The Box Set: "Severance: Season Two."

Deconstructing Ep. 3, "Who Is Alive?"

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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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I think we just stumbled down a tiny hallway into the best “Severance” episode of the second season.

As expected, the series kicked it up a notch in the storytelling after a small lull in the last episode, and in the process raised a bunch of interesting questions, created new intrigue and pushed the plotting forward.

Even if you got a free 18-minute session with the wife you don’t know, it would be hard to top what we got in “Who Is Alive?”

Before the deeper dive, let’s string out the developments:

• Innie Dylan finally gets to meet his wife (guest star Merritt Wever) and in the process of seeing someone he’s never seen before except for moments prior on the screen, Dylan learns that 1) He can’t keep a job because he’s kind of a screw-up in the Outie world, 2) His wife loves him regardless — okay fine, he doesn’t seem to realize that immediately, 3) his kids have names and his wife has a photo of them all together, plus 4) “And we live on a cattle ranch?” Yeah, he got that one confused. It was a great scene and his wife Gretchen even said, first thing, “Who is that child?” in reference to Miss Huang, who is of course intently listening to everything and answering almost nothing.

• Mark very much wants to find out a lot more about the Innie life down at Lumon but top of his list is finding Ms. Casey/Gemma, his allegedly dead wife. This heightened pursuit by Mark is showcased in three different plans, each a little more bold than the last.

• You’re not going to silence Ms. Cobel that easily, forcing her to relocate into god knows where in god’s country — not when she’s got a bangin’ cassette in her deck inside the VW Rabbit. That said, Helena ends up calling her bluff but it’s very doubtful, with all that rage, that Ms. Cobel goes down easy.

• This episode makes a pretty strong case for those who believe Helly really is Helly down at work, and not Helena. Either that or Helena learned to fake it pretty easy and pretty fast.

• And yet — and YET — early on, when Mark and Helly stopped in a random corner of a random hallway and got all awkward, that version seemed like Helena, did it not? There seemed to be an urge to kiss (on Helly/Helena’s part, which is interesting enough on it’s own if that is indeed Helena, for the ramifications that it might induce; but more interesting because it looks like Mark is over that phase, sorry Red, and onto finding his real love, Gemma). Only later, once Mark and Helly re-found the Goat Room, did Helly seem more like herself. So, you decide.

• But of course that was all forgotten quickly BECAUSE THE GOATS HAVE THEIR OWN DISTINCTLY LUMON HALLWAY.

• The scene of Natalie introducing Milchick to the “inclusively re-canonicalized paintings” of Milchick as, drumroll, Black Kier, was arguably as great as the Dylan and wife scene, and certainly one that seems like a tiny bomb has gone off inside Milchick. “Oh, my.”

• After Mark tries to sear “Who Is Alive” into his retinas, Asal Reghabi, who we met in S1 as the surgeon formerly employed by Lumon who performed the “reintegration” surgery on Petey, returns to the show and tells Mark the only possible way to get a message from an Outie to an Innie remains unchanged — the reintegration surgery, which she claims she’s much better at after Petey’s ultimately failed badly and gruesomely, and Mark is now desperate enough to find out if Ms. Casey/Gemma is alive, he agrees to the procedure.

• Not a great idea for Mark, of course, but it’s a nice storytelling twist because if Asal Reghabi is, as she says, more advanced in her surgery techniques around reintegration, it we could have Outie Mark and Outie Helena pretending on the Lumon floor. Intriguing.

• It’s confirmed that Burt is not returning. But you should bet on Burt having a role to play soon enough, based on Ep. 2.

• Irving is tipped off that the hallway painting he cranks out repeatedly while listening to hardcore metal music, is actually called “the exports hall.”

• Ms. Cobel confirms that it was she who started the “Cold Harbor” project and recruited Mark for it.

That is certainly….a lot.

Let’s deconstruct what it means.

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