Severance Season 2: Who Is Asal Reghabi and What Is Reintegration?
An important figure from Lumon's past just popped up in Severance season 2, but you may have forgotten all about her.
Played by Karen Aldridge, Asal Reghabi is a key figure on Severance (and not just because her name sounds the most like a Star Wars character of anyone in the cast). First introduced in season 1 episode 6 āHide and Seek,ā Reghabi was a Lumon employee who went rogue. She appears to have worked for the company in a scientific or biomedical capacity as she claims to have installed the severance chip in several employeeās brains ā including in Markās (Adam Scott).
Now she works against Lumon by developing experimental āreintegrationā technology that will un-do the severance process and make severed employees whole once again. Itās because of this reintegration work that her path crosses with Mark. Early on in season 1, outtie Mark is contacted by his old work friend Petey Kilmer (Yul Vazquez). Petey claims to be undergoing the reintegration procedure and wants Markās help in joining a resistance against Lumon. Unfortunately Petey eventually dies from complications of reintegration.
When Mark turns on a cellphone that Petey left behind, he immediately receives a phone call from Reghabi and agrees to meet with her in an old lab building at Ganz College. Before Mark can get much information, he is approached by Lumon thug Doug Graner (Michael Cumpsty) who Reghabi promptly beats to death with a baseball bat. She instructs Mark to go home while she handles Granerās body and assures him that theyāll meet back up again at some point to āfinish what Petey started.ā
āWe were interrupted, if you recall,ā Reghabi tells Mark in this episode of their first meeting. Indeed we do now recall.
Reghabi arrives to Markās home in Severance season 2 and convinces him not do something dumb by burning a message on his retinas for his innie to read. Apparently the āswitchā from outtie to innie dilates the pupils to provide a clean visual slate anyway. Instead, Reghabi advocates for Mark to do something arguably even dumber to get information in and out of Lumon: attempt reintegration.
As Reghabi tells it, reintegration is a way to sew together the innie and outtie consciousnesses. We saw a little how that worked in season 1 when Petey, despite quitting the MDR floor on Lumon, was still able to access some fractured memories from the inside. Of course, Petey also paid dearly for those memories, something that Reghabi is eager to explain away to Mark.