Great scene.
I also liked Mark W's pragmatism. Like, you know, I thought I was being permanently retired when they closed down my branch. This is a pleasant surprise. They skipped Gwendolyn. uh with the ball game did and i was curious to know more about her that's like i i wonder if we'll see these guys again because like i don't know how much to take them serious because like they're doing a lot of interesting things with mark w where he's like prissy and pissy and he's
kind of upset that Miss Huang stole the initiative from him because it's actually, you know, I get to roll the ball and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, there's no real reason to introduce these characters unless. you want them to come back other than the joke of hey these characters are like the other yeah marx mdr employees but i think what do you think The symbolism of Miss Wong being a child, I think, is just, again, hammering home the reality of these innies being kind of children.
That, you know, also crossing guards are usually the oldest, you know, children of the school that they're in. And so they're like trusted with a little bit more authority. And even if she is, let's say, 11 years old. I had no idea she could be anywhere between 10 and 16. But let's say she is like 11 years old. She's still so much older with so much more experience than any of these guys. And if you take everyone at their.
word, she's not severed, just like Melchick's not severed. That's another theory that, again, if you take things at face value, I don't know why you would. That blows some theories out of the water. But yeah, again, I don't know why you would take any of this stuff at face value. Yeah, it's like, who is she a replacement for? Is she a replacement for Milchick? Is she a replacement for Miss Casey? Is she a replacement for... It feels like she's a Milchick replacement. Yeah.
Even the short sleeves and her role and even I noticed like some of the body language, the way she stood when she's summoning Dylan to a meeting with Melchick is very Mr. Melchick coded. You know, he's got this kind of formal, stiff chest out kind of weird out of tension thing when he's doing these official herald duties. Mm hmm.
So the first day ends and Mark rides the elevator up and down one more time. Arriving the next day, the Macrodats are comparing notes on how this branch stacks up to their old ones. Mark S. comes up with an idea to sabotage Mark W., but it blows up in his face. In the aftermath, Mark distracts the group with a threat to their kitchenette.
That rhymes. Threat to the kitchenette. But it's only a distraction to get a chance to have some words with the lumen board. I love it. This is this is hilarious. Like top to bottom. Milkshake. I don't know why this was so funny to me, but every time they said Milkshake, I cracked up. Especially when Mr. Milkshake is reading the note and calling himself Milkshake. Do you think I'm a shambolic rube? Like shambolic rube milkshake. Yep.
is such a fucking great name that i might i might be my new screen name when i'm when i'm playing video games and stuff nice shambhala group milkshake uh it's great yeah and just just like how like this does feel like if your baby sister or baby brother is trying to get you in trouble with mom and they write a note that's like so fucking over the top
Right. But they don't they don't see the artifice of it. And the fact that it's written in your own hand language, their own writing. Does Mark S even know that people have distinct handwriting? Like, it's it's just it's just really funny. Yeah, what's his goal here? Just to throw a monkey wrench into the works of Lumen here? He's just protesting? Yeah, and I think Mark is just becoming ungovernable.
You know, he like last year was him trying to stay within the lines at all costs until the weight of it finally kind of, you know, the combined weight of all four of them working in tandem with Helly kind of being a touchstone broke him.
out of that um he's not going back in that box yeah you know no seems like it i've always wondered what they do with you know employees who refuse to do their job like and and he's not totally there yet either because you know he'll be even Dylan I mean people who are like violently opposed to what's going on here will still tail Mr. Milchick down a hall as he leads them toward their punishment you know
Instead of like sitting down and protest. No, fucking move me if you can. Like, yeah. So they're still like under the spell a little bit. But yeah, this is fun sabotage. It's like one of those things where like a dog at or an animal at a research lab. Might be in a cage and dream of escaping that cage, but they don't understand that that's just a first step. You're locked in a room that's locked in a building that's locked in a secure facility with razor wire. You don't even know the full.
scope of your imprisonment so like yeah mark's trying to kick at the goads that he can see and he doesn't even know all the ones he doesn't sure Um, just really some funny things in here. Like I love Gwendolyn's read of, do you even have a brother-in-law asshole? Like, you know, you've got a brother-in-law that distracted you from looking at the sky.
uh okay must be some brother-in-law now she's like just questioning everything hey he is some brother-in-law come on but also you know mark has got some creep to him now like that On the fly, oh, you don't know what I did to the kitchenette. That was pretty fucking sophisticated. Yeah. Yeah, just distract him.
So he runs straight to Milchik's office and gets on the horn with the board. There's a couple of things he finds. What's the significance, if any, of the drawer full of what appears to be like a fancy Japanese shaving kit? I don't know. Couldn't tell you. But yeah, he finds the board. Do you think the board was there? Do you think the board heard him? I don't.
I don't know what the board is. I mean, we've had a million theories about it being, you know, undead Eagans and shit like that, but I don't know what the board is. Presumably they can't be listening all the time, but maybe they can. And if that's the case, sure. The board heard him. Don't think the board cares, but they heard him. Milchick arrives. That's the other thing is Miss Huang is hilariously ineffective at security. Yeah. Like. She has maybe moral authority as their boss, but...
Whatever you say, say what you want about Milchick and Grainer. They had some physical presence. They're intimidating individuals. Miss Wong, you could just push her down by her face and there's nothing she could do about it. Or just walk, just walk past her. There's, you know. There's nothing she can do. So Milchick is outraged by this. He claims that the board does not converse with innies and says that his Audi's fame has gone to your innies head.
And Mark asks, are you firing me? And he says, on you go. He's thrust into the elevator and. I would say this is the most sinister elevator transition yet. It felt fundamentally different than any one we've seen before. Yeah, because it fades out. Usually when we see it. it's it's an instantaneous sort of i would almost call it a transition but it's not even a transition it's like they're they get to about half aware and they just come back up it's This one goes dark.
And I don't know if it's because we're this is like, you know, we've never seen an internal POV of an any riding up the elevator. We're always locked on their face. I don't know. But to me and even Mark coming out of it felt like a man surviving a near death experience.
