I’m bringing up the spoiler warning statement for Severance fans. Read it. Again:
I am thankful to have been warned of potential spoilers, my fall cut short by those with wizened hands. All I can be is thankful, and that is all I am.
I believe you mean it. Let’s get started!
Critics told us to expect something special from ‘Woe’s Hollow,’ and Season Two Episode Four delivered with an immersive cinematic experience. From the episode’s wide, sweeping exteriors to its ghoulish landscapes and dreamscapes, the Severance cast and crew made the most of this field trip into the great outdoors. Trading soulless fluorescent hallways for raw, snowy nature helped lay bare the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) team’s most honest and vulnerable selves.
From the opening seconds of the episode, it is clear that our Innies are standing on thin ice, both literally and figuratively. We open on a disoriented Irving B. (John Turturro, Fading Gigolo) coming into consciousness on a frozen lake below a threatening cliffside that evokes one of the Severed Floor’s cultish paintings: Kier Invites You to Drink of His Water. In fact, the “previously on” segment reminds viewers of this very painting, and a conversation between Irving B. and Burt G. (Chrstopher Walken, The Deer Hunter) about their shared fear that Kier might slip from the edge of a cliff as he surveys the valley below.
We soon learn that Irving B. and the rest of MDR are in fact slipping and sliding out of their comfort zones and toward their own independent natures, but first, their twisted Lumon handlers get a chance to freak them out a bit.
After the distant, echoing voice of Mark S. (Adam Scott, Parks and Recreation) ) coaxes Irving B. off of the ice and up to the nearby cliffside, MDR reunites for a corporate retreat of sorts. Helly R. (Britt Lower, High Maintenance) claims to have awakened on the nearby path and a distraught Dylan G. (Zach Cherry, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) runs out of the woods. Before the gang can orient themselves, they notice a corporate AV cart in the distance and find themselves watching a video orientation starring Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman, Barron’s Cove). It turns out that our favorite Innies have found themselves in the Dieter Eagan National Forest to partake in an Outdoor Retreat and Team Building Occurrence (ORTBO).
Their mission? Retrieve the Fourth Appendix from Scissor Cave, “the very same grotto where Kier Eagan tamed the four tempers for the first time,” and use it to guide them in their voyage to Woe’s Hollow.
Just in case those instructions weren’t unsettling enough, Mr. Milchick also gives them a little fairytale-esque warning: “Steer not from Kier’s path, lest you roil nature’s wrath.” It’s also worth noting that the team is promised help along the way which comes in the form of creepy human husks that seem to be near-perfect doubles of each member of the MDR team. We’ll dig into this development down in the Tempering the Evidence section.
It’s clear to viewers that this whole excursion has been curated to terrify the MDR team and get them back in line; it even seems clear to our formerly gullible Innies, who are more confused than awed by the Fourth Appendix tale of Kier and his brother Dieter going to the woods to live deliberately. What starts as an American Romantic tale of two brothers putting the trappings of civilization behind them turns into a tale of Dieter’s dark seduction to nature and his ensuing death and transformation. It’s horrific and solemn. It also may be a Lumon storytelling device contrived to help Helena Eagan perform her best Helly R. impersonation.
Soon after locating the Fourth Appendix, the team completes the hike to Woe’s Hollow (site of “the tallest waterfall in the world” according to Lumon’s corporate manipulation) and finds that Mr. Milchick and Ms. Huang (Sarah Bock, Bruiser) have prepared a nice little glamping expedition, complete with custom marshmallows bearing Kier’s visage and a moonlight theremin recital from Ms. Huang. The site is cozy and the tents have incredible mood lighting — but things take a turn when Mr. Milchick reads the shocking and bloody conclusion of the tale of Dieter Eagan and his exploding head (interpret this metaphor as you will).
Helly R. mocks the story’s simplistic moralizing, because despite the serious tone, it’s ultimately just a story built around punishing Dieter for masturbating. She manages to get Mark and Dylan to laugh along and pontificate about what type of vegetable Dieter’s genitals became during his transformation. It ruins the sanctity of the event and prompts Mr. Milchick to cancel the festivities: “Marshmallows are for team players…they don’t just hand them out.” More importantly, though, the crudeness of the joke doesn’t quite feel like Helly’s brand of humor. For Irving B., it’s the last domino to fall in his ongoing suspicion that Helly isn’t Helly. He’s right. By the end of the episode, we get definitive confirmation that we have spent all of season two with an undercover Helena Eagan.
