Summary
Severance Season 2 steps up a level in Episode 4, which takes the macrodata team on a wintry excursion full of oddities and a key revelation.
“Woe’s Hollow” is a surprisingly horror-tinged masterclass of a Severance episode, and the best of Season 2 thus far by a margin. The standards were already high after Mark’s reintegration began, but Episode 4, which takes the macrodata team out of the Lumon offices and into a chilly wilderness full of unusual dangers and the truth about Helly’s return to the Severance floor, raises the level even further.
As regular readers will know we already speculated that Helly was really Helena, an outie posing as an innie and deceiving the rest of the team, but it’s confirmed in the most dramatic possible circumstances here, which is nice. But while the tight focus leaves the other outie subplots a little neglected, the change of scenery is more than welcome and ends up being mightily effective in a variety of ways.
The gimmick of “Woe’s Hollow” is that the team is on what a televised version of Milchick describes as Lumon’s first “Outdoor Retreat and Team-Building Occurrence”, a two-day stay in the wilderness of Dieter Eegan National Forest, a treasure trove of Eagen lore so sacred and secretive that it’s forbidden on the Severance floor.
As the gang is led through Woe’s Hollow by the discovered words of Kier’s Fourth Appendix, dictated just before his death and detailing a twin brother, Dieter, who “shared the lodging” of Kier’s mother’s womb and pushed Kier to live as a woodland pauper, weird things happen. The text is deeply strange, the refiners are pointed in the right direction by visions of themselves, a starving Irving debates eating the half-rotted husk of a dead seal, and eventually, Milchick and Miss Huang show up to provide various amenities and explain the place’s lore, identifying the eerie doppelgangers as reminders of how Kier’s twin was always with him, and promising copious luxury meats, marshmallows, and campfire stories in the near future.
In the midst of all this, Irving becomes deeply suspicious of Helly, believing she’s lying about what she saw during the Overtime Contingency, which we know that she is. When he confronts her, she’s evasive. During Milchick’s reading, he observes her and Mark “making goo-goo eyes at each other” and pushes her again about the “night gardener” she supposedly saw during the OTC. He finds her laughter at the story to be suspicious, and her cruel retort – that he’s jealous because he’ll never get to see Burt again – seemingly tips him over the edge. He disappears into the wilderness alone and falls unconscious in the chill, while Mark and Helly spend the night together.
The flashes of horror in Severance Season 2, Episode 4 come through most prominently in Irving’s icy nightmares, particularly the depiction of Woe as described in Kier’s story, but really, the entirety of “Woe’s Hollow” has a creepy, off-kilter quality to it. It makes the late flash of violence expected, even if it’s somewhat uncharacteristic for this show.
The violence comes from Irving, who follows Helly to the river and confronts her more directly about who she really is, positing that Helly, while many things, was never cruel in the way she was to him the previous evening. Irving is smart enough to have worked out that only a select few people would have the power to send their outie to the Severance floor, so has deduced that Helly must be an Eagen. He drags her to the river and threatens to drown her, holding her head beneath the water to communicate his seriousness, unless Milchick brings her innie back. When she temporarily comes up for air, Helly breaks character and instructs Milchick to do so. He does, and as a very confused innie Helly snaps back into consciousness with the telltale sound of an elevator ding, Irving has proved his point.
Of course, Irving will have to suffer the consequences, and it’s not immediately clear what they might be. Milchick promises that all traces of his existence will be wiped from Lumon and indeed the earth, but with the confirmation that Helena has been impersonating Helly the entire time, his work is essentially done. And there are doubtlessly going to be repercussions for everyone.
