I was not expecting the “slow” episode after those 2 high tension ones to feel like a hug but here we are. It's not even a "happy" episode by any means, it's just what seeing my own grief treated carefully feels like.

• Free Devon 2025 remains tragically relevant.
• Helly’s isolation after coming back is hitting some personal rough spots, and the weight it’s being given as an act of cruelty towards her is flooring me. She doesn’t know she was raped. She doesn’t know Helena raped Mark S. The way it doesn’t even quite hit for Mark S. until Milchick corners him in the elevator over it before sending him up mid-panic attack…
• Mr. Milchick, don’t turn to reactionary violence against your comrades when the cognitive dissonance hits, you’re so sexy aha. (Natalie’s silence, Ms. Huang’s needling, all of it was just so appalling… Punch up, dude. Punch up and get the fuck out. You can’t reform Eugenics inc.)
• Dylan’s speech for Irving, like Mark’s private eulogy for Gemma in season 1, like Ms. Casey returning it at the end of this episode, like Dylan’s speech, like Irving Bailiff pressing his hand against his paintings like Mark did against the tree that took Gemma: I loved this person, and now they’re gone. They were picky, and they were strange, wonderful people, and the tangling of our lives changed us forever in ways we could not predict. I love you. I miss you. I carry you in who I am after you.

I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
soft as it began:
I loved my friend.

• I’ve been dreading a string-of-fate plot for outie Irving and Burt, and this reveal has been possibly the most meaningful thing to me in their quadrant of the show. It was a kindness that warmed me whole. I think the two of us down there might have loved each other. Mine got sacked a few weeks ago over it / Mine got fired as well (they’re dead; we made them, and we hoped they’d be happier than us, and now they’re dead). / Come by my place and have dinner with me and my husband. You don’t have to do this alone. You are a stranger, but I am choosing, deliberately, to offer you a community to lean on. We cared about those versions of us we never even met. They loved each other. They deserve this attempt at connection.
• Irving B., even while literally erased from physical record in the office down to the desk and the photos, leaves a message for Dylan, beating himself up for letting the company kill him, for not listening, and for not helping. Such an act of love. You wanted me to live until I figured out exports, and I got myself killed before that, and I’m sorry. But you can still do this; you still have a place in this office and in the world. You stayed behind. You always do. You can find a way out for all of us.
• Mollified by that last shot of Mark. I’ve mentioned the list of lovable idiosyncrasies as presented by Outie Facts, but it really hit me that… We just don’t know who Mark was before the grief for Gemma ate him away.