This is a nice, simple episode of Severance. I mean it! Despite major advancements being made in the storylines of almost every character, there’s very little that’s inscrutable this time around. No mystery men whose faces you don’t see, no new rooms with bizarre new people, no hints at vast reams of new Lumon/Eagan lore. It’s just a bunch of people going through a bunch of stuff and reacting accordingly. At its best, this show is always a drama to be watched, not a code to be cracked.
Dylan G., for example, tells Mark S. and Helly about Irving B.’s drawing and map to the sinister Export Hall and its down elevator. But he stops short of admitting that he’s been given access to the visitation room and regularly hangs out with his outie’s wife, Gretchen, as a perk. For her part, Gretchen lies to the outie Dylan about her latest rendezvous with his innie, which gradually made its way to a makeout sesh. It’s a deeply uncomfortable, weirdly erotic scenario: If the man with whom you’re cheating on your husband shares your husband’s body and big chunks of his personality but none of his memories, is what you’re doing even cheating? Perhaps more to the point, would you find it hotter if it was?
On the outside, Irving has his dinner with Burt and his husband of many years, Fields (a magnificent John Noble). Wealthy and well-mannered, the two men are also devout Lutherans, quite a turnaround from Burt’s wild younger years. Indeed, it’s his fear that his earlier transgressions have doomed him to hell that motivated him to become a severed worker: Since they believe innies have their own souls, at least Burt’s innie stands a chance of making it to heaven to be with Fields in the great hereafter. It’s a little silly, a little scary, and very sweet.
Irving, of course, screws up the plan. If Burt’s innie was in love with Irving’s, then they would be together in heaven, wouldn’t they? Fields, who gets increasingly drunk throughout dinner and is very loose with his words by the end, wonders if the innies had unprotected sex — which somehow segues into a beautifully sincere hope that the innies’ love affair was as wonderful as any two people deserve.
Flustered but not put off completely, Irving leaves at the end of the night with an offer from Burt to start seeing him one on one. Unfortunately for Irving, Burt is almost certainly still in cahoots with Lumon: Drummond, the well-spoken behemoth who sits high up in the hierarchy, just so happens to know Irving isn’t home and breaks into his place to rifle through his files on severed people. I wonder who tipped him off? Burt’s sinister look as Irving departs speaks volumes.
Back on the severed floor, Mr. Milchick is still smarting from his harsh performance review. After pointedly reminding Miss Huang, who ratted him out on several matters, that her “fellowship” (she appears to be part of the same Lumon/Eagan youth cult indoctrination program Ms. Cobel was) cannot be successfully completed without his say-so. Later, after affixing a few hundred paperclips to various documents — right side up this time, every time — he barks commands to himself in a hidden mirror. “Grow up, grow up, grow up,” he chants at himself. “Grow! Grow! Grow!”
Like his co-stars John Turturro and Christopher Walken, actor Trammell Tillman has a special gift: the ability to make deep-seeded weirdness feel like it comes from the soul, not from a shopping list of funny tics. I now want to know what his deal is more than any other character, while at the same time I don’t want that at all, because the mystery of how he got to be like this is too intriguing to actually ever solve.
Mark/Mark S. and Helly make more personal progress than any other characters on the show this week, innie or outie. Mark’s exterior self continues the process of reintegration with the help of Regabhi, finding himself able to retain very recent memories, while his innie occasionally has sustained flashes of his environment on the outside.
In a very welcome development, Mark S. finally tears the band-aid off and tells Helly that he had sex with her outie, Helena, believing the evil Eagan to have been her innie persona at the time. Though she reels from the news at first, Helly quickly comes to two realizations. First, whether or not he should have known better, Mark S. believed he was having sex with her, Helly, which means it’s something he presumably still wants to do. Second, she wants to do it, too.
So with a straightforward bluntness that is, again, pretty sexy, the two agree to have sex again, for the first time. Making a tent out of dust tarps in an abandoned office, they both affirm their desire with a murmured “yes” before getting it on. Does this count as their first time? Whose bodies are these, anyway? Whose desires? Should Mark feel violated by Helena, or was the experience such that he’s grateful for it regardless of the violation and deception? The eroticism arises from the conflicts and contradictions. This is a very rich vein that I hope the show keeps tapping.
On the outside, however, Helena Eagan overplays her hand. Presumably intending to seduce the outie Mark — she clearly has all kinds of fucked-up envy issues regarding her other self — she oh-so-randomly bumps into him at a restaurant. But in her attempt to win him over, she gets his “late” wife Gemma’s name wrong, though she knows all the other details about her death. Whatever residual affection outie Mark might have felt for this version of the woman he loves on the inside evaporates. (What this means for her invitation to Mark to meet with Jame Eagan, her father and the company’s head, is unclear.)
Mark immediately runs home to Regabhi and tells her to conduct the invasive procedure that she believes will aid in completing the reintegration process, a procedure he previously rejected in part because of the physical and mental toll reintegration has taken on him so far. In addition to his cough, he’s now getting nosebleeds at work, and he’s haunted by thoughts of what’s being done to Gemma down there.
Regabhi goes for it, but Mark’s sister Devon comes knocking as he’s recuperating and he insists on letting her in. As he picks a fight with her, he finds he can’t pick up his water glass, and he’s smelling phantom smells. He collapses to the floor with a seizure. Is this the final step in reintegration? Tune in next week, same Kier-time, same Kier-channel!
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.