You know, everything went to black. Everything was like a flash of light. And then he comes to and he's the way like someone would if you the way that the gal in Pulp Fiction woke up once she had the adrenaline shoved in her heart, you know. Um, that's what I felt like surviving this near death experience.
it's a little weird to see mark's demeanor as he comes down in the very early goings of the series uh in that case if he's like fading to black and having a near-death experience every time it's a little surprising that he'd be Totally cool coming off the elevator. Super calm. Yeah, true. Maybe he's just used to it.
So I think I think they're saying I think you're right. I think they're saying something that this was like because he even wonders, did like Melchick try to get me fired? Is this what it looks like when they're clearing your any program? Or is this the evidence that one of those administrative functions like beehive or clean slate or whatever has been used? Maybe. This could be maybe they took the implant out to examine it and then put it back in. Upgraded it. Upgraded it. Maybe. I don't know.
So we see a painting of, I think it's Kier pardoning his betrayers, is what it's called. And... Dylan, you know, like Mark's trying to get his bearing and Dylan comes back. And, you know, Mark's trying to catch him up on it. uh i just love the line of like he tackled me bad which fair because i tackled him first but i didn't fuck with the man's belt
And Irv comes like he comes to in media res. He is still pounding on the door, screaming for Bert as the elevator opens. Like it takes him an extra long time to recover from that. And he is completely transformed by the experience more than anyone else. Other than perhaps Helly. He is just a shell of the former man he was. I love Dylan's.
what's wrong man are you poor up there i'm like man how can he be any poorer than you are up there man and what does that even mean you've got like what are you you rich because you've got a drawer full of fucking finger traps like what does that even mean for you you're working the same job he had a big walk-in closet full of clothes maybe he knows he's not poor yeah fast fashion you could get that many clothes that's true
But then Heli comes out next and she hugs them. But like I said, I didn't clock this on the first one through, but there it's it's it's a weird interaction. There is. Yeah. You know, something not Helly like and the way this woman is behaving very much like when we saw Helena versus Helly last season. Mm hmm. Uh. So Irv is in the restroom. He's groaning. He needs a moment. You know, Mark fills him in on everything he knows. And they're also like.
very skeptical like you know what what if they're listening to us what if this is what if they don't know what happened they're trying to figure it out yeah i i don't know what you're feeling on this is but Do you think Mark was moved around to different branches or do you think they just replaced employees? I don't see any evidence that he moved branches like, but. Also, it's kind of unfalsifiable because we've never seen another branch.
Yeah. No, I don't trust anything. If like that, that's the thing is like, if these people are real inies, then I don't know why they lie about their branch. Like, you know, they, this is one of the original branches. So theoretically. you know newer branches might have better facilities like animatronic eagans and things like that um
And none of it seems out of character for Lumen because like he's like, well, is that be fit the dignity of the Egan family? But this is the company that has Kier flying around on a rainbow at the end of. You know, and they're they're having their employees have waffle parties in the founders bed like it's there's it's a very.
weird veneration they're doing. So there's nothing that I would say is, well, that's out of here. I mean, Kobo might hate it, but like Lumen as a, as a, I don't know. It doesn't seem like they have a special reverence for their founder in the ways I would think. they would your audi is a friend to children and the elderly your audi likes films and owns a machine that can play them Your Audi avoids ads at support.baldmove.com Please try to enjoy each ad equally.
This concludes the wellness session. Now get back to your desk and listen to more Waffle Potty. Yeah, I think they just brought in some new employees for MDR and then shipped them off wherever. And brought the old ones back. Also, the other thing that I thought was weird is Heli is the one that drew attention to the fact that the security camera is gone. Uh huh.
That's a smoking. We're not under surveillance anymore. Feel free to talk, guys. Yeah. Let your guard down. Trust me. We had a moment, didn't we, Mark? You can trust me. Yeah. So after the given a few moments of process, Miss Huang escorts them all to the break room, which has been reimagined in a kinder, gentler, luminous listening sort of way.
At the end of the lengthy presentation, Milchik says that they're given the rest of the day to choose whether they want to remain working on the severed floor or leave. No hard feelings. You can just you can just cease to exist, guys. Yeah. The makeover that the room got, it's almost like an orientation room at this point. It's not even the break room anymore. Or at least that's what they're using it for in this session.
because man the video it's like they've collapsed the the the break room and wellness centers into one thing now like yeah to be when you're re-educated you're still going to be re-educated but it's not going to be some weird 1984 bullshit it's going to be some more brave new world type of bullshit right you know watch a lot of videos yeah
There's a lot. Okay. So again, I love when a live action show just breaks into claymation fucking classic. You know, some of my favorite shows have done it community, et cetera. But I particularly enjoyed they use like real audio drops like that's actual herbs voice saying burn this place down as his claymation guy catches fire like. John, you know, what was the fucker from Fantastic Four, Johnny Storm. But I thought that was hilarious. I loved like the individual reactions like Irv.
who's got a goofy sense of humor like actually laughed at the joke about the building don't run inside me because it tickles uh i love dylan's reaction that his any would be like almost have a orgasm from trying to lose snacks and he's just wordless like yeah it's so good he is so perfect in that scene he is and it's because because it's like it's not like it's unfair he is a massive perk or uh-huh but also it's almost like why are they picking on me kind of thing right right um
I like and then if you look at I think I read that these were all A.I. generated because I remember there when when they. that these motivational posters are AI generated and that the creative team kind of got a little flack from it. But I'm like... To me, it's not they're not doing this because they don't have enough artists going around. They're saying something about Lumen being cheap.
and generic and artificial. And, you know, like I'm a frolicaholic, the grin and bared it, the, you know, the, the Lumen CEO. uh, be ever married with, uh, a picture of here as a bee. Like this is just slop. This isn't something that you would put in the kindergarten school room. Right. But, uh, yeah, which I mean, That so aptly describes as motivational posters that are up everywhere or were up everywhere in the 90s and 2000s. Yeah. So yeah, they got...
