Warning: This review of Severance season 2 episode 6 will contain spoilers.

Fun fact: episode 6 of Severance season 2 was the last which AppleTV+ had distributed to most critics in advance of the show’s premiere. And with the final moments arriving in the shocking fashion as they do, I can understand why. Within the world of the show, reintegration has always felt like a kind of trial-run procedure – especially given what happened to Petey last season. So to see Mark (Adam Scott) rushing through the terrifying process first-hand makes us understand just how great the stakes are.

Every one of our major players is going through some existential crisis in “Attila”, and it’s all Severance at its best. I find everything with Helly (Britt Lower) this week the most compelling, especially with Lower’s continuously excellent performance. Mark comes clean about having sex with Helena during the ORTBO to Helly, which throws her for a loop about her feelings for him, especially after learning the truth of Helena’s infiltration last week. Helly feels even more like a prisoner in her own body, her outie using her and her story to further Lumon’s nefarious goals. So she takes the opportunity to have her own sex with Mark, taking back her power in one of the only ways she knows she can. Helly, and by extension the MDR team, may not be much closer to discovering the whereabouts of Ms. Casey/Gemma (Dichen Lachman), but Helly reclaiming her own agency, and deepening her relationship with Mark, is her own small act of rebellion.

All of this gets infinitely more complicated when Helena pays outie Mark a visit at the Chinese restaurant. As Mark gets closer and closer into reintegration, he has to be careful to reveal how much he knows, and Adam Scott plays it all to perfection. On the reverse side of the coin, Helena seems more smitten with Mark, perhaps hoping that their experience at the ORTBO could lead to a more genuine connection – even going so far as to suggest she bring him home to her father. But Lower masks it all under the guise of corporate sincerity, with an underpinning of a little girl’s first love (she does note she’s never brought a boy home to her parents). Even if Helena doesn’t explicitly give anything away, Mark rightfully senses that something is up and quickly, rashly goes forward with the next step in the reintegration process with Dr. Reghabi (Karen Aldridge).

The centerpiece scene of the episode, which perhaps carries Severance‘s thesis statement in a nutshell, revolves around Irving (John Turturro) having dinner at Burt’s (Christopher Walken) and Fields’s (John Noble) home. We finally get an answer of how Burt came to Lumon, and it’s a conversation rife with philosophical questions about redemption and fate. Burt became severed because Fields was worried that his past actions would keep him from getting to heaven, so he believes, since innies have their own separate souls, he’ll have a better chance at salvation. John Noble is incredible in his first Severance appearance, playing into the hurt of a jilted lover, while carrying the same unbridled menace he so memorably brought to the role of Denethor in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

We also can’t overlook the “confusion” between Burt and Fields over how long ago Burt began working at Lumon. Walken’s sinister screen presence goes a long way in perpetuating the feeling that something is up, but Severance is nothing if not a very purposeful show in nearly every facet, so it can’t be fully attributed to too much wine. Whenever a character exits a show – in the ways that Walken and Turturro’s characters did – it can feel like the creators grasping at straws to find ways to bring them back into the fold. With Burt and Irving, their involvements in season 2 have felt like organic extensions of the stellar material set up in season 1. How much they’ll factor in the remainder of the season remains to be seen, but their scene in “Attila” was easily a standout.

We don’t see much from Dylan (Zach Cherry) or Milchick (Tramell Tillman) within episode 6, but there’s still plenty of material to chew on for both of them. Dylan has another session with Gretchen (Merritt Weaver), where he gets even closer to her, while the gulf between her and his outie continues to grow. Meanwhile, Milchick is still reeling from receiving his performance review last week. There was a moment, after he was gifted the Kier paintings in episode 3, when it was an open question whether Milchick would remain an enemy, or become our heroes’ ally in their quest for Ms. Casey. Episode 6 shows that he’s taking the menial criticism in the worst way, and perhaps becoming an even more staunch believer in Lumon and Kier. Tillman has already had some Emmy clip-worthy moments in season 2, but his pep talk with himself in the mirror may be the front-runner so far.

Besides being a showcase for almost the entire cast, Severance episode 6 is an Emmy-worthy opportunity for director Uta Briesewitz. I don’t know any other way to depict the disorientation that Mark feels as the reintegration takes its hold of him, but the quick cuts and hallucinations he sees gives the whole episode a haunting feeling. The overwhelming tension in virtually every scene is mostly thanks to Briesewitz’s direction, even when it’s not the flashiest material of season 2 so far.

Everything comes to a head in the final moments, when Mark has what appears to be a stroke and collapses on the floor. Severance is a bold show, but there’s no way the creative team would give Mark the Petey treatment at this point. If anything, the ending shows just how volatile and dangerous the procedure is, and it’ll provide a great deal of drama for the remaining 4 episodes of season 2.

• You Got Your Lost in My Severance!: There’s a brief scene at the onset of episode 6 with Milchick and Ms. Huang (Sarah Bock), where he dangles that she may not be “Winter Tide material.” As with Cold Harbor, we don’t really know what Winter Tide is, or really much about Ms. Huang and her increasingly bizarre role within the show.