‘Severance’ Review: Episode 4 Blows the Ceiling Off of Season 2 — Spoilers
[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “Severance” Season 2, Episode 4, “Woe’s Hollow.” For coverage of earlier episodes, read our previous reviews.]
“Stray not from Kier’s path, lest you roil nature’s wrath.”
Irving (John Turturro) has always been the most devout member of Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement team. Well-versed in the handbook and respectful, if not outright reverent, of the Eagan family mythos, Irving would be the last employee Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) would expect to spoil a company ORTBO (Outdoor Retreat and Team-Building Occurrence) — especially one that’s designed as a reenactment of the founder’s fateful final outing with his secret twin brother.
And yet, it’s Irving who strays from Kier’s path, and thus Irving who sparks the ire of Woe’s Hollow.
In the last few minutes of an eerie, unsettling, and increasingly ominous Episode 4, two shocking developments roll out one right after the other. First, Helly (Britt Lower) is exposed as a fraud — a “fucking mole,” as Irving calls her, while he drowns Helena Eagan in order to bring Helly back to life. Irving came alive in the woods, like Dieter once did, and he’ll die there, also like Dieter did, but the waterfall can’t quiet his bellowing convictions: The woman working alongside them since the beginning of Season 2 has been Helena Eagan, Helly’s Outie, all along. Of course, Irving doesn’t know her real name is Helena Eagan (or that she’s the daughter of current Lumon CEO Jame Eagan), but he’s correctly deduced she is an Eagan, since it would take quite a bit of power to arrange for an Outie to the spy on the company’s Innies.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a mystery anyone at Lumon wanted him to solve. As quickly as he forces Mr. Milchick to confirm his suspicions, Mr. Milchick terminates Irving from the company — and, essentially, from the world itself. As Dylan (Zach Cherry) apologizes for not listening to his friend and Mark (Adam Scott) quietly grapples with the consequences of Irving’s revelation, Mr. Milchick performs a de facto execution. “It will be as if you, Irving B., never even existed or drew a single breath upon this Earth,” he says. “May Kier’s mercy follow you into the eternal dark.”
And with that, Irving B. is no more.
The suddenness of each massive twist is enough to produce a bit of whiplash: How did we get here? With Helly, the truth has been shrewdly hidden behind a key theme of the episode (and “Severance” overall): twins. In a show where every severed character essentially forms an identical duo, Season 2 also introduced a number of scenes involving Helly/Helena that, while perhaps curious or notable at the time, now invite two distinct interpretations.
Take the brief shot in the first episode where Helena Eagan studies surveillance footage of Helly kissing Mark. At the time, it looks like Helena is catching up on what her Innie has been doing. She’s just a Lumon executive who — after getting hoodwinked by a lower-level employee (her own Innie, how embarrassing) and chastised by her boss/father — dutifully follows up on the work she’s been neglecting. But now, it’s clear Helena wasn’t just learning about her Innie; she was studying her Innie. She needed to know not just what Helly was doing, but also what she was feeling. If Helena had pretended to be Helly without knowing her Innie had the hots for Mark S., her espionage attempt would’ve been obvious from the jump.
Another telling scene, also from the first episode, sees Mark suggesting he should help look for Ms. Casey/Gemma (Dichen Lachman) because he and his Outie were “the same-ish person.” Hearing this, Helena adamantly disagrees. “We’re not the same, actually,” Helena says. “And we don’t owe them shit.” In the moment, when we still think she’s Helly, her reaction appears to be motivated by Helly’s recent discovery that her Outie is an Eagan; she’s so repulsed by Helena’s role in persecuting severed employees that she can’t entertain the suggestion that she, Helly, would share anything with her, Helena Eagan (let alone “owe” her any semblance of assistance).
But now that we know Helena is the one who’s emphatic about the split between Innies and Outies, her outburst looks like Helena’s true self breaking through. After all, in Season 1, Helena always treated Helly with brazen disregard. Helena refuses to let her Innie quit. She’s happy letting her Innie suffer. She reacts to her Innie’s repeated cries for help — including a suicide attempt — as if they’re an irrelevant annoyance she shouldn’t have to deal with. So of course Helena doesn’t think Innies and Outies are the same — not even the same-ish.
Put another way, Helena is cruel to Helly, and it’s that same cruelty that ruins her ruse. Sure, Helena’s half-assed lie about a “night gardener” set off Irving’s bullshit detector, but it’s Helena’s spiteful words about Burt (Christopher Walken) that sets her fate. “What you said to me last night was cruel,” Irving says, when confronting Helena the next day. “Helly was never cruel.” Once again, Helena’s mistake is fairly well-hidden. Making a snide remark is an understandable reaction to being pushed, again and again, about a topic she clearly doesn’t want to talk about (what really happened during the Macrodat Uprising), and to us, the audience, it seems like she doesn’t want to talk about it because she doesn’t want to tell her colleagues she’s an Eagan.
But Irving isn’t blinded by his feelings, like Mark, and he hasn’t been incentivized to behave, like Dylan. While his two co-workers have been manipulated into dialing down the urgency around their original mission, Irving is more dedicated than ever. Out in the woods, he tames his own temper of Woe and sees what everyone else cannot. That Helly isn’t really Helly, and that the only way he’ll ever be with Burt again is if they can figure out how to get the Innies out of the basement and into the outside world. Saving Ms. Casey/Gemma is, in a way, like saving Burt. If they can connect Mark’s Outie with his wife, who’s trapped inside Lumon, why can’t they connect Irving’s Innie with Burt, who’s stuck outside Lumon?
