Spoiler alert! Major spoilers ahead for Severance’s second season, so if you’re not caught up, be sure to stream episodes with your Apple TV+ subscription.
The second season of Severance has come to an end on the 2025 TV schedule, and while I will certainly be thinking about Gemma in that heartbreaking final scene until Severance Season 3 premieres, there’s another Lumon employee who I can’t get off of my mind: Dylan. Zach Cherry's character was developed so much this season, which became especially apparent when I revisited the series premiere. Knowing everything we do now, there’s one joke in “Good News About Hell” that’s taken on a whole new meaning.
Severance Season 1: It was a simpler time. After enduring the literal torture of “Chikhai Bardo” and everything that followed in Season 2, I was craving the blissful ignorance of finger traps and the coveted-as-fuck egg bar. It healed my soul to hear Irving quip, “Hi, kids. What’s for dinner?” However, where Dylan’s smart-ass response would normally have elicited a chuckle, now the question he asks forces my brain down a Dylan rabbit hole.
Dylan’s Sarcastic Takedown Has Deeper Meaning After Learning More About His Outie In Season 2
The first time we meet Lumon’s MDR employees, we immediately get a sense of both their individual personalities and their rapport with each other. Like in many workplaces, the macrodats operate like something of a dysfunctional family, and it’s pretty funny to see that the greeting from Irving (John Turturro) has irked his colleagues, particularly Zach Cherry’s Dylan, for a while.
Mark (Adam Scott) points out how confusing the “What’s for dinner?” question is, asking Irving, “Like, did the kids make you dinner in this scenario?” Which prompts Dylan to chime in with:
Yeah. What kind of a shit dad are you?
Now back in 2022, that was just a dumb joke, and Dylan taking Irving’s dinner question so literally just spoke to the simple humor of the unworldly innies. But that was before we knew more about Dylan’s outie and the kind of dad he is.
It Turns Out Outie Dylan’s Fathering Skills Might Be Less-Than-Ideal
Not only do we find out later in Season 1 that Dylan is the only one of the macrodats with children (other than Petey, who is no longer with Lumon by the start of the series), we find out that — to put it bluntly — he’s kind of a shit dad.
Maybe that’s being too harsh. We definitely don’t see Dylan treating his three children terribly or really even neglecting them, but we don’t see him playing with them or interacting with them either.
It’s more that his general lack of motivation feels all-encompassing, and I think his watching TV and forgetting to bake the store-bought cookie dough is meant to speak more to his overall contribution to his and Gretchen’s home life.
So while Gretchen (Merritt Wever) graciously says that her husband “never quite found his thing,” we know that innie Dylan has a higher standard for his outie and would no doubt stand by his questions about his other half being “dumb,” “a dick,” and/or “kind of a fuck-up.”
Everything Changed For Innie Dylan When He Learned He Had Children On The Outside
However, back in Season 1, we didn’t know this about Dylan. While his outie was struggling to find satisfaction in his life away from Lumon, we only knew of his innie, who was thriving down on the severed floor. He didn’t know life could have a bigger purpose until Milchick (Tramell Tillman) activated the Overtime Contingency to find the card Dylan had stolen from O&D.
Waking up in his outie’s closet and having his son run in to hug him changed absolutely everything innie Dylan knew about his existence, and it was immediately obvious how important being a dad was to him. Perks like the Music Dance Experience no longer had meaning. He didn’t want a waffle party; he wanted to remember his kids being born! He all of a sudden has something to fight for.
That moment was the beginning of the whole Macrodat Uprising, which changed all of the innies’ lives forever, and I think not only was that passion to be a good dad in Dylan’s innie all along, I think he helped rekindle it in his outie.
I Think Innie Dylan Got His Outie To Stop Taking His Family For Granted
There’s been lots of discussion from the characters, the writers and the fans of Severance about how much of an innie’s personality bleeds through from the outside. What personality traits can’t be erased by bifurcating your brain? I think that shot fired at Irving in Season 1, Episode 1 was a big clue into how Dylan operates.
Joking or not, innie Dylan’s first thought when Irving asked, “What’s for dinner?” was to wonder about the welfare of his colleague’s theoretical children. His innie acted like a dad before any of us (even him) knew he was one.
Even in Season 2, while everyone was perplexed by the fact that Ms. Huang was a child, Dylan was the only one who asked if she needed help, saying in “Who Is Alive?”:
I don't mean to impugn. It's just like, are you OK, you know? They're not, like, forcing you to be here, are they?
Dylan’s innie had a painful end to the season. He fell in love with Gretchen and then got dumped for his own loser outie. However, in doing that, it sounds like the “affair” was the wakeup call outie Dylan needed.
The anguished cry of, “Gretchen!” will never stop ringing in my ears, but it probably was the happiest ending we could have hoped for from this bizarre love triangle. Despite what he said, innie Dylan couldn’t provide for Gretchen, but he did inspire his outie to be a better husband and, in turn, a better father.
That crack about Irving’s presumably nonexistent children was just the first of many hilarious insults hurled good-naturedly at Dylan’s MDR brethren, and I think it’s pretty crazy that even when we knew so little about what was happening inside or outside of Lumon that these characters’ complexities were already being formed.
That said, I don’t know if Dylan joking about Irving being a “shit dad” was an intentional clue into the innie’s conscience or his outie’s guilt, but given it was one of the first things we heard from Zach Cherry’s character, it definitely feels more loaded after seeing him grow so much over two seasons.
After the Severance Season 2 finale, I have no idea where Ben Stiller, Dan Erickson, and their new showrunners and writers will go next with one of the best shows on Apple TV+, but I hope they continue to develop such well-rounded stories for these complex characters.
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