Spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t yet streamed Severance’s second Season 2 episode with an Apple TV+ subscription.
With every episode that’s come out thus far — 11 in total, with hopefully millions more on the way, I say non-hyperbolically — Severance has proven itself to be not just Apple TV+’s best original series to date, but among the medium’s upper echelon at large. Season 2’s second outing, “Goodbye, Ms. Selvig,” certainly didn’t drop the ball as it revealed just how much of what Mark learned during “Hello, Ms. Cobel” was based on reality: barely any of it. We don’t even know if Helly is actually Helly.
But one notion rang abundantly clear throughout the entire episode: Mark S. is so intrinsically important to Milchick and Lumon that an entirely new web of lies was created — including crafting newspaper fronts and lore-filled stop-motion videos — to convince Adam Scott’s Innie character to continue heading MDR for the sake of whatever the Cold Harbor project is. But all this focus on Mark as leader led me to reflect on the catalyst that got him to this point: Petey Kilmer.
Why Was Petey Previously Running MDR, And What Was He In Charge Of?
Far be it for me to ever assume that a company as large and opaque as Lumon would have only one ulterior motive at play regarding its severed employees, because I'm sure a network of motivations is guiding the non-severed overseers' actions. So I'll grant that a singular answer won't exist here, since the basic question of "What does MDR even do?" is still an overarching mystery.
All that said, I think it's both important and necessary to have a better grasp of Petey's professional role within Lumon, specifically where it compares (or doesn't) to Innie Mark's significance within the same office role. Let's take into account these perceived details:
- Mark is so important that Ms. Cobel broke protocol to get closer to his Outie
- A lot of pressure is on Milchick and Team MDR to achieve their goals, which the audience can assume are tied to the Cold Harbor visual at the end of the Season 2 premiere
- Mark's connection to Ms. Casey/Gemma appears to be vital to the Cold Harbor project and Cobel's own interests
- As opposed to Helly joining any other departments on the Severed Floor, the golden child of Lumon's CEO was specifically put onto Mark's team just after his de facto promotion
- Milchick pushed hard to make Innie Mark believe in the five-month time gap, even retconning Irving and Dylan's terminations and sending Helena back in to fulfill Mark's request
Knowing everthing that we do about Petey's story, which I'll admit isn't that much, I don't think Severance''s creative team set Yul Vasquez's character up as extremely vital to Lumon's clandestine schemes with MDR. Though his reintegration-related hallucinations could have been based on moments that never happened, I think having those rather mundane office interactions revealed to be fictional would undermine the idea that reintegrations can work.
Plus, in the time since Mark took over MDR, Cobel and Milchick have appeared completely stressed out in ways they neither expected nor have ever dealt with before. Which makes me think neither has ever had to go beyond basic efforts to keep Petey and his own predecessors placated, and that Petey's personal life wasn't so directly connected to his Innie the way that we've seen with the core characters.
1. Severance’s Patricia Arquette Told Me What Ms. Cobel Was Thinking When Mark Confronted Her, And Now I See Her Character In A New Light
2. Miss. Huang Is One Of Severance Season 2's Biggest Surprises, And The Cast Told Me Their Thoughts On Her
3. Keanu Reeves' Uncredited Severance Season 2 Cameo Is My Favorite Example Yet Of How Psychological And Brilliant This Show Is
With all of that taken into account, I can't quite tell if we're meant to understand that Cold Harbor has been an ongoing project that Petey was unwittingly in charge of, with or without the Mark/Gemma connection as its main purpose, or if he was making sure some other plan was put into effect that he was most ideally suited for.
Either way it went, Petey still got wind of something evildoer-esque happening, thus sparking him volunteering for the reintegration process in the first place. Within the context of this show's layered narrative, it would make sense for Petey to have been in charge of something as equally groundbreaking as whatever Cold Harbor is, but I don't get the feeling that he was.
If Mark suddenly went missing without anyone being able to contact him, followed relatively shortly after by a dead head of security, I can only imagine that Lumon higher-ups would be on full alert with undercover operatives scouring the streets of Kier and beyond, in opposition to the seeming lack of an effort in finding Petey and keeping him alive, or keeping him from talking more. Cobel wasn't even officially tasked with the morbid job of retrieving the chip from Petey's brain, but did it anyway for her own reasons.
Maybe these questions and avenues of thought are completely pointless and irrelevant to the point of the show as a whole, which I'll easily allow given the scope of everything else. But it's precisely that meticulous attention to detail that compels me to believe learning more about Petey would help inform what makes Mark so special to his employers.
But now it's time to start preparing this month's signature syrup flavor for the Waffle Party, so remember to watch new episodes of Severance every Friday on Apple TV+.
