‘Severance’ Season 2, Episode 6 Recap – Is This a Late Valentine’s Day Episode or What?

In Episode 6 of Severance Season 2, Gretchen technically cheats on Dylan with Dylan, but it’s impossible to tell whether this is a morally justifiable action because they’re both technically the same person even if they’re experientially distinct, and if you think about it too much your head starts to spin like the girl from The Exorcist. If there’s a better synopsis of this show than that, I’d love to hear it.

Is this romantic? I have no idea, but “Attila” really does feel oddly romantic, and only a week after Valentine’s Day. And Severance is never – okay, rarely – romantic. One supposes that the snippets of revealed realities that the macrodata refinement team caught a glimpse of during the Overtime Contingency opened their eyes to what their innies have been missing. And it’s authentic human connection, touch, and love. At this point it’s easy to believe that the much talked about “Cold Harbor” is just a euphemism.

If you think about it this makes Irving’s story especially vital, because he’s the only one for whom love has been a primary motivating factor, both before the OTC and after. For him, it was always about Burt. As promised in the previous episode, his outie not only gets to meet Burt in “Attila”, but also his husband, Fields, who is played by John Noble with the unmistakably sinister air of a devout religious man who describes his husband as a “Philistine” in front of guests.

The religion thing is important. Fields and Burt – though one gets the sense Fields primarily – are devout Lutherans, and since Burt was a “scoundrel” in his youth, there was a bit of a worry that his soul would be forfeit and he’d tumble straight to Hell upon his death. Luckily the Lutheran church is pretty open-minded when it comes to severance, so the decision was made for Burt to become severed so that his innie, whose soul can apparently be judged as a completely separate entity, could be judged more positively and reunited with Fields in heaven.

Nobody seems to have thought too much about this given Burt’s innie would have no idea who Fields even was, but I suppose that’s beside the point. Fields seems to have ulterior motives to me; his welcoming “I know my husband was cheating on me with you and I actually think you deserve it” attitude seems very performative, and the mask seems to slip when he blurts out that the two of them might have had unprotected sex at work. When at the end of this rather bizarre ham dinner Burt implies that Fields perhaps won’t be present for the next date, you can hardly blame him.

Again, is this romantic? Surely not. But it exists as a consequence of romance infiltrating the refiners’ lives. They are beginning to realize that there is a world outside of the Severance floor and that it contains people who might want to sleep with them. These are people who are, by definition, incomplete. The gulf between their personal and professional identities has only widened after disappearing for a scant few moments. For all the debate about whether the innies are truly human or not, the most compelling argument is that, in having been deprived of virtually everything that makes us human, they can’t really claim to be. But they can try to be.

John Noble and John Turturro in Severance Season 2 | Image via Apple TV+

This is perhaps more obvious with Dylan. To be fair, his innie is being manipulated on two fronts, both by Lumon, who’re using Gretchen as a conciliatory effort to keep him focused at work in innie Irving’s absence, and also by Gretchen herself, who keeps reiterating that his outie is a useless slob who she can’t really stand. But innie Dylan is very explicitly realizing what the simplest intimate human moments look and feel like, and it’s only natural that he’d want to progress from a nice warm hug to a steamy make-out session. The more relevant questions should be asked of Gretchen, who not only goes through with this but later lies to Dylan’s outie when he asks how the visit went, claiming that Lumon canceled it at the last minute.

But this is nothing compared to Mark and Helly. This whole dynamic is the most intense but also the weirdest since it’s the most logistically complex and, thanks to a scene in which Helena approaches outie Mark and is pretty explicitly – and I think sincerely? – flirty with him, I can’t quite tell what to make of the whole thing.

What I do know is that Innie Mark tells Helly that they slept together during the workplace retreat, which throws her for a bit of a loop. But the more she thinks about it, the more she sees the upside. Mark earnestly believed that Helena was her, which means he’s really interested in Helly, and why should Helena get to keep all the good memories for herself? So, Helly rushes back to Mark and tells him she wants her own memory of the event, and so they have sex in a makeshift tent under a desk.

At the risk of repeating myself, is this romantic? I honestly think it is. It isn’t conventionally romantic, I’ll grant you, but it has all the requisite components. The authenticity of this scene makes the potential manipulations of Helena screamingly frustrating since the idea of her stomping all over Helly’s most intimate desires just for a lark is an awful thought. Not that Mark seems to be falling for it, though, since immediately after his encounter with Helena he instructs Rehgabi to flood the chip in his head, despite the potential risk of a brain hemorrhage, to speed up the reintegration process.

This leads to the cliffhanger ending of Severance Season 2, Episode 6 – Mark rushes off during the procedure to answer the door to Devon, leading him to collapse on the floor in a frothing seizure with a mind full of visions – and also an errant thought of my own. Now that Mark and Helly are getting on so well, do we really want him to reunite with his presumed-dead wife? What might that mean for Helly? Has Gemma become surplus to requirements? Helly and Mark have found in each other a way to cope with grief and potentially escape their own familial obligations, to understand who they are both individually and together.

Isn’t that romantic?