The music dance experience is officially canceled—but Severance has returned. After three long years, the macrodata refinement crew is back on our screens. Follow along each week as we break down each episode of Severance Season 2. In the process, we’ll try to piece together what the heck is going on at Lumon Industries. Next up: Episode 5, “Trojan’s Horse.” I’ll ready the refreshments—you focus on the mournful signage.
Crunching the Numbers
We can’t see the face of the whistling gentleman as he wheels a cart into a supply room that looks like a cross between Khloé Kardashian’s pantry and a morgue. But some might recognize his tune. Perhaps you’re a scholar of shipwrecks, or maybe you just read The New York Times Magazine last month, when interviewer David Marchese said to Ben Stiller:
I’m determined to elicit a nugget of Severance information that’ll make the obsessives on the internet go nutty. So, without giving too much away, there’s an episode in the upcoming season where someone, and it’s not clear who, is walking and whistling a melody, which, I believe, is the melody of Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Is that correct?
And Stiller responded:
I mean, I don’t think that’s a spoiler to say that.
Whoever the man is, he gets what he came for—a tray of what looks like dental equipment—and takes it to a place that we’ve seen before, somewhere. That long, black hallway, that red elevator light. And ding! He’s gone.
The opening credits roll, and when we return, we see a face that’s familiar. “How was the weekend thing?” Devon asks outie Mark, in a phone call, as he pops his daily meds. Oh, it was fine, he says—except that “my innie fell off a rope, apparently.” He seems almost annoyed when his sister asks if he’s hurt. “No, I just got a little wet,” he says. “That’s all.”
That’s all? Hearing this seems to prove something about the Great ORTBO: Either it was less of a simulation than it may have seemed or those Blue Man Group shows have really gotten sophisticated. Either way, Devon responds to this by saying, “Jesus, it never ends with these people” in the tone of someone commiserating with a friend about their in-laws, which, I guess, in a way, she kind of is. And OH MY GOD WHAT IN THE SINGLE-GUY FRIDGE IS THAT—
I’ve done some ill-advised juice cleanses in my day, but none of them resembled egg drop soup. This, it would appear, is the concoction that we see Mark spilling in the show’s opening credits, and watching Mark take a sniff and a sip is somehow grosser than when we saw Dr. Reghabi performing the ad hoc surgery on his brain that I assume has necessitated these beverages. (Which he seems to be … chewing?) Speaking of the good doctor: Reghabi has been living at his place because she can’t be seen coming and going all the time.
“Do you think they’re watching us?” Mark asks.
“Depends on how dumb you’ve played it,” Reghabi responds. So, probably, yes.
We then see Helena, looking put-together following her near-death experience in the wilderness, sitting across the Lumon conference room table from Natalie and Mr. Drummond. The words “contretemps,” “your tempers will rebalance quickly,” and “arrange another obligement session this evening” are bandied about with various degrees of condescension. Natalie says that they’re close to getting what they want from innie Mark. And then she makes a silent-film-grade funny face when Helena protests that she will not be going back down to the severed floor to help.
“It won’t be you,” Natalie says. “It will be your innie.”
Helena isn’t happy about this. “They’re fucking animals,” she says, but she’s the only one snarling. Drummond tells her that their hand has been forced thanks to Mr. Milchick’s many mistakes.
A few minutes later, when Helena gets in the elevator and is warped into Helly, her innie does in fact resemble an animal—all bulging neck tendons and shifty eyes and cornered rage. But can you blame her? As far as I can tell, this has been life from Helly’s perspective over the past … what, few hours?:
- Putting the finishing touches on a bold scheme to take over her outie via the “overtime contingency”
- Abruptly spending 39 minutes as her own oppressor and, oh yeah, by the way, giving a speech in front of a bunch of people including a shady senator
- Going full YOLO mode onstage, shouting truth to power, and getting tackled by Natalie
- WAKING UP MID-HEAD-DUNK IN A FRIGID RIVER
- Waking up again, back in the ol’ Hellevator, right as it opens up to this tableau:
I’d be clenching my fists Arthur-style and, per the closed-captioning, “breathing shakily” just like Helly too!
Since the end of last season, Britt Lower’s multiple Face/Off-style performances (as Helena, as Helly, as Helly figuring out she’s Helena, as Helena aping sweet Helly, etc.) have been not only a highlight of the show but its backbone. And in Episode 5, Lower is heartbreaking as just good old Helly—confused, wounded, skittish—once more.
The MDR crewmates (well, three of the four) are reunited back in their workspace, but the emotions are running high. Mark is pissed that the corporation found a new way to screw them, literally. Helly is frantic, and instead of being consoled by her colleagues, she’s being iced out. Dylan is disdainful—“You’re a fuckin’ Eagan,” he spits toward Helly—and desperate for a status update on his best work bud, Irving, whom he assumes to be some form of dead. “Helena Eagan, in her executive capacity, was conducting valuable research,” Mr. Milchick eventually blandly confirms. “Irving B.’s outie has departed on an elongated cruise voyage,” he adds, from which Irv is not expected to return.
