Warning: The review of Severance season 2 episode 9 will contain spoilers.

So many television shows use the penultimate episode of a season to produce the biggest shocks, but Severance episode 9 is all about building suspense for next week’s season 2 finale. With Mark’s (Adam Scott) completion of Cold Harbor imminent, our major players are coming together – or going apart, in some cases – as they seek to destroy or protect Lumon. Unlike so many of season 2’s installments, “The After Hours” moves along at a breakneck pace, so let’s get going on one of the show’s most densely packed offerings.

Fresh from her return off last week’s excursion, Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) is ready to offer whatever help she can to Mark and Devon (Jen Tullock) in his reintegration journey. It felt like such a throwaway bit of worldbuilding in season 1 when Devon encountered the strange wife of the senator at the birthing center, but apparently it holds the key to fixing Mark’s brain. How exactly this works will have to wait until next week, but it’s an intriguing development, almost veering into the supernatural. We only arrive there in the episode’s final minutes, but innie Mark gets switched on without the use of the overtime contingency, so there must be some kind of Lumon-related properties at work within the birthing center.

If there’s one unifying force within all of the plot threads in episode 9, it’s rebellion. Helly (Britt Lower) continues her rebellion by being the only one on the severed floor committed to finding the dark hallway. Even Milchick (Tramell Tillman) gets his own small bit of rebellion, telling Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) to “devour feculence” when the higher-ups get worried about Mark completing Cold Harbor in time. But Helly’s previous ally Dylan (Zach Cherry) can’t muster the energy to care because of his ongoing clashes against himself to win the affections of his own wife Gretchen (Merritt Weaver).

Everything with Dylan (both his innie and outie) and Gretchen this season has been A+ material, getting to the heart of the emotional damage that the severance procedure can cause. Innie Dylan, sweet as he is, proposes marries to Gretchen, but she rightfully turns him down since it simply wouldn’t be feasible for an innie to marry an outie. His only recourse is to submit a resignation request, and we’re left wondering if it will be accepted or not. Of course, the only other time we’ve seen the same request before was with Helly, and since she’s an Eagan, we don’t know how likely it is if we’ll ever seen innie Dylan again.

The same goes for Irving (John Turturro), who leaves the episode on a train to nowhere. Last we saw Irving, he had left a contentious dinner date with Burt (Christopher Walken) and Fields (John Noble), and his apartment was being broken into by Drummond. Early in the episode, Helena announces to her father that they have surveillance in place on Irving, and the next time we see him, Burt is waiting in his home. My theory after episode 6 that Burt was concealing his true self seems to have been at least partially accurate, since even the smallest bit of dialogue on Severance is extremely purposeful. Crucially, Irving asks “won’t Lumon come after you?” when Burt drops him at the train station, and Burt provides no answer.

I certainly hope that episode 9 is not the last we see of Irving, or John Turturro – or Christopher Walken, for that matter. Irving’s journey throughout these two seasons has been one of the more rewarding of Severance overall, and it would leave a gaping hole in the show going forward. He started out the show as the innie most knowledgeable about Kier, and stuck most closely to his teachings at every opportunity, and now both his innie and outie are openly working to expose Lumon. At the very least, we still don’t have an answer as to who Irving was calling from the pay phone earlier in the season, so here’s hoping we at least get that closure in the season finale.

Severance is a show where the sci-fi elements has mostly taken a back seat to the human drama, but it feels like the back half of season 2 has leaned more into some of the genre trappings. Dan Erickson and the creative team haven’t jumped the shark just yet, but all the talk of reincarnation and magical birthing centers has the potential to fall into silly territory. Thankfully episode 9 is more focused on the plights of our cast of characters, so we’ll have to eagerly wait and see which direction the season finale will take us.

• You Got Your Lost in My Severance!: There isn’t much to go on this week, but I can’t let the cold open go overlooked – specifically in the increasingly bizarre and depraved way that Helena Eagen prepares and eats a hard-boiled egg, one tiny, bite-sized sliver at a time. We always knew that the Eagen family was a bunch of weirdos but this confirms without a doubt that they must be stopped.