Summary
Severance Season 2 takes on a sinister quality in Episode 5, as Mark’s reintegration continues and Helly is forced to return to the floor.
If there’s a word to describe Episode 5 of Severance Season 2, it’s probably “sinister”. This isn’t entirely new for the show – the previous episode ended with someone almost being drowned in an icy river – but it usually comes in fits and starts. “Trojan’s Horse” feels sinister all the way through in a pervasive, underlying way, like we’re on the cusp of something awful that may or may not include the use of sharp medical tools.
But who knows? The appeal of Severance is that we continue to know very little, or at least can’t intuit the order we should assemble what we do know so that it makes any kind of sense. That, it turns out, works pretty well with the sinister thing. Every threat seems much more dangerous when you’re not totally sure where it’s coming from. Although we can be reasonably sure it’s coming from high up on the Lumon board.
Speaking of which, Lumon’s latest move is to send Helena Eagan back to the Severance floor as Helly R., despite her concerns about the potential dangers of doing so. And it’s a testament to Britt Lower’s chameleonic performance that from the second the elevator doors opened, and she greeted Miss Huang with a rattled “Who the f*ck are you?”, I knew there wasn’t any subterfuge at play. This is the Helly we know.
Helly’s return means that Lumon have to come up with a viable reason for why Helena was posing as her innie in the first place. Milchick delivers some vague spiel about secretive and important Undercover Boss-style corporate research, but nobody’s buying it, least of all Helly, who just feels violated. But she also quickly feels lonely, since all of the other refiners are still stinging from the betrayal and blame her for the loss of Irving, who has officially been fired but everyone else believes to be dead, even going so far as demanding to hold a funeral for him.
But anything for Mark. Lumon’s only concern at the moment is Mark completing the Cold Harbor file, which he’s 80-odd percent of the way through and which will, according to Drummond, be regarded as one of the finest achievements in human history upon its completion. That’s why Helena is forced to go back. That’s why concessions keep being made to keep the refiners going, even if they ultimately imperil the company (or, more immediately, Helly.) Cold Harbor is the only goal.
Not that Mark seems to have much sense of his own importance. He’s in a colossal sulk in Severance Season 2, Episode 5, both on the Severance floor, where he’s snappy with Helly and cold about Irving’s dismissal, and out in the real world, where he keeps lying to Devon about what he’s doing and drinking highly questionable-looking vials of goo to help with the reintegration process while Reghabi lives – somewhat against his wishes – in his basement.
Sydney Cole Alexander, Britt Lower and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson in Severance | Image via Apple TV+
But I think you can excuse Mark a little since the reintegration is clearly working and has a variety of mental and physical effects that make it genuinely difficult to discern where he’s being an asshole and where he’s falling deathly ill. The headaches and coughing seem like symptoms of the process, but his complete refusal to look inward at himself, deal with his unprocessed grief and trauma, and actually engage with his reality could be just another Tuesday. With Mark, it’s always difficult to tell.
This is why I’m glad that the end of the episode makes it really explicit that Mark’s innie and outie are becoming properly enmeshed. Visions of the Severance floor begin to infiltrate his waking life and Gemma’s voice leads him along the corridors until he eventually encounters her in person, giving him disembodied future facts about his outie until the vision gives out. Needless to say, this is pretty intense emotional trauma, so if Mark was in a bad mood before, he’s going to be in quite the state when we rejoin him in the next episode.
Elsewhere, Devon is becoming increasingly concerned now that Ricken has drunk the Lumon Kool-Aid – or more accurately taken Lumon’s money – to have The You You Are rewritten as an innie-inspiring workplace text, and Irving, or at least his outie, continues to update his contact about his innie’s progress (which isn’t much in this update, since he has been fired.) But Irving’s outie will likely have a lot more to do in the next episode since he happens to run into Burt’s outie, who invites him for dinner with him and his husband.
This whole thing is pretty interesting since Irving and Burt’s outies seem to share the same kind of intuitive romantic connection that their innies did, which we haven’t really seen anywhere else. Burt’s outie was fired for an unsanctioned romantic entanglement and since Irving showed up at his door shortly after, he has intuited it was probably with him, which hasn’t made things easy with his husband. All three men sitting down and drinking expensive wine to discuss this seems like a recipe for either great progress or quite the opposite. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
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