But with Irving B. permanently dismissed — and Helena exposed as a spy — what does that mean for the rebellion? Befitting the episode’s duality, each twist can be read as a setback or a step forward. Yes, Helena has been caught, and Helly is back. Great! But that also means Helena was spying on the MDR team, unnoticed, for weeks on end. Clearly, the Lumon higher-ups know the foursome (now a threesome, without Irving) is looking for Ms. Casey/Gemma, and with their mole exterminated, Mr. Milchick & Co. may decide to keep a closer eye on Mark and Dylan.
Losing Irving is obviously a blow. He’s been with them since the beginning, proving himself as a loyal friend and a valuable mutineer. Plus, assuming Lumon replaces him (they need the team to finish Cold Harbor), there’s no way Mark, Dylan, and Helly can trust a new member, and even if they somehow prove themselves loyal to the cause, winning them over would take time — time they may not have.
On the flip side, maybe Irving wasn’t punished for leaving the path. Maybe he was freed. What little we’ve seen of Irving’s Outie shows a man who’s very curious about Lumon and its employees. He’s got a secret stash of company intel buried in a trunk. He’s got files on other employees and maps to their houses. He’s got military training. So when it comes to re-connecting the severed employees with their full selves, maybe Irving’s Outie can be even more helpful than Irving’s Innie?
“The truth you seek lies within the Fourth Appendix.” It sure did. But which truth will matter? Which interpretation of the past will win the day? Woe’s Hollow is where Kier Eagan first tamed the four tempers of the human soul: woe, frolic, dread, and malice. And woe is running wild at the end of Episode 4.
“Severance” Season 2 releases new episodes Fridays on Apple TV+.
W(ho)TF Is Dieter Eagan?
Well, that’s a good question, since no one knew about Dieter before they were invited to walk a mile in his shoes. Along the path, Irving and Mr. Milchick provide a sporadic reading of Kier Eagan’s Fourth Appendix, a book banned from the severed floor and ceremoniously housed in a dark, damp cave somewhere within the Dieter Eagan National Forest. (There’s simply no way this is where it’s actually kept. The pages would be in tatters by now.) The book starts with a dedication to Dieter, before the first chapter tells a twisted version of his (brief) life’s story.
Given the baroque language of the text, not to mention the metaphysical events within the narrative itself, Dieter’s exact exploits remain open for interpretation. There’s clearly more to the man (or boy, as it were) than Kier chooses to share, but here’s what can be safely summarized from the scripture.
Dieter Eagan was Kier’s twin brother. The two were “bosom friends” as infants, but started to drift apart “in boyhood” as Kier was drawn toward commerce and capitalism (while working at various factories), and Dieter preferred to live as a “woodland pauper.” One day, Dieter convinced his brother to run away from home and explore the forest. They set out for Woe’s Hollow, and Dieter “unfastened himself” — a phrase that can be taken both literally and figuratively. To the latter, it sounds like Dieter came alive in the wilderness. “The din of his fervor fell strangely into concert with the music of the wood, and for a moment I could not tell the two apart,” Kier wrote. But he also unfastened himself in the sense that Dieter unbuttoned his pants and masturbated until he “split his lineage upon the soil.”
Despite this off-putting bit of brotherly bonding, the twins kept the good times rolling well into the night, feasting on rabbit and telling each other jokes… until Kier finally suggested they go home. “We must return to Father,” he said. At this, Dieter fell silent. When he finally spoke, all he could muster was a whimper, and soon after, he fell apart — literally, if we’re to believe Kier’s words. “I was looking at him when his eye came out. It popped from the socket driven by a sudden torrent of puss from his skull,” Kier wrote, adding that his hair turned to moss and the puss turned to sap. As Dieter screamed in agony, Kier fled to the waterfall to escape the sound. There, he met “the tempest Woe, a gaunt bride half the height of a natural woman.” She blamed him for what happened to Dieter — “you suffered his wantonness” — and that’s when Kier tamed the first of four tempests.
So… what really happened to Dieter? As Helena suggests, he “jerked off in front of his brother and got punished for it,” but… who provided the punishment? And what kind of punishment was it? Was it fatal? It sure sounds fatal! But whether that’s how Dieter died or just where Kier left him is hard to say. Absent any myth-making mumbo jumbo, Dieter seemed desperate to escape whatever life he shared with his brother. The other appendices state that Kier started working at a very young age and suffered extensive abuse from his employer. In the Fourth Appendix, Kier promised to look after Dieter at the “ether mill,” which indicates he was likely working and suffering alongside his brother. If your parents have a “close biological relationship” and your boss is beating you with a wooden dresser leg, wouldn’t you prefer to live in the woods as a pauper? Isn’t a life without mountains of money better than a life monopolized by misery?
All that being said, there’s another way to look at Dieter’s story: Maybe there is no Dieter. Maybe Kier never had a twin. Maybe the story he’s written is just a fictionalized version of his own internal struggle between committing to a life of arduous labor and fleeing to the relative safety of the wilderness. After all, wouldn’t it be more fitting for Kier’s twin to only exist in his head? That the Fourth Appendix is banned from the severed floor because it depicts the first battle between an Innie (Kier) and an Outie (Dieter)? And that battle ends in a violent death?
I know I wouldn’t want my loyal worker bees reading anything like that. But then again, I wouldn’t have taken them out to the forest either.