Severance: Mark, So Confusing
Everyone is reeling in Season 2, Episode 5
I’ve only been able to write about Severance lately because everything else going on is so stupid and hard to parse through. Should be a bit of a statement.
The still-young second season of Severance has been following a bit of a stop-start-stop pattern. After such an abstract fourth episode and a stunning ending, I had a good feeling we’d be in for a breather. But while the pace might’ve slowed in comparison to the theatrics of the ORTBO, Episode 5 did the most when it comes to character progressions for almost everyone in the show.
So for this episode’s post, I want to do a character-by-character breakdown since I feel like I keep forgetting things.
MILCHICK is sliding toward humanity. I don’t think it comes from a place of remorse for anything to do with Irving, rather some sort of weird internal panic he’s been processing since the Board’s gift re: black Kier. Again, it was both a little racist and a bit of an indicator that the myth of Kier isn’t terribly serious nor sacred. He asks NATALIE how she personally felt about it, particularly alluding to their shared experience as Black employees at Lumon; her canned non-response is further proof she’s much farther down the rabbit hole than him. Or that she’s permanently severed. He’s also a bit more inclined to treat the MDR team like humans; we get a feeling he had offered the ORTBO as a retreat/reward to keep the team in good spirits. He just hadn’t properly assessed their morale, particularly Irving’s.
In Milchick’s performance review with Natalie and DRUMMOND, he fights for his life a bit. He loses his steely demeanor when confronted with authority. While reviewing the absurdity of his performance review, too, I got the feeling he’s really starting to lose his patience for the company’s lack of transparency. But, because Drummond is still a scary presence, Milchick promises to “tighten the leash” a bit. Right away, his confrontation of Mark at the elevator is just that — he gets weirdly intimate with him in bringing up Mark and Helena’s ORTBO encounter. Something is seriously weird with hearing him speak about sex. I continue to be captivated by Milchick’s arc and don’t know what to expect from him.
It’s a relief to see IRVING won’t be taking a break from the series despite his innie’s banishment. We see him back at the telephone booth making some sort of mysterious call with an outside connection who has some apparent awareness of his work in digging at Lumon’s backstory. I’ve seen some people suggesting he, too, is communicating with Asal, thus perhaps suggesting he’s explored reintegration. But I have a hard time connecting those dots, mainly because I don’t see why Asal would keep her work with Irving and Mark separate at this point in time, given how desperate the situation. I think Irving has been working with his innie in his own way — but I really think is that Irving’s entire reasoning for pursuing a severed job with Lumon isn’t to correct his life or counter a personal trauma. He feels more calculated and perhaps given his alleged military background, maybe he’s intentionally targeting the severed worker program as part of a covert operation…? (Tin foil hat moment)
The MARKS are merging. We know the reintegration process isn’t fully complete but that it’s been slowly having some sort of effects. In both episodes 4 and 5 he’s had little flashes of memories and visions from the other conscious, but nothing more tangible. I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that the reintegration will result in an immediate shift, but more of a slide. When returning to the office to start this episode, Mark is irritable and hostile. It makes sense that he’d have complicated emotions for Helly — she’s now incredibly hard to trust and he’s not totally sure how to bring up they’re only a few days (?) removed from having sex at the ORTBO. For him, that’s his first sexual encounter since his wife’s death. That would be pretty hard to process in a normal world without the context of everything else that’s happening. He’s liable to feel pretty damn violated.
But even still, I can’t help but feel his coldness here is more than that. It’s more like outie Mark’s personality is bleeding into his world a bit without him realizing. He’s more snide, more skeptical. He talks back to Milchick in a way normally only Dylan would. At the end of the episode he experiences a blatant crossover more intense than the first flashes he gets at the end of Episode 3. He hears and sees Gemma/Ms. Casey and flits back and forth between Lumon and his home. Episode 6 is sure to advance this in more than a subconscious way.
I was worried about whether DYLAN would be able to keep his eye on the ball after his meeting with Gretchen in episode 3. But the ORTBO likely sabotaged Milchick’s aims at redirecting Dylan. While he might be a bit infatuated with Gretchen and eager to prove himself, his love for Irving was something much more real. Losing him — watching him die — seems to have reset him a bit, even after Milchick offers a light threat about Dylan potentially “losing privileges.” He’s back to talking recklessly, pushing boundaries and pressing Mark to back him up. Dylan recalls Irving’s advice to “hang in there,” retrieving the drawing of the Exports hallway hidden behind the poster in the party room.
His eulogy indicated Dylan’s failure to spring into action and help Irving search for the hallway is weighing on him heavily. Milchick’s biggest misstep with the ORTBO might actually be losing the progress he’d made with his biggest skeptic at MDR — now Dylan’s next steps might mirror how he approached the ending of Season 1 in taking the reins toward the next big discovery.
Of course, maybe my biggest takeaway from Episode 5 is that I fear HELENA is much more villainous that I’d been led to believe at the start of the season. The distinction between Helena and HELLY is violently palpable now — it’s stunning to see how Britt Lower is able to articulate such different personalities through simple vocal shifts and body language. Despite Helena’s dedication to the company, however, I get a feeling she doesn’t really know what’s behind Cold Harbor. Drummond tells her the project’s aims are “mysterious” — and I don’t really know why he’d speak in code directly to her otherwise.
She’s also reasonably wary about going back down as Helly. Both because of the physical harm it presents her and because, perhaps, she’s a bit unsettled with a more vulnerable-yet-outspoken version of herself and how it complicates the company’s (and her father’s) perception of her.
BURT makes a reappearance, finally. Christopher Walken will be delighted to receive this week’s DVD from Ben Stiller. Burt’s outie apparently doesn’t think his innie resigned, rather he indicates they told him he’d been fired for getting to close to innie Irving. He’d been following Irving to understand who he is — the two are able to quickly, like surprisingly quickly, determine why they have some mutual curiosity in each other with regard to Lumon. Their conversation reveals they’ve both got a pretty deft understanding of the company’s attitude and approach to employee management in comparison to Mark and Dylan. What will come from their surely-to-be-awkward conversation with Burt’s husband, Fields?
Other thoughts
My apologies, this got a lot more long-winded than I had expected. There’s just a few other loose ends to address.
Devon and Ricken’s side plot is advancing at a snail’s pace. She remains skeptical (to say the least) of Lumon and fears her husband’s ego is being stroked to do their dirty work in justifying the humanity of severance. But I don’t really know where that fits in with the primary storyline re: Cold Harbor, Mark and Gemma.
And where is Ms. Cobel? We last saw her driving out in the middle of nowhere. Though the show has featured lots of overexaggerations, Drummond alludes to Lumon’s population of severed workers as a worldwide program. Is Cobel headed somewhere else that’s connected to Lumon? Is she the one who’s been talking with outie Irving, maybe?
Idk. Longest post yet and we’re only halfway through. Damn.