They got the new snacks, fruit leather, cut beans, Christmas mints, salsa, hall passes, playful mirror room, which I thought was weird because in-universe, the Claymation Irv looks like he's distressed by this. Like he looks worried and sweat is. Why would you animate it like that? If this is supposed to be the playful mirror room, it's another. My thought was.
it's an emotion they don't get to experience i mean fear is like a pleasure to them because it's different but but they look at the numbers and they feel fear yeah exactly exactly so i don't know it was a little bit weird I love Dylan's awkward clap at the end of it. Like, what am I supposed to do? I'm just going to clap awkwardly. And then Melchick says, yeah, I don't want to be your jail jailer. If you start your new file, I'll assume that you're going to start.
Brand new quarter, brand new, a new beginning and continue to what we've built here. There's no cameras or microphones. You shouldn't have to pack away like sardines in a supply closet to have privacy. But this is something like Alan Sepawal said in his kind of like spoiler free season long review is the one of the central tensions of this show is if the Enies get what they want as it's presently constructed, their reward is oblivion.
Yeah. Like the only way they could get any kind of just outcome is some sort of reintegration, which as we've discussed. for many many weeks is problematic in itself like the sum of those parts is not the same as the parts themselves so it's like What does that mean to be reintegrated with your Audi? Yeah, especially when it comes to people who are naturally opposed to the idea of being integrated with their any like Helena.
There's no chance Helena would want to be reintegrated with Allie. Yeah, because Mark could say... he didn't know and he was grief, but like she's doing that as a corporate stunt for a process that she should know is wrong. Well, and Mark Scout might want to be reintegrated with Mark S. I don't really see a huge reason why he wouldn't.
But there are people who wouldn't, and how do you handle that? One other thing about this video, and I looked in the credits to try and verify this, but that name is conspicuously absent. 100% guarantee that the voiceover in this is done by Keanu Reeves. 100%. Really? He's putting on a voice and he's like, he's quote unquote acting as much as Keanu Reeves ever acts. But yeah. It's got to be him. It sounds so much like him. I didn't pick that up, but I also... I also...
Don't have anything. And it would be funny because, you know, the conception of Keanu is he's like a blank avatar that you can just project anything onto. So it would be a pretty funny deep cut. And I could see him going along with the joke. I mean. This is one of those episodes. It's directed by Ben Stiller. It's written by Dan Erickson. This is the captains of the ship taking the helm. So, yeah, having their celebrity buddies doing uncredited cameos.
That wouldn't blow me away. So after Milchak leaves them alone, the macro dads take the opportunity to debrief themselves on what they saw on the outside. Mark's recap goes about like we'd expect. Irv dodges the question because, you know, we even speculated he's the only one that kind of went off mission. And but Heli Heli's story does not add up at all. She's 100% lying to them, obviously. But why? The only thing...
I I'm 95% sure that's what's happening. This is actually Helena and she's doing an undercover boss type of bullshit situation. But I'm also leaving a 5% window open in my mind to account for the administrative functions. that this is just a new instance of Heli that they've filled with false memories. Still to do essentially the same role, but it's like, can this version of Heli be redeemed or does she just need to be exposed?
I think everything they're doing in this episode says that she is lying, whether she is Helena or Helly. Right. A hundred percent. Like how she interacts with Irv later, I think is actually a big part of that too.
the things that she says to him but yeah i i definitely think she's lying and i i would go so far to put it at 99 this is i'm 100 sure she's lying i'm just saying no 99 this is elena yeah okay okay all right well lying she is she's a spy oh oh and irv is catching on to this irv the smartest in the group here realizes
wait you saw a gardener we were all out at night well that doesn't make any sense but he's so distraught he can't follow that train of thought to its logical you're like how the fuck does he know that gardeners don't work at night and there's plausible deniability he could be a gardener and he's just walking
walking home, checking his mail at the end of the night and he's getting home late or there's lots of export. Like he looked like a gardener. So maybe he's some kind of other maintenance person and hell, he just doesn't know the difference. But. But yeah, obviously in universe, if you're slow watching the show, they're giving a big this might be bullshit blinking indicator for you. Mm hmm.
Um, I love like Dylan's reaction to like the, he, he, I went for a party for Rick and hail. No shit. He's my brother-in-law. What? We both know his cobell. What? Ah, in. And the fact that like his wife, your wife is Miss Casey. Well, yeah. And I thought that was just really interesting. The other thing I thought was interesting is paying attention to the way Mark talks about himself. Mark talks about his Audi.
as the third person, but then he says, yeah, he lost his wife, which is part of the reason I decided to sever. Interesting. I wonder, yeah. Yeah. So I started paying attention to see like when he shifts between third and first person. And I'm going to do that because I think it's interesting that like Mark thinks of himself as one entity in a way that Helena Helly cannot.
You know, he recognized they're different people, but also that there's something, you know, it's mushy. It's mushy. Yeah, it's very mushy. So, yeah, then, like I said, we got the whole, you know, heli. taking telling bold face lies about her apartment watching nature show having a save the gorillas t-shirt um this gardener's brother's a cop and might be able to help um
And Irv just seems to be taken with the idea that is Melchick serious about letting us live or leave because this is not our world up there. And he just wordlessly walks out. So as Irv leaves the group in silence, Dylan goes after him, leaving Heli and Mark to talk through the decision to say severed. But Heli objects to Dylan being the only person to go talk to Irv.
I think she wants to be, you know, as a spy, as Helena, she wants to be there to hear what Irv's going to say. What did Irv experience? I need to know so I can report back. Yet another gun with smoke coming out of its barrel for sure. Yeah. It's also interesting the way Helena played the revelation of Mark being married to Gemma. She's like, oh, did you look happy? Like she's almost like kind of guilting, pretending to be jealous, making Mark.