Milchick shows the workers their new workstation, which no longer looks like a four-leaf clover, having been reconfigured from four desks to three. Irving has been erased from all the group photos.
And Mark S.? Ever since that backroom reintegration surgery, the man kiiind of has that Nicole Kidman–in–Moulin Rogue! cough. That Kate Winslet–in-Contagion cough. That King George VI–in–The Crown cough. It’s probably nothing, though! Helly asks him if he’s OK, but she doesn’t really care about the answer—she’s too preoccupied with learning about her other self. What was she like, she asks Mark. He doesn’t want to talk about it, nor does he want to take Helly up on her offer to tell him what she saw “up there.” He already knows more than he wishes.
Mr. Milchick and Ms. Huang prepare a funeral spread for Irving B., though Ms. Huang doesn’t understand why they’re doing it. “The Affections Index for Irving B. was in the high 60s,” Milchick explains, and it will help the workers to grieve. “May I say a question?” asks Ms. Huang, with the syntax of a child. “You shouldn’t let them have a funeral,” she continues, with the sudden edge of a M3GAN doll. “It makes them feel like people.”
“That wasn’t a question, that was an opinion,” says Milchick. “Unsolicited.” To which Ms. Huang responds, with the undermine-y glint of a gal who is newly learning the power of passive-aggression in the workplace: “Your first performance review is today, right? That was a question.”
Irving B.’s funeral features:
- Nine seconds of silent reflection
- Mugs with his mug on ’em
- Calypso music
- The pronouncement “You may now briefly partake in Irving’s fruit head” as a watermelon carving of his likeness is served
After the funeral, everyone is cranky. Ms. Huang complains that she didn’t get to perform her theremin for the room despite having practiced. “You can play your piece for me later, yes?” Milchick responds, blurring the lines between statement and question with one simple trick. Mark S. is anxious to get back to work. Dylan, annoyed by the lack of respect for their fallen comrade, asks Mark if he’s caught Helly up yet on what she missed, such as, oh, I dunno, the notion that Ms. Casey is Mark’s wife? Helly tries to convince a scoffing Mark that they’re in this together, that “not everything in here is a lie.”
Silly Milchick: For a moment there, as he gets ready to enter his first performance review, he too wants to believe that not everything about Lumon is a lie, that there possibly can be some true human connection within the company. He tries to level with Natalie—what did she really feel when she was gifted those ridiculous paintings of Kier Eagan in her image, as he was? (You know they gave girl Kier one hell of a rack.) Milchick even smiles, thinking he must be getting through to her. That smile is wiped right off his face, though, when Natalie reminds him that Mr. Drummond is waiting. As she walks Milchick into the conference room, it has the feeling of a guy walking the plank.
This being Lumon, though, everything is a little bit backward: First you drown, then lunch is served. Milchick’s first performance review is a real doozy. On the one hand, Drummond says: “You received the gift of the Kier paintings with grace”—oof—and “Your attendance and urinalysis are both in the excellent range.” On the other hand, Milchick uses too many big words. And fucks up paper clip orientation. And, most crucially, keeps losing control of his innies, “at great risk and harm to the Eagan name.”
That new refining team around Mark S. “failed to coalesce.” Those kindness reforms “have, in no way, deterred curiosity or idling.” And that ORTBO was a real snafu and a half! Sure, Drummond allows, it’s been under Milchick’s stewardship that Mark S. has almost finished with his biggest assignment, one that “will be remembered as one of the greatest moments in the history of this planet.” But if Milchick wants to succeed, he needs to “remember these severed workers’ greater purpose” and “treat them as what they really are.”
A humiliated Milchick agrees. “I’m tightening the leash,” he says.
Down on the severed floor, Dylan says one last goodbye to Irving B.’s watermelon noggin and then notices a poster in the break room that says “HANG IN THERE”—one of the last things Irv said to him during the ORTBO. Feeling around behind it, he finds Irving’s sketch of the dark black hallway with the red elevator light and, on the flip side, a set of directions that look like they came from a Game Genie magazine. Mark S., meanwhile, gets back to work on his Cold Harbor file. As he hits 85 percent completion, he’s also hit by one hell of a glitchy, flickering headache.
He heads for the exit six minutes early and is confronted by an angry Milchick, who is eager to tighten any leash in his grasp. The two bicker: Mark calls Milchick’s little newspaper “The Bullshit Gazette,” while Milchick asks Mark, with placid menace, if he’s told Helly yet about the whole banging-Helena-in-a-tent thing.
When Mark’s outie leaves the elevator, he’s coughing again.
In their beautiful home that always looks as though it’s in the middle of a power outage (I say this with reverence, as someone who loves lamp), Devon reads aloud a snippet of Ricken’s newest work: a Chicken Soup for the Cog Soul version of The You You