Imagine if this was the first episode of the new season you got to see. You’d be so confused! There’s a child sitting in front of a horrifying painting. One of the team members is missing. The boss has been replaced. And no one is being very clear about what happened.
This is all to say, I have a lot of sympathy for our innies this week, and one of them in particular.
Spoilers for all of episode five, “Trojan’s Horse.”
Poor Helly is back for the first time all season. She’s greeted by Miss Huang, sitting cheerfully under the painting Kier Pardons His Betrayers. “Who the fuck are you?” Helly asks, which pretty much sets the tone for this week. Though it’s not full of revelations, like “Woe’s Hollow,” it is all the same full of what the fuck? moments.
The pacing and the tradeoff of this season so far—the revelatory episode followed by a genuine comedown, a difficult hour of people losing trust and struggling with the fallout—is fantastic. Give everyone all the awards, but especially Britt Lower, walking Helly’s stompy walk for real, again; and Adam Scott, for that last shot alone. But then there’s Christopher Walken as outie Burt, who we meet for the first time, and Zach Cherry giving Dylan a careful mix of anger and hurt. And Tramell Tillman, calibrating the ways Milchick takes feedback and the ways he does not, walking a careful line that almost seems to snap in the elevator with Mark. Milchick says fuck!!?? Milchick says fuck.
No Severance episode is about just one thing, but this one spends a lot of time with trust and the loss of it. It’s distilled in one of the many difficult scenes with Mark and Helly, when he asks how he can know that she’s who she says she is. You can’t, she says. He just has to trust her. Which is an innie problem, but also just a human problem, trusting that people are who they say they are, and mean what they say, and have your best (or at least decent) interests in heart. This is an exaggerated, terrible version of real life, because it is real life for the innies. A fraught, streamlined, confusing, intense version of real life, in which they could just put their heads down and do their jobs—as Mark seems to want to do in order to avoid all the complications—or they could try to understand the world and their place in it.
Every Mark and Helly scene this week is hard to watch. Mark is so brittle, he’s almost like his outie self: Shaped by trauma, loss (of trust rather than of a person), and shutting himself off from the people who want to support him. (It made me wonder, a little, if an innie, over the course of years, could somehow reintegrate just by becoming more like their outie.) He reacts the same way to pain, innie or outie.
While it’s more than fair for him to be upset, it is still hard to watch him push Helly away. We know she’s Helly, not Helena; we heard the elevator ding. But this poor woman is absolutely at sea: Irving is gone, Mark is being a jerk for reasons she doesn’t understand, Milchick is in charge, there’s a tween bossing her around, and—and!—Dylan just casually throws out the fact that her outie is an Eagan who was spying on the rest of them. Helly doesn’t even know how long it’s been. No one sits her down and tells her everything; tidbits just spill out in rushed and loaded conversations, piecemeal, from their meeting with Milchick to the funeral for Irv. And then there’s the fact that the outie of the guy she’s into is married to the missing wellness counselor. It’s so much to deal with. Megan Ritchie is credited as the writer on this episode, and she did a masterful job with the discomfort that coats the whole thing. (And the scene with mirror image Helly! Just beautifully shot.)
And that discomfort really settles on Mark, who doesn’t trust Helly—but what’s more, and maybe worse, he doesn’t trust himself. He didn’t recognize her. He also didn’t recognize Miss Casey, which makes sense, logically, but has to feel very weird, emotionally. He may or may not really trust Reghabi; right now, he isn’t fully trusting Devon, as he hasn’t told her he’s trying out reintegration.
Devon is such a great character, and so necessary to this show: a little bit of a skeptic, a truth-teller, who doesn’t mince words. Her scene with Ricken is simple on the surface—he is totally willing to create Lumon propaganda in the name of financial gain; she’s horrified—but the language is all slightly off, slightly weird. There’s Ricken and his stilted word choices, and then there’s Devon ending the conversation with a terse “No thank you!” I keep reminding myself that Ricken also wrote a book about Kier. Does he want to ingratiate himself with Lumon? Has Devon told him any or all of what is going on with Mark?