Defend it because he's like, oh, you know, it's it's not my wife. It's it's Mark. Well, you know seem like you're you know, you want to do the right thing buyer and This is a way to kind of put Mark off on his back foot yeah there are a few times in here where i could if if i if i ignored a lot of other signs that i got they did things to make me think that this is actually heli pretty convincingly um
That's one of them, I guess, is some of the concerns she showed for Mark is a little more genuine than I would expect. But maybe Helena can muster that sort of false energy. I don't know. There's some things to point. in the direction of no heli's just heli but many more things point in the direction yeah they're they're doing plausible deniability but um i also thought it was interesting that the the word that
Mark used to describe the split existence of the severed individual. He says it's mushy. But the most common usage of that as an adjective is like sappily romantic. Like, you know, if you catch your mom and dad kissing like, oh, gross. I want to see that mushy stuff. Right. And I think that's telling that he's describing this altruistic thing he's trying to do for.
jimma slash miss koble or miss casey as mushy because it is kind of pretty simpy type behavior to save another man's wife that you don't even know just because Well, it points back to how Mark thinks of him and his Audi, right? Like you said, he thinks of them more so as like a single person. Do you think that Helena, if let's just go forward, this is Helena. It's not Heli.
Do you think Helena is trying to deepen her relationship with Mark? Do you think that she's trying to keep Mark at an arm's distance? Or do you think that she's trying to do both? Like, definitely encourage the emotional connection, but also... Also, she doesn't want to go forward with kissing this guy or certainly fucking this guy. I don't believe the type of person Helena is has anyone special in her life outside of her.
she still might not want to fuck in any like that's degrading I look man she put a microchip in her head and went to be another person that she would not remember any of so I She's willing to go to links that I think include kissing, banging, whatever is on the menu. I think she's willing to do it. All right.
But they end up that Mark decides he's going to stay because he wants to, you know, at the end of the day, regardless of what the relationships is, Miss Casey is one of them and he wants to do right by her. And Hell, he says she'll stay to help. Mm hmm. Meanwhile, Dylan catches up to Irv, who's trying to leave the severed floor because the pain of losing Bert is just too much to go on. Like...
this is so first love, you know, like the first time you really love a guy or a gal and, and you split up and you just think you're never going to, it's never going to be the same. You're never going to heal. It's no, it's just the first time you've experienced that pain. And it.
It's not like it hurts less. It's just you get more perspective on it, you know, like falling down and scraping your knee when you're two years old. That's the end of the world. When you're 40, it's just a fuck. It's a minor annoyance.
I think heartbreak is not exactly like that, but it's more like that than I think we're willing to admit. But Irv is just, yeah, he's just completely bereft. He has no... potential for happiness he doesn't feel like he'd rather face oblivion where he can maybe in some ineffable way be close to Burt yeah like I'm gonna go to heaven with him right that kind of thing
uh this scene is amazing i i was shocked at how emotional this scene got the way that dylan is trying to talk him off this ledge as characters that in season one really seemed like antagonistic toward each other. They were not for sure what I would call friends visually, but this shows that that is all coming from a place of.
actually caring about each other you know like yeah they're giving each other shit but that's kind of just how the relationship is and they deeply care about each other and I think Irv even reciprocates it in this scene it's not
Something that's lost on him. I'm your favorite perk. Don't bring those into it. Don't sully the perks with our friendship. But this is Dylan... this is dylan in his way breaking down sobbing and saying i love you bro yes totally um it's amazing that both these actors do such a good job here
I like the way that he says that he encourages their courtship. Like, ah, I don't know that. No, he kept telling him, dude, shut this shit down. Don't go see Bert because you're getting us in trouble, man. Right. And the way he's like, I'm sorry, Bert has a hot husband or whatever. But, you know, any Bert's the guy who fell for it. He's he's he's gone anyway. So, yeah. And then.
I thought another brilliant part is, you know, Irv hugs Dylan, which I think is a genuine reaction, but he also uses it to whisper into his ear about all the black ominous hallways that Zinni has been painting. And I'm like, oh, OK, so Irv is back. on board but then he's like I just wanted you to know before I leave and Dylan has to bodily prevent them from leaving and this is great as a viewer too because you feel like this is giving Irv an exit where he's given them
Some, but not all of the information he had, because if you remember, he was also doing massive amounts of research on Lumen employees. Yeah, but it tells me as a viewer, he might step through that door and not come back. Yeah, there was I mean, I was talking to one of our professional friends and about before I'd seen the episode about, you know, we were talking about, like, what are the odds you think of.
um how long they're going to wait until it's like they might be a good long time because you know like from my perspective none of these people are safe like i don't think they'll do anything with mark yeah like everyone else can die you know everyone totally and and i felt like yeah i was kind of there with you like oh my god they might actually be writing bird out for real and john sterile's probably pretty expensive so you know he's a very talented actor yeah yep
The moment where Irv pushes Dylan's glasses up on his face. Uh-huh. is so fucking cute it's like a wife straightening her husband's tie before he got you know and this the way he looked at him was just that endearing and i'm your favorite perk uh And I think he does. He really scores a point at the end. He's like, you know, if I was Bert, if Bert was still here, he'd be telling you to stick around and figure this shit out just like I am. And I think Irv knows that that's right.
especially because of who he is on the outside to his Audi trying to figure things out. He realizes, yeah, that's me. The other fucking hilarious line was Bert saying, I woke up standing in front of easel. Whoa, they got easels up there. What a mundane thing to be impressed by, you know? Yeah. So after Dylan seems to stabilize Irv, Miss Hong summons Dylan to Milchak. Dylan goes, eager to settle the belt score.
But it's taken aback by an apparently generous offer for Mr. Melchick for future conjugal work visits with his wife. There's also some office tension about Melchick's welcome screen and his relationship with Miss Huang. Kind of on frosty terms, it seems like. That slammed the door right in her face. Is he just trying to copy Kobol? Maybe. Yeah, maybe that's the standard issue attitude for her position.
So that's in the Lumen management training, like keep your employees desperate for your approval. It's like a Machiavellian management book. I don't know. So none of this can be believed either, right? Like the blueprints that Dylan's being shown, the information he's getting about his wife, her name's Gretchen.
None of this is real, right? Especially when he says, oh, I can see my family in this room, and he says, well, if you take the name of the room at face value, sure. Yeah. What a wickedly twisted bit of speech there. It also could be I kept on thinking it could be an observation room, like a fancy thing at the zoo where like you can come in on a one way mirror and look at your loved one working and be like, oh, yeah, they're OK. It doesn't mean that you're going to get the.
But it just makes Dylan's day. You can see that he's hungry for this. He wants that connection. He wants to believe. Yeah. This is the ultimate perk for him. Milchick splitting them up a little bit because now he's got a secret like, oh, you know, your other friends are single. They're not like you. So but how the fuck did they know? Like he's trusting Milchick that they're all single. Like we don't. I mean, we know that I think that's true, but like there's no way for Dylan to know. So.
He could just all be a bunch of fucking lies. Dylan's wife's name's Gretchen. i don't know if that'll be important but that's a detail we got here and the fact that milchik's got the secret room in his office what the yeah what the fuck do you got a hidden panel that goes back into a blueprint room yeah and you've got like a whole bunch of files back there you've got some film sure uh some rolls of film uh yeah i i don't know i don't know why you need this in this location
Is it something that he didn't know about until he got Kobel's job and then that became information that he had? Is it something only for the manager?
I don't know, because we never saw Kobel use it. No. I want to talk about the Hello, Miss Kobel part, too, because I have had enough... experience with like c-suite executives to know that any guy that gets there on the first day and is so preoccupied with the name on the door and the business cards and the voicemail greeting and all that they're probably going to be a fucking pill to deal with yeah on the other hand
If I was, you know, a mid-level management and I've been there for five months and they still have the old guy's name on the door, that tells you how serious they're taking you. Yeah. But... To me, it seems more like this is bullshit that Milchak has been there for five months and they still haven't like he's still he just just unpacking the thing.
uh he they haven't got his thing changed and and is he concerned like out of motivation just like he's just like it's a personal flattery or is he concerned that someone's going to come in and see the hello mrs coble and then figure out like what the fuck it's been five months you still haven't got your name changed i don't know it's they're all equally plausible to me yeah there was something we didn't talk about when the when the old crew comes back um
We mentioned the painting and passing, which we talked about more in the preview podcast, but that whole space has changed because normally, well, there are two possibilities here. This is a different elevator. They're bringing them down in. Or that they have done some extensive remodeling between Mark going up that elevator and Mark coming back down and then all the other people coming back. Because...
If you recall, like the elevator, they come down the main elevator for the severed people. We know there are a couple, one for unsevered. That opens into like a sitting area, couches and whatnot here. The second time he comes out, it opens directly into a wall with that painting on it. But we're sure it's not just remodeled.
I mean, if it is an extensive remodel, it's extensive. You're saying extensive because I'm like, yeah, I definitely saw that they changed that, you know, they've got that painting there. But I mean, normally it opens into a room in a large area. We know that they can do some pretty extensive remodeling very quickly. Like they installed that security door over the weekend. I think it was overnight.
Oh, well, yeah, it's hard to tell with the innies. But even like, you know, like, you know, again, who knows if it wasn't five months before I am prepared to believe that there's a much bigger gap between, you know, when when Milchick tried to fire him, quote unquote, like that might have been a big. gap but I don't know we'll see what it means but it was definitely different
I want to talk about the game that Miss Huang is playing. She's playing this weird game. It says at the top main level and she's watching. It's almost like a backgammon board where these little circles are falling down to the bottom. And it's it's some kind of weird, like macro data refinement game. And when Mr. Melchick comes out, she kind of looks at him expectantly and he mean mugs her and slams the door in her face. And then she goes away from her screen.
opens up a drawer that looks like it's a perk drawer, takes out one of those games your parents used to give you on a long car trip before Game Boys existed. It's a thing. It's a little handheld game that's full of water. You push a button that squirts the water, and it moves some hoops, and you try to put the hoops on something. In this case, it's Keir in a swimsuit about to do a, like...
Popeye dive or whatever an archaic cartoon man dive and if you get the ring on his hands it binds his hands in a weird way I I wasn't even yeah but is that that's this is just Are these both equally busy work? Is that what it's telling me? I mean, I assume anything they're doing on the computer is important to the function of lumen. So I don't think so, but I'm not sure.
Because I don't know what any of the game stuff means. Like I saw symbols for what I associate with like a database or a microphone, which to me says something about audio, but I don't know what they mean in Lumenspeak. But anyway, Milchak switches off his computer with the Hello, Miss Kobol because he's he's disgusted with it at the end.
The macro that's reconvened back into cubicles, united in their work once more, if not united in their private feelings and motivations. And just as the episode closes, they throw some. fresh red meat to the fans of the MDR's refining people theory, or at least that's how I see it.
What we have here is there's a really cool shot where they're kind of like looping around the cubicle and you get the view of everybody turning on and getting back to work. And, you know, like I said, they're unified, but they're also separate. But as Mark starts his, you know, getting down and dirty with the refinery. It flashes to a picture of Gemma slash Miss Casey, the different haircut, severe expression on her face.
It's overlaid on her image is Cold Harbor, which I think is the name of the file they're working for. She has an ID number and an IET number, which is 25.00 in parentheses build. Now, if you saw that as a developer, what would you think? I assume this is the 25th major iteration of this piece of software. Yeah. Does that mean there's 24 Miss Casey's? yeah and the other stuff is like standard medical stuff they show her respirations uh her ox's specific oxygen level
I think it's CO2 saturation is the other number. It was a little too fuzzy. The one that's 32? Yeah, I'm... I think it's average and it says CO2, but and her temperature is standard human 98.6 and it flashes back and forth between Mark's eyes and her eyes on the screen as it does the distinctive kind of severance stutter. sound and that's the episode uh question for you here do you think is this something mark is imagining is this something mark is actually seeing is this
Something that is done only for us as viewers to connect some dots and intrigue us. I think it's the latter. I think it's the latter, except for the one thing that makes me think otherwise is there's a point in the episode where Mark is. Like, I think it's when you're playing the ball game and he's talking about, hey, I'm Marcus and I've been here for two years. And he's and he thinks of that wedding picture of him and Gemma. So it could be that he is overlaying this. But I don't know why.
