And here we are at the S2 finale. I’m writing this almost a week in advance and don’t expect many people to read it. But I wanted to get some thoughts out before seeing the final episode.

Will it be as good as “The We We Are”? Will Gemma get out? Will Ricken and Devon confront each other over Lumon? Will Milchick and Natalie join forces to overthrow Lumon? Who is outie Irving calling from that pay phone? Will we find out why Jame Eagan said “My Helly” when he surprised Helly R in the office last week, causing me to feel like my skin was made of centipedes? Will we finally be told what the MDR group is doing, and if Mark S has been contributing unwittingly to Gemma’s destruction? Will Helly and/or Milchick and/or Dylan and/or Devon and/or Irving and/or Cobel show up with a flamethrower? What’s up with the board? And wherefore the goats?

Obviously there’s a lot that can’t be answered satisfactorily in an hour, so thank goodness there’s another season in the offing. But, as many people pointed out last week, the seams have been showing somewhat this year, and there’s still quite a bit unresolved from S1. That plus the fact that “The We We Are” belongs in the pantheon of spectacular season finales means there’s a lot riding on this episode. Looking back over S2 there are more than a couple of things I would have changed or eliminated, particularly early on. (If Balaban or Shawkat shows up in a meaningful way in this episode I’ll happily eat crow.)

Eventually there needs to be some kind of resolution with the Petey/Reghabi/outie Mark/outie Irving/outie Burt storyline. You can’t “fire” the best friend of your protagonist in the pilot and not have that eventually mean something. You also can’t have someone who clearly knows about both the outie and innie experience at Lumon put someone who seems to know about both the innie and outie experience at Lumon on a train to nowhere and just leave it at that.

Frankly there’s a huge amount of S1 outie Mark’s Lumon resistance that has been totally abandoned in S2. I have no problem with “Save Gemma” becoming Mark’s primary motivation — of course that’s his priority once he finds out she’s still alive. But the fact that (IIRC) we haven’t seen him share anything he learned from Petey with people who are trying to help him is a problem.

(At this point I pretty much won’t be satisfied unless Mark and Irving compare notes. The four core outies plus Devon, Gretchen, and Ricken (plus possibly Gemma and – almost certainly – Burt) know Milchick and almost the same number of them know Cobel, but for now Mark and Irv are the only two Lumon employees we know of who are fighting on the outside (outie Burt is TBD).)

Obviously not everything that happens on screen has to be Deeply Meaningful. For example, as of this writing Devon’s child is a plot device (and there’s an argument to be made that Ricken is, too). But in a genre show like this you have to be careful about how many things you introduce and then discard (or how long you wait to have them pay off) because the audience is always going to be looking for clues.

I assume this week we’ll finally learn what Cold Harbor means. Going forward I (so far) trust the showrunners not to fuck it all up. I’m guessing we won’t learn all we want to in this episode and that’s not necessarily a bad thing; lots of shows have tied a bow on finales leaving them nowhere to go the next season. But I am going to want to see some indication that storylines haven’t been abandoned.

Spoiler Policy: remains in effect. I’m all for people guessing what might come next, but I still want people who want to remain totally unspoiled to feel free to participate.