Irving B. gets more and more irritable, and points his anger toward the ongoing flirtation between Helena and Mark S. Ultimately, Helena makes a fatal mistake when she strikes back against this onslaught by reminding Irving B. that he will never see the love of his life, Burt G., ever again. It’s cruel. Helena doubles down on that cruelty when she sculpts an (admittedly adorable) snow seal for Irving. It is meant as a peace offering, but it plays out as another sign of cruelty — a reminder of Irving B.’s earlier moment of panic when he suggested that they eat the corpse of a dead seal (he feared Lumon might leave them to starve in the wilderness if they didn’t take matters into their own hands).
At this point, Irving B. has had it with Helena’s secrets, Mark’s obliviousness, and Dylan’s emotional absence. He’s also had it with that mountebank, Mr. Milchick. Irving B. retreats into the woods and lays down on a rock to get some shut-eye.
While Irving B. finds himself at the mercy of the elements, Mark S. (seemingly still in the earliest stages of his reintegration from last week) finds himself wandering into Helena’s tent. While Innie Mark certainly wants to honor his Outie’s marriage and the possibility that his Outie’s late wife, Gemma/Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman, Dollhouse), might still be alive on the Severed Floor, he also seems to be feeling a new sense of freedom and identity as he conducts his search. Perhaps Helena’s words from the premiere are finally sinking in and he is starting to believe that he does deserve his own life and identity. In any case, Helena completes her mission and consummates her relationship with Mark. At least for the moment, it seems like this may give her some sway to help steer Mark in a direction that will benefit Lumon and the Kier family line.
Meanwhile, Iving B. goes on a vision quest. He awakes in his MDR clothing in a decimated forest scape. He makes his way through an eerie fog and finds the iconic MDR cubicles. He sits down at his station and the divider across from him drops to reveal Burt G. It’s a short-lived moment of joy, as Irving B. is then haunted by Kier’s manifestation of Woe: a ghostly bride. Despite this creepy new coworker, his eyes are drawn to his screen and the numbers rearrange into a shape, possibly an eye. He wakes up with an intense sense of purpose.
Irving B. books it back to the camp to confront Helena. After she refuses to come clean, he resorts to a full on physical assault. He forcibly dunks Helena’s head underwater as he demands that Mr. Milchick restore Helly. Desperate and out of options, Helena urges Milchick to give Irving B. what he wants. We hear Milchick deliver an emergency order for security to remove the “Glasgow Block” and Helly is restored for the first time this season.
rving B. is immediately terminated from his position, but wears a sense of pride and accomplishment in his eyes. Not only has he restored Helly, but he earns an apology from Dylan G. for failing to listen to his friend, even after their moving heart to heart in the season two premiere. It’s a triumphant end for Irving B., even as Mr. Milchick frames his firing as a dark and empty death: “It will be as if you, Irving B., never even existed, nor drew a single breath upon this earth. May Kier’s mercy follow you into the eternal dark.”
Overall, the episode is a cinematic tour de force. Not only are its eerie vistas striking, but it reframes the development of the MDR Innies in this new season. In the behind the scenes featurette for the episode, Severance creator Dan Erickson suggested that season one was about the Innies in their childhood, and season two offers them a sort of adolescence. This is certainly a compelling new look for the MDR team, but we will have to wait until next week to see what sort of emotional intelligence Mark S. can bring to his suddenly complicated relationship with Helly.
We will also have to wait another week to see what sort of toll the reintegration process is taking on Mark. “Woe’s Hollow” fails to follow up on last week’s mind-bending reintegration climax (outside of a brief flash of Gemma during Mark’s intimate moments with Helena); for now, it looks like the series is setting up reintegration as a slow burn for both Mark and the fandom.
Fortunately, we still have our theories.
TEMPERING THE EVIDENCE
Severance is so full of lore, iconography, and open questions that we could never explore every possibility. Instead, we will try to make things more manageable by “tempering” the evidence. In other words, we will attempt to shape our theories into a more focused and manageable arrangement. But what is a logical arrangement for such a strange and complicated story?
Fans of the show have become all too familiar with Kier Eagan’s theories about human personality as depicted in a painting, the “Taming of the Four Tempers.” In fact, a top fan theory is that the four members of Macrodata Refinement each represent one of the tempers: Woe (Mark), Frolic (Dylan), Dread (Irv), and Malice (Helly). It is even possible that their unique dispositions must work in harmony (Harmony Cobel?) to complete the department’s hidden function or objective.
Each week, we will check in on five theories. We’ll swap them out if they are resolved, disproven or otherwise lose steam along the way. Each of the first four theories will reflect one of Kier’s “tempers,” and for the last theory, we will “throw a Waffle Party.” In other words, we’ll take a big swing, hold nothing back, and attempt to tame the tempers by exploring our most bonkers prediction.
In order to best keep up with this ongoing segment, consider checking out last week’s installment of Tempering the Evidence.
Woe: Clone Development?
We don’t get any definitive answers in terms of the clone theory this week, but the creative team continues to do everything in their power to push our minds in this direction. In fact, in this episode, each member of MDR gets a creepy, inhuman doppelganger. These monstrosities move unnaturally and look like they crawled straight out of the Severance title sequence we broke down back in the Season Two, Episode Two Tempering the Evidence section.
In addition to those mysterious doubles, this episode also reveals a new appendix to Kier Eagan’s sacred texts. Our crew learns that Kier Eagan allegedly had a twin named Dieter. According to the Fourth Appendix, the Eagan brothers attempted to spend time living as “paupers” in the woods. In the end, Dieter was taken in and driven wild by his devotion to this wild spirit. Not only did he spill his “lineage upon the soil,” but ultimately, he was driven mad, killed, and consumed by nature.
In any case, all this talk of taming a wild twin paired with those creepy, soulless mannequins certainly doesn’t work against our theory that the MDR team is currently processing data to help hone the minds of clones. This theory is very much alive for another week!
Frolic: Helena: Rebel Rebel?
For the last few weeks, we’ve been tracking the increasing likelihood that Helly R. has actually been Helena in disguise this entire time. We here at The Pop Break have been one-hundred percent sold for a couple of weeks, and many astute viewers have been convinced of this theory since Helena first ran out of the elevator in the season two premiere. This week, we finally learned that we nailed this one. Honestly, it was kind of adorable listening to the behind the scenes interviews as the entire creative team talked about this big reveal as if they had successfully pulled the wool over our eyes. Fortunately, this was a great piece of storytelling, and the fact that so many fans called it early only enhanced the drama between the characters. Also, Britt Lower deserves to be celebrated for bringing us such a nuanced and layered performance. That being said, it’s time to try something new:
Listen, the creators didn’t trick us with the Helena reveal this week, but what if we were to learn that Helena is actually pushing her own agenda? Perhaps she isn’t fully on board with running this creepy family business. Her examination of Mark S. on the security footage back in the second episode certainly suggested a deep sense of emotional longing, and this whole Severed Floor experiment seems like a big ask for the privileged daughter of a powerful family.
Additionally, if we think back to Season 1, there is one detail that doesn’t quite fit. In the first season, Helly R. makes a harrowing suicide attempt in order to punish and kill her Outie for trapping her on the Severed Floor. Later in the season, Ms. Cobel is punished for keeping the suicide attempt under wraps. She certainly couldn’t have pulled that off unless Helena Eagan were equally interested in hiding the incident.
Sure, this could be a simple matter of a daughter who is afraid to disappoint her demanding and terrifying father; we’ll never forget the time he called Helena a “fetid moppet.” Perhaps that’s all we are meant to glean from this detail, but we certainly have cause to keep our eyes open and see if Helena’s agenda could end up serving the interests of our beloved MDR department members.
Dread: Permanent Innies?
This week took us off of the Severed Floor and into the wilderness. As a result, we didn’t get much more insight into the inner workings of the Severed Floor.
Of course, we did get confirmation that Helly R. was actually Helena in disguise. When Mr. Milchick finally bent to Helena’s pleas to wake up her Innie during a violent assault at the hands of Irving B., he gave the order to remove the “Glasgow Block.” If there is a special protocol to make Helena a permanent Outie, logic would dictate that Lumon also possesses the technology to create a permanent Innie.
Once again, we don’t have confirmation, but it’s looking more and more inevitable that some characters will be revealed as full-time Innies before all is said and done.
Malice: Ms. Cobel the Usurper?
This week was entirely devoted to MDR and the Severed Floor managers. We didn’t get a check-in with Ms. Cobel, but things are a mess for Mr. Milchick right now. If there were ever a time for Ms. Cobel to take advantage of a power vacuum, this is it.
It seems likely that we will get a peek into her true intentions in the very near future.
Waffle Party: Cobel = Gemma?
We’ve been stacking up assumptions to keep this theory alive for the past two weeks, and unfortunately, we didn’t get much new data to work with in episode four.
Of course, we didn’t get anything to disprove the theory, either.
In fact, our only time with Gemma/Ms. Casey came during Mark’s hookup with Helena. He got one brief reintegration flash of an intimate moment with his Outie’s wife, and we certainly have a tangled web of relationships and emotions taking shape for the remainder of Season 2.
If this oddball theory holds together moving forward, we will likely see some unusual and particularly personal emotional reactions from Ms. Cobel in the coming weeks when she encounters Mark and/or Helly/Helena.
For now, all we can do is keep our eyes peeled, and hold our theories loosely.
In the end, all that matters is that we will be back for another wild ride next with Episode Five: “Trojan’s Horse.”