In a way, Devon parallels Dylan, though she’s a little more tactful. Both are intolerant of bullshit; both have big hearts, though they’re unlikely to wear them on their sleeves. Dylan’s insistence on a funeral for Irving’s innie is both touching and sort of absurd—the absurdity emphasized by the alarming melon head (a black beauty watermelon is a real thing). But it’s his naive way of asking for time. No one on the severed floor is given any time to adjust to anything that’s just happened, but Dylan asks for it and gets it. A whole nine seconds of silence! And then Dylan’s perfect eulogy: “He put the dick in contradiction.”
It’s a great touch that Dylan’s insistence on the funeral is what leads him to the clue Irving left for him. Those of us (I know I wasn’t alone) who thought the relevance of the “Hang in there!” was about the OTC were wrong; it was much more concrete and simple than that. The directions to the Exports Hall/Testing Floor elevator, hidden behind the poster. A parting gift.
But: Does this mean Milchick wasn’t lying about there being no cameras or microphones in the break room? Either he was telling the truth, and Lumon doesn’t know that Irving hid the directions there, or he was lying, and Lumon knows and let Dylan find them anyway. It seems relevant that when Mark blows up at Helly, he says looking for Miss Casey doesn’t matter anymore because Lumon knows everything. But the things he says they know are the things that Helena told them, because she was there. She wasn’t there for Irv’s side quest.
I have a lot of questions about Milchick, actually, beyond whether or not he was lying about innie privacy (I assume he was, at least to some degree). Actually, I have questions about Lumon, and their monthly performance reviews that may last two to six hours. That is hell. That is a definition of hell. Even if you get to pick your lunch.
The development of Milchick from Ms. Cobel’s minion to department chief has been a journey that feels like it takes place in asides and suggestions. He’s subtle, he uses big words, and he can turn that smile on and off like nobody’s business. And every time it seems like he might actually care for the innies, even a little bit, something happens to turn it around. He clearly gets angry at them interrupting him in his office. He gives them their funeral (notably a choice that Miss Huang creepily disagrees with) but with only nine seconds of silence.
And then he has that performance review, which is bookended by two incredible conversations: Beforehand, he carefully asks Natalie about her reaction to the Kier paintings. His phrasing is precise, noncommittal but polite, questioning, gentle, offering a connection—and she gives him absolutely nothing. She doesn’t shut him down, but she doesn’t answer him, either. Maybe the board was listening.
The performance review seems important, but it’s interesting that we get the lead-up and the fallout, not the actual review. There’s just enough to demonstrate the intensity and absurdity: the mention of atonements, the fact that his failings range from “uses big words” to “calamitous ORTBO,” and Drummond’s insistence that Mark’s completion of Cold Harbor “will be remembered as one of the greatest moments in the history of this planet.”
This scene isn’t really even about Milchick, but about Lumon—because to Lumon, everything is about Lumon. The important thing is that Milchick “remember the severed workers’ greater purpose—and to treat them as what they really are.”
Okay, but what are they, Drummond?
Whatever we don’t see in that review, Milchick takes it to heart. His moment with Mark in the elevator is intense, ominous; he does not use his big words, because he does not need them. Mark deflects with vicious sarcasm (love the callback to the fake newspaper), but Milchick is determined to do his leash-tightening, no matter how unnecessary, or how much it repeats what Mark has already been through in this very bad, no good day. He even repeats Dylan’s question: Did you and Helly catch up? Milchick then turns the ORTBO happening around, making it sound like Mark is the one who did something deeply questionable, rather than the victim of Helena’s actions. (Milchick’s knowledge of their night together also underscores that yes, Lumon knows everything.)
Milchick emphasizes that Helena is the leader-in-waiting of Lumon, but sometimes she really doesn’t seem like it. Her meeting with Natalie and Drummond is a mirror to Milchick’s performance review, and both she and Milchick are at the mercy of the other people in the room (and those not in the room, whether the board or “Father”). Milchick is the stick, for Mark’s completion of Cold Harbor, and Helly is the carrot—whether Helena likes it or not.
