The Box Set: "Severance: Season Two."

Deconstructing Ep. 2, "Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig."

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This is a weekly examination of each new “Severance” episode. It contains spoilers, so if you haven’t watched, come back when you have.

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It seems a little early in the “Severance” second season to have a placeholder episode or even take a pause, so on the positive side I’d say three interesting things happened in “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig,” and none of them were about Mrs. Selvig/Ms. Cobel.

If the first episode was essentially “we’re back; wow, what happened out there?,” then the second episode is a perspective shift retelling of that with Milchick having to fix more of his mistakes (this time rehiring those he fired, but we already knew they were rehired in the first episode, so this was just watching it happen). As a thematic bonus to fixing mistakes, Helena has to make a mea culpa video and calls the whole thing a bad joke that revolved around drinking and side effects of her medication.

That, too, is not really going forward, so viewers are probably left doing what they did the previous week, which is wondering if that’s really Helena down in Macrodata Refinement pretending to be Helly, or Helly lying about what her innie learned/saw in the outie world (that she was Helena; boo!) because mentioning that would be a good way to lose all her friends.

No, mostly this was a simple episode with precious few sterling moments. Among them: a brief scene of (a possibly crying/distraught) Burt out in the world, tracking down Irving; Milchick riding a bad ass retro motorcycle at top speed on icy streets; and the most revealing bit, which was Helena saying that nothing matters more than Mark finishing the macrodata file he’s working on called “Cold Harbor,” which he’s 68 percent finished with, which in turn proves into the mid-90 percent range that “Severance” isn’t just irreverent David Lynch-ian reverence about weirdness, but perhaps a show that’s actually about something.

And that leads to a question worth exploring: Is that what fans want?

Not “Twin Peaks.”

Let’s unload some of that: