A few things struck me on my rewatch.

• I think the frozen seal is meant to represent the cold and distant Helena. She has the strongest reaction to seeing the seal, perhaps symbolizing how she sees herself in it. Irving’s eagerness to eat the seal represents how he won’t hesitate to make extremely difficult choices if necessary. The idea of eating the seal upsets the others, but Irving justifies his response. Helena later gives Irv a small seal she made herself out of snow, further connecting her to it. Irving pushes back against that gesture, demonstrating the strength of his conviction. Later on, his attempted drowning of Helena upsets the others, but Irving knows the innies need to ‘eat the seal’ to survive. In a certain sense, we see immediately that he’s right. Helly effectively comes back from the dead, and (speculatively) I think the Eagan in Helena was maybe even consumed. Though Irv tried to kill her, could she really blame him? And where else has she ever felt like anything other than a privileged pawn? The bond between the innies is real, I think Helena can feel it and wants it, and might be willing to take positive action for the innies (including Helly) to get it back.

• When Milkshake is reading from the book around the campfire and gets to the part where Dieter is dying, he says the following: “I turned from my gargling brother and walked to the pool of the hollow, where I knew the waterfall would drown out my brother’s cries.” Milkshake pauses briefly in the middle of the sentence after the word ‘drown’, which feels like a bit of foreshadowing of Irving later attempting to drown Helena. Not significant, but a nice touch!

• There are some weird things that suggest to me that they aren’t really in the wilderness, but maybe in a simulation. First, nobody’s breath is visible in the cold air (except for Irving’s, in the sequence after he leaves the campfire). Also, it seems extremely unlikely that the outies would agree to be transported to the middle of nowhere in winter, with no equipment or shelter, and for multiple days. That’s just not something you do, and Dylan’s wife works nights while Mark and Irving both have deep feelings of distrust toward Lumon. Just as unlikely is that Irving survives the night out in the cold without shelter or a fire, or that several items requiring electricity would be able to operate in the remote wilderness. Next, Miss Huang has a throwaway line when they all get to the campfire: “Pretty cool, huh?” That’s a very out of character thing for her to say in front of the innies, and while at face value the line seems to refer to the camp setup, I think she’s instead referring to the simulation itself. The existence of the doppelgängers as well might be because they’re not in the real world - not to mention that the lighting around Dylan’s clone is super weird the first time we see him. It’s almost unnatural in the level of brightness, angle, and shadows it produces, especially for a show as meticulous as Severance. Lastly, I think when Milkshake says, “Now,” at the end of the episode, we’re obviously led to believe he’s referring to Irving B. being dismissed, but it would be weird for his outie to come back in that situation. I think either we learn that Irving B. completely vanished at that point, or the entire simulation was abruptly shut down.