It’s a bitter turn for Helena: Before, Helly wanted out and Helena said no; now, Helena does not want to go back down to the “fucking animals,” but Lumon believes Helly’s presence is necessary. Her father hasn’t been told exactly what happened on the ORTBO, but he encouraged her return to the severed floor. There are clear statements about how the innies aren’t seen as people, but does Lumon—do the Eagans—even see Helena as a person? Their cruelties don’t let her off the hook for what she did to Mark (and Helly, who had her identity stolen), but there are layers of control and abuse here. And cultiness, obviously. The work, after all, is mysterious and important.
(For the record, Milchick’s story about the Gråkappan is true, or at least true enough to be included in Charles the XI’s Wikipedia entry as “Swedish legend.” One assumes Helena did not know and does not give any fucks about an ancient Swedish king, though it is interesting that Milchick notes that Kier Eagan used to tour his “ether factories” in similar disguise.)
Out in the always-wintry world, outie Irv stacks his paintings (why?) and then goes back to his glowing phone booth (as dated as all the cars) and tells someone on the other end of the line that he thinks Lumon knew what his innie was up to. Which raises a pretty big question: How does outie Irv know what his innie was up to?
This is our first introduction to Burt’s outie, and I love him. He’s forthright and confident where innie Burt was shy and uncertain; he, quite understandably, wants to know why Irving appeared on his doorstep, shouting his name. It does seem a bit odd, though, that Lumon told him, in such detail, why he was let go (“an unsanctioned erotic entanglement”). Either Lumon told him that for a reason—maybe they want to see what happens?—or he knows more than he ought to.
Either way, I hope Burt’s invitation is sincere and aboveboard. It is so unusual, in this episode in particular, for someone to just come out and say something, that it is hard not to find it somewhat suspicious. But maybe he does just want to talk it though and understand what happened on the severed flood. With some expensive red wine to loosen tongues, of course.
For the third week in a row, the episode ends on a cliffhanger. The slowly reintegrating Mark begins to hallucinate (or remember!), seeing the halls of the severed floor instead of his own house; he hears Miss Casey calmly telling him things about himself. When he turns, she’s there, saying “Your outie is going to—” and that’s it. That’s it! Mark’s face is heartbreaking. It’s the first time all episode that he’s not wearing a mask of some sort, hiding all the things roiling under the surface of both innie and outie.
I really hope she’s not going to say “Your outie is going to be a father,” because there have been altogether too many horrible SFF pregnancies and I don’t know if I can take another one. But there are all those horrifying Kier babies in the opening credits. Would Severance be that obvious? We’ve got five episodes left in the season to find out.
Nine Second of Silence
- The opening! The opening is so disconnected and fascinating! Thank you, people of Reddit, for naming the song the cart-man is whistling: It’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” by Gordon Lightfoot. I have no theories about what that means. I do wonder why Felicia and her colleague seemed very tense about the cart-man’s arrival.
- I’m hung up on Mark telling Reghabi that eggnog “might be out of season.” Does he not know when eggnog is in season? Does he not know what season it is?
- Milchick was going to explain the Glasgow Block when the MDR team interrupted. Or was he? I want to know what he would have said.
- “If you’re taking feedback, I hate it.”
- It’s a bit alarming that Lumon already has mugs with all of the MDR team’s faces on them, if those are specifically broken out for funerals.
- Ricken’s book is wrong about at least one thing: The innies do wear watches, or at least innie Mark does; we see him switch from his outie to innie watch in the first season.
- I find it quite interesting that one of Milchick’s positives was that he received the Kier paintings “with grace.” Are we to conclude that not everyone else has done so?
- I remain unconvinced that Miss Huang is an actual child. I don’t know what is going on with her, but that line about not letting the innies feel like people was chilling.
- Two interesting lines repeat: Both Dylan and Milchik ask Mark variations on “Did you and Helly catch up?” and twice, Mark says someone is “not dead” just “not here”—he says it about Irving’s innie, and about Gemma.
