What’s up with Severance’s goat room? The clues are… muddled

Severance season 2 takes viewers to a previously unseen area of the Lumon severed floor: Mammalians Nurturable, where a herd of goats is grazing and is tended to by a sizable workforce. The goat room also introduces us to an all-new character played by guest star Gwendoline Christie, the apparent senior member of the Mammalians group.

Mark and Helly’s excursion to the goat room leads to many new questions — mainly, What the hell is up with that goat room?

We previously saw the room adjacent to the goat room in season 1, when Mark and Helly went on a “mental health walk” in “The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design.” In that episode, Mark and Helly encounter a caretaker feeding a room full of baby goats. Wyatt the Goat Wrangler (played by Brian Rock) tells Mark and Helly, “They’re not ready. You can’t take them yet. They’re not ready. It isn’t time!”

Gwendoline Christie’s unnamed character greets Mark and Helly with a similar assumption regarding their arrival: “Are you here to kill me?” she asks while wielding an onion shear. Intriguingly, the goat room leader seems rather matter-of-fact about her possible fate, and later tells the MDR visitors that the goat room staff is not afraid of them. Which makes sense: There are a lot of people working there. More than 20 staffers — including the return of the Goat Wrangler — appear to be involved in the raising and breeding of goats.

The goat room herders seemingly confirm they are severed employees. One recounts a session with Ms. Casey in which he learned that his outie was skilled at stargazing, at least acknowledging that they don’t stay down here forever (to their knowledge). But the innies of the goat room are much more disheveled and dirty than other Lumon staff; some appear to have skin conditions. Like other aspects of Lumon, some of the herders appear to be holdovers from another time period, based on their grooming and clothing.

Perhaps most interesting is the manner of speech Christie’s character uses. Like Jame Eagan, who earlier this season scolded Helena Eagan with the insult “fetid moppet,” she uses anachronistic language. She speaks of not abiding “fripperies” and refers to the sketch of Ms. Casey as a “page of paper.” She warns that they’ve “[sent] a courier to inform Mr. Milchick of your inquiry.” Yes, many Lumon employees have unusual speaking habits, but Christie’s goat room character stands out in how closely she echoes Eagan’s bygone vocabulary.

The goat room employees appear to have some connection with another division at Lumon. Like the Optics and Design team, they wear green badges. They likewise suspect the Macrodata Refinement team of being marsupials. And similar to O&D, our first glimpse of their department back in season 1 belies their true size; we went from knowing of one goat herder to nearly two dozen, just like the reveal of the expansive O&D group.

So where does all that leave us? Goat imagery has shown up throughout Severance. An adult male goat-person appears in the painting of Kier Eagan taming the four tempers, with the goat representing the temper Malice. The same temper was represented by a goat-masked dancer at Dylan G.’s waffle party. There’s also a bust of a goat head in Devon and Ricken’s home. One astute Severance viewer noticed comparisons to the show’s themes and Arthur Machen’s 19th-century novel The Great God Pan, a reference to the Greek god of shepherds and hunters who is part man, part goat. Other theories posit that the goats being raised on Lumon’s severed floor are temporary hosts to the brains of dead Eagan family members, and that the Board that never speaks cannot because they are preserved in goat bodies; or that if Lumon is experimenting with cloning technology, it’s utilizing goats. Those Lumon goats certainly appear to be well cared for, free roaming and being hand fed by severed employees.

Those theories certainly make an exchange between Mark and Helly in season 1 more interesting. In “The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design,” after the encounter with the Goat Wrangler, Helly asks, “What if the goats are the numbers? Like, we’re deciding which goats live and which ones… Oh, God.” To which Mark replies, “I doubt it’s that.”

An earlier exchange between those two may be even more illuminating. When Helly R. is having her contentious orientation in Severance’s very first episode, she asks Mark S., “Am I livestock? Did you grow me as food, and that’s why I have no memories?” To which Mark incredulously responds, “You think we grew a full human, gave you consciousness… did your nails? No, you’re not livestock. Good lord!”

Only one thing’s for certain: As with many episodes of Severance, we’re left with just as many new questions as we are answers.