Why he would imagine these build numbers and the. oxygen and the respiration and the temperature and why would he if he because i i can almost talk myself in thinking that he thinks there's something about this that's making him closer to jimma But all the other extraneous stuff and the fact that this is nothing like any Gemma we've ever seen or Miss Cobble, she got different hair. It's a much more severe, almost angry, judgy look that she's given the camera.
I'm with you. I think it's for us. I think I think this is this is just to make us go. What the fuck? At the end of the episode. I think so, too. um although i will say there's a little bit of a complicating factor in there or maybe this is just like help for one of the theories that has been i guess out there is what is macro data of refinement doing Because if you look at this screen, this looks a lot like the numbers screen.
Except it's got a camera feed and they're superimposing, you know, a person there. It's got the five boxes, the four percentages of what we think is the different tempers. The file name up there in the corner, a completion percentage. To me, it says what he's actually working on right now in this moment is something to do with Miss Casey in or Gemma in cold storage. Agreed.
And, you know, I guess I maybe I'm assuming that everyone's listened to our season one coverage that we just completed. But if not, one of the popular theories is MDR is actually refining persons in grams or genetic profile or. And that they are sorting their personalities into the four core tempers. Woe, malice, frolic, dread.
Uh, because those are kind of like the initials and there's four of them, but there's five by, it doesn't cleanly map on, but I think it's the best theory. Yeah. Um, that, that I've seen yet that each, each file is a person. And this leads into that, I think, by showing Casey superimposed or this stuff superimposed over her. It's leaning so hard into it that it makes me think that maybe I'm wrong.
Like, it's the same thing with, like, Heli. Like, they're leaning so hard on Heli's actually Helena that I'm almost, that's why I'm leaving the window crack 5% open because. Man, on the first episode, they emphatically do pull so many tricks right in front of us. It makes me think that I'm getting magic. I'm getting pin and tellered. I'm looking at this and I'm not paying attention to that. I get that instinct, but also this.
show is i think remarkably not stingy with its information it's one of the things i like that they'll just put information out there and it'll be in a context that you just can't quite decipher it here I think there's something interesting, not just like they could be dumping this information like, yes, this is this file is directly connected to Gemma. But the thing they put out here is Gemma seems almost aware of it.
like she's looking at the camera she's a part of whatever is happening here not you know passed out on some table where they're doing testing on her or something this is That to me is like the big information that is confusing. Like why would Gemma be in on this? Yeah. I don't know. Or is this still Miss Casey? I mean, I guess it could. She's still severed. So maybe it's Miss Casey.
There's also another nice moment. When Dylan comes in, he's obviously conflicted and feeling dissonant, but no one notices because they presume he just came back from a difficult conversation with Irv. and so they redirect about like how's irv and you see dylan kind of like oh shit right irv and irv says right here another question is what the fuck was irv doing for those 15 or so minutes
Was he just staring at the separate access door and debating? Did he go back to optics and design? Did he go find him in Bert's special jungle room? Maybe. What was he doing? Because he wasn't hanging out in MDR.
petting goats petting goats sure trimming his mustache uh-huh uh and there's also i like dylan cocking an eyebrow about dylan's lo-fi freshman fluke trophy the hand carved that dario yeah he didn't take it with him and mark's face that he made like yeah that's that's another thing why not
Why didn't he take that? Can you imagine Mark not taking his freshman fluke trophy? Or Dylan? I mean, if the analog here is Dylan, Dylan takes every perk with him. He's got a pocket full of perks on his way out. I wonder if he still has his crystal picture of all four of them. Did they let him keep that when Milchick tackled him? I don't know. Tackled him bad, Jim. Can you take perks away once you give them as punishment? Man, I don't know.
Are we leaving anything on the table as far as you're concerned? I don't think so. If you like this end credit song, I think it's Curtis Steiger. I don't know how to say his name. And the Forest Rangers singing John the Revelator, which apparently they did a bunch of music for Sons of Anarchy. So if you've seen that show, you're probably familiar. I haven't. i like this kind of this this feels very severance it's kind of bouncy jazz uh-huh yeah it's like a really bluesy um
But it's a it's a remix of it, too. It's got some extra electronics stuff going on. Gotcha. But yeah, the song is a religious song. I don't know. It's not that fits context or anything. But apparently it's a very old song. How long until we see Mrs. Goble? Next episode. Gotta see your next episode, right? You know, that's the thing. It's like because you mentioned how this show is not like a lot of puzzle box shows because I was thinking that same thing that.
A lesser show would have introduced like Helly's weird reaction to Mark hugging her. And we'd be debating it in the subreddits, the forums that are in boxes for a week. And the next week they'll have another hint that something's not right with her. And then by the third or fourth season, they did, you know, they would finally fess up. That would be like a big midseason revelation. But this just fucking ask and answer. Same episode. It moves, man. That's one of the things I love about the show.
as the other thing the fact that like so much of what the weird stuff in the trailer was in this like makes me think that this show is just confident that we can do show you anything and it's and you're never gonna you're never gonna know where we're going Like this, this has got a, this show's got a confidence and swagger that I haven't seen. I don't know. Like I want to go back like the leftovers to a show that that's confident about what it wanted to do and say. And.
the the satisfaction of pacing and kind of the humor blend although this show is way funnier than than uh sure then the leftovers got there occasionally but yeah this is more consistently funny yeah not as heavy but uh it's just feels tight tight tight tight yep we need to find that work-life balance we'll be right back Reintegration is complete. To avoid further non-worker related interruptions, please see the company policy on advertisement avoidance at support.baldmove.com
All right, Jim, this is the point where we asked the listeners, what the hell did you think? Any corporate memos coming over to severance at baldmove.com line? Also, a new season. If you want to get in on the ground floor with us, get ad-free feeds, bonus content, all that kind of stuff, check out support.baldmove.com and help us keep making these podcasts. We appreciate it in advance. Jim, Severance at baldmove.com. What you got?
