Severance Season 2 Episode 9 Review: The After Hours

Things are coming together or falling apart depending on how you look at it on Severance Season 2 Episode 9, “The After Hours.”

On one hand you have Mark and Devon finally getting some help from Cobel, so hopefully Mark won’t die. On the other hand, just about everyone else on the show is spiraling out.

While Mark is waiting for Cobel, everyone in Lumon is panicking because Cold Harbor is supposed to be completed that day and he’s nowhere to be found. Helly, Milchick, and Drummond all want to know where he is and the tension is palpable. 

The only person who doesn’t seem to care about Mark is Dylan, whose storyline has taken such a depressing turn. If you needed another tragic reminder of how much the innies don’t matter it’s Dylan’s outie’s wife rejecting him despite the fact she even admits to her own husband that the innie is a better version of Dylan.

Zach Cherry usually has to play the comedic beats, so seeing him play Dylan in such despair is a reminder of how versatile an actor he is.

Dylan, who used to be the most outspoken defender of their rights, is led to resigning AKA committing suicide. The show leaves it open-ended if we’ll ever see his innie again but there’s a tone of finality throughout the episode.

That extends to Irv as well, who finds Burt searching through his investigations that apparently identified Burt as a Lumon goon. Admittedly the “Burt is secretly evil,” plot felt incredibly rushed and forced this season, but it’s still a major betrayal to fans. 

We also don’t really get a good look at who Irv was working with or what he had found. It’s a very anticlimactic ending for the character, if this is the end, wrapped in a beautiful love scene between two iconic actors.

Burt being willing to spare Irv’s life because the only good part of him, his innie, loved Irv counteracts the Dylan narrative of innies not being worthy of love. Still, they can’t be together, and Burt denies Irv’s final desperate pleas to want to know what love is like as an outie.

It really seems like they’re clearing the board on this show and we’ll be left with a Mark-Helly-Gemma love triangle. 

The only good news is Milchick finally snaps and tells Drummond to “devour feculence” when he gives him a hard time about his vocabulary. After spending most of the season being a jerk it’s nice to see him grow a spine and stand up to Lumon’s nonsense.

Now if only he was nicer to Miss Huang before she gets shipped off to the Arctic. It’s possible he sees his own weakness in her, as she displays emotion at Dylan’s resignation.

After slowing things down with the standalone Gemma and Cobel episodes, Severance uses its penultimate episode to speed us along to the finale. It’s a good thing for fans who were waiting for something to happen, but may make you question even more why it spent the last two episodes ignoring most of these characters.

Mark only cares about saving Gemma, so it’s hard as the audience to care about anything else too. When Adam Scott passionately delivers the line “She better be f*cking alive,” you feel it in your bones.

If she’s not, then what was the point of all of this?

Revisiting Helly after spending so much time on Gemma feels awkward because it’s not clear what her role is. Can she make a difference under Helena’s control? Will her search for the exports hall lead her to Gemma before it’s too late?

With only the season finale left, there’s a lot of the show’s legacy resting on how the search for Gemma ends. 

What did you think of this episode of Severance? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Severance airs Fridays on Apple TV+.

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