Mark’s transition from innie to outie is smoother than the others because he starts off in a vaguely familiar situation. He’s talking to Harmony (Patricia Arquette), who his outie knows as his batty neighbor Mrs. Selvig. Mark doesn’t make much of this but finds an excuse to leave the conversation. He runs into his sister, who he briefly mistakes for his wife. This episode sneaks in so many small moments expressing the innies’ tentative hopes, and Mark’s hope for a family is one of the sweeter, sadder ones. He’s pretty thrilled to discover he does have a family of sorts, and that his brother-in-law wrote the book that changed his life inside Lumon.

The scene at the reading is one of the episode’s most intense, since Mark keeps trying to speak with his family privately to explain that he’s actually his innie, but keeps getting sidelined by silly book event-related issues. By the time he finally tells Devon (Jen Tullock) that Lumon needs to be investigated, their conversation is cut short by the realization that Harmony is Mrs. Selvig, and she now has Devon’s baby. The family tears out after her, only for Mark to realize soon after that Harmony left the baby safely in a bedroom. Still, it’s one of the episode’s freakier moments, and Tullock is excellent as a mother realizing just how fully this woman has invaded her life.

There’s a sweetness to Mark’s plot that’s missing from the others in this episode. You get the sense he doesn’t need to be severed at all, because he feels instantly at home in his outie’s world. When Devon tells him he used to be a history professor, but got the procedure after losing his wife in a car crash, you can sense some deeper understanding of self click into place within Mark. He’s been on a journey of self-discovery all season, and now, he seems to easily and empathetically reconcile his two halves.