yeah i mean this is this is a hurry up game we're playing here so we don't have feedback from this episode obviously obviously yeah we have stuff from our preview where we talk some about like the trailers so maybe it'll be slightly relevant but uh we're gonna start off with leila who apologizes uh if this has already been discussed before everything's been discussed there are no new thoughts on the planet so it's fine nothing new under the sun
My running theory for MDR is that when they select words that are scary, they are in fact teaching a form of AI through machine learning. And thanks to Google AI, we have a definition for machine learning, which seems really strangely recursive. Machine learning allows computers to learn from data and make decisions without being explicitly programmed.
So how this would work, data analysis. Machine learning algorithms analyze large amounts of data to identify patterns and relationships. The learning. happens where they learn from the data and improve their performance over time. And they have decision-making capabilities where they use their learning to make decisions such as classifying data or predicting outcomes.
So maybe on the testing floor, we have a bunch of clones or robots or goats or what have you. And the MDR folks are training by analyzing large groups of numbers and identifying patterns and relationships between the numbers to train the robots or clones. Maybe this is how Kier lives forever. Oh, I'm not. I'm not picking that train of thought up. Sorry. I mean, this is so instead of like the goat clone.
hole she's going down the robot android replicant hole like yeah she's oh and then they're patterning yeah the personalities clearly for the robots as we've discussed with the perpetuity wing and the the eagans kind of want to live forever it seems like yeah seems like it and probably with the rest of us being their immortal serfs but uh We'll see. Alternatively, maybe the MDR peeps are themselves being trained as a form of AI somehow. This would fit with the rats in a lab theory.
presupposes that Mark et al. are being studied and poked and prodded and tempted with new experiences like Rickon's insipid book. The innies seem to have a thirst for knowledge and new experiences a lot like children. Or perhaps like AI crawling the web for info, trying to sort through copious data and identifying patterns and learning to make decisions based on different inputs. I can't falsify that theory. Yeah.
I will say that like it would you say that like they're doing some kind of like hypnosis, repetitive kind of trance type therapy with like the moving numbers and the feelings. And it would be so subtextual that, yeah, like, yeah, they could be doing that. But.
They haven't suggested any of those mechanisms at work, so I feel like it's less likely than some of the other theories we've been dealing with. Yeah, I mean, it's the biggest mystery. I feel like everything that can be... proposed has been i wonder if we've got it i wonder if someone out there has already landed on the explanation and we just can't quite put our finger on it as yes that's the thing because there are so many plausible
Or semi-plausible theories. But even then, if you understood what MDR is doing, that would just be a small piece of what Lumen is doing. Because I think we might have it with they're actually refining people. Taking people that have recently deceased or are in a coma or something and they're reconstructing their brainwaves or personalities in a way that is allows them to either transfer that consciousness or retrieve that consciousness or or just.
better employees yeah who knows yeah um but uh yeah i i i don't know I think we're getting close there. But there again, you're talking about like, you know, the blind man feeling the elephant. If you get close to figuring out what the trunk is, you still don't know what the rest of the animals do. And so true. All right, Brian K says he's getting really stoked for Severance's return. Well, get ready. In your Season 2 preview, you speculated why Mark would want to return to Lumen.
Aside from Mark wanting his innie to look for clues of Miss Casey and Gemma, which you touched in the podcast, there is, however, a more significant reason. Do we really think nobody cared about Grainer's death? I certainly didn't. I don't know about you, Aaron, but I didn't. I mean, that's what government-issued facemen are destined to do, die for their duty. So...
This is a company town. He's a company security guy. Like, I feel that. I feel that they that no, I don't I'm not expecting the FBI. to or like federal investigators to come in asking for the murder of Grainer. I don't. But how like the question is, how many corpses can they make before that happens? The numbers, you know, it's not zero, but it's also not probably 100. You know, the more bodies that they end up dropping and they got two right now. Right. You got Grainer and you've got the PD.
that we know have died under suspicious circumstances. Things are getting messy over there. Yeah, sure. Like you said, the more bodies that pile up, the messier it gets, the more likely the spotlight shines on Kier. Not in the way they want. I think Brian is talking also about like. Internally in Lumen, like knowing that Mark killed.
grainer or had a hand in his death you know it wasn't he didn't do it but he was there uh he says it would take almost no effort on the part of lumen to determine the security card key that any mark used uh to access the otp It seems like the forces at Lumen could blackmail Audimark to return under threat of turning him into the authorities. We just don't hear anything about Grainer.
yeah plus coble is such a loose cannon does you know like what what kind of cover up is she trying to do because she's do it from all angles she's trying to cover up from the outside she's trying to cover up from the board and and so we didn't talk about this in the main episode What kind of timeline do you think has elapsed? Man, it's tough because there are two big cuts here. There's the one between last season and then there's the one between Mark's new crew.
getting ousted and Mark's old crew coming back. If I had to guess, it's relatively fast. I would think that first Mark returning to work might have happened in a day or two. Same. Or maybe a weekend. I think it could have been over a weekend. But I think there is more time that's passed on that second blackout. Yeah. Because they had to get the heli thing set up.
They had to get all of them, you know, like there's a lot. They had to remodel things. The break room like that stuff is is is a little harder than just stripping the name off wellness and. You know, drywalling over the doors like you got to do a lot of things. And if you say like you said, if they either move to a whole other branch and or.
You know, remodeled extensively the elevator landing area that just speaks to a lot more time passing than but but yeah, the five months is clearly bullshit. I think that was short. But once we got through the other. kind of time jump or time disassociation. I have no idea. I have no feelings. I guess the people's hair. That's the other thing. Like, I can't believe that people's hair would be exactly the same when they came back. Right.
Is Mark's hair longer? I can never tell. He's got this flop cut that... I don't think so. I think it's been pretty consistent, but... Okay. Yeah. And I don't know. Here's the other thing.
Me, you, and Talitha have been working together for two, three years. I don't think our hair has changed a bit. Like, your hair grows, gets longer, so you're in a nice three-week cycle. Mine does the same, too. But, like, maybe I'm not... maybe i'm overstepping that but like yeah i just i just think that everything's bullshit and that was really weird when mark got maybe almost fired and i have no idea how much time has elapsed
So so another question we didn't really ponder that I'm kind of obsessed with now is how did they get Irv back? Because Dylan Dylan never left. So Dylan, of course, is going to come back. His Audi doesn't even know that anything happened. Irv woke up pounding on some man's door who is also on his list. They do have all those administrative protocols, though. They know about the overtime stuff.
On the outside, not just overtime, but like, you know, we've got the what was it? The open house where we speculated that's a reverse of the thing where you could. you know, bring in Audi to the inside. They could have done something weird where they just took, you know, they picked up Bert or Irv and they took him in and they just made those memories go away. Yeah.
Yeah, that's where it gets a little tricky. I don't know how much we also know is investigating. I don't know if Lumen knows this, but Irv is in a deep Audi. Irv is in a deep investigation of malfeasance at Lumen. So he might want to come back for the same reason or like not.
the same reason that mark would want to come back he'd want to come back just because he wants to continue that work like this is fucking interesting but yeah i woke up in the middle of the night and i'm at bert's house it's a new development fuck
Yeah, this is it. Yeah, it's like, you know, they could come to me. Oh, it's a mix up. And it's like, oh, it's fine. You know, I just like the money. And I do. OK, how many episodes do you think we got to find out before we get the aftermath of what happened with Heli? I want it immediately. I wanted it since. I think it's going to happen next episode. Milchick tackled Dylan, but. I literally think it's going to happen next episode. God, I hope so. I hope you're right.
Cause I'm starting to think that like everything we saw in the trailer is from the first like two or three episodes. That would make sense. Like 90% of it. And that's, that's usually the case when I've been tracking these things, you know, there might be one or two from the late season, but most of the shots and. Probably half the shots from the trailers that we've seen so far have been from this episode. The only ones that I can think of that weren't for sure.
are like, you know, the Irv, you know, the motorcycle riding scenes, Irv in his night watch cap, Milchick trying to recruit Mark. And of course, the goat, the goat hills. Sure. The equal but opposite proposition from the goat holes to goat hills. Man, the more you bring up the other procedures, the other modes that are in that system, the less I like it.
I know that's that. This is where the show might lose me if there is really a whole bunch of different functions they can do to these chips to wipe or change or. implant memories i that's gonna that's gonna be westworld season two and that's gonna really disappoint me if if they go down that route but they almost as long as there's i mean unless that was just stage dressing unless that is just like
Type up some bullshit that doesn't matter. Put it on a screen somewhere. No fucking shot. Doesn't feel like this show. Yeah. But they can also... They can also do that and have tells like they could have done that with Heli. But we we knew it right off the bat because, you know, there's it's not a perfect procedure. And I don't.
You know, Lumen's kind of a slapdash, ready, fire, aim type of thing. So, like, I would have a problem if, like, we would go a whole season not knowing that someone's been swapped out or the memory's been changed. It just makes theorizing impossible because what function... Could they have that could explain literally anything you want to theorize?
And the other thing that gives me hope is like I've seen enough critics that I respect to have seen the entire season. And I know that they have some of the same problems that we had with Westworld. And like I would think that if it was that was running amok rampant.
Yeah, they would have said something. But this is getting almost universal praise by everyone who's seen it. And this first episode is fucking incredible. It's like far and beyond what I was expecting. I had my height and my expectations are pretty high.
But I just could not believe how confidently the show moved through this hour's material. No, it felt like the season one premiere in a lot of ways. Just the like you mentioned, the confidence of it to not go immediately directly back to the things that we. obviously we're going to have questions about, but to put us in a strange new situation, that's also somehow familiar and, and old. Yeah. They, they navigated, I think the beginning of the season really well.
They do have to give us answers. I do want to see what happened. Sure. Immediately after I want to see Mark coming to as an Audi. Yeah. And go. What did I say? Yeah. Yeah. But some of these some of these reveals felt like midseason reveals. So, like, again, I'm so, so far beyond impressed by what I thought we'd be getting at this stage. So, yeah, I'm. Yeah. I'm giving this show wide latitude.
All right, well, I think that's it for the feedback then. Yeah, and as I said in the preview, I'm not exactly sure. the format, because if there is, you know, thus covering this as quick as we can.
There might be room for us to have like a midweek kind of like spoilers and speculation kind of roundup. Like, what are all the different theories? What are people saying? If we get a sufficient feedback as you know, we can talk an hour and a half for an hour show. No problem. And if we start getting 30 plus minutes.
feedback maybe we do two shows a week to kind of make room for all that stuff um but we'll see we'll see it seems like the everything was pretty comfortably fit in the one episode this time Yeah, not a lot of email on the preview cast, but I kind of expect that to change. Yeah, the floodgates might open now because this is a... Jeez, the show opened the floodgates, so... Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's nothing going to stop the emails flowing. Anyway.
That'll do it if you want to fill up our mailbox with your speculation and your theories and the things that you noticed about this episode and enjoyed. Severance at BaldMove.com. We're always listening. Just like Lumen. We also would love to have your support. Love you for to join the Bald Move family at support.baldmove.com.
It's going to be some rollicking. There's already been some rollicking discussions on our discords about this. It's a great place to hang out and talk TV and get access to that. Plus ad free feeds and a ton of other bonus stuff by going to support.baldmove.com. That's going to do it for us here at the Waffle Potty for this week. Can't wait for the next episode. We'll be back next week. Until then, I'm Aaron. And I'm Jim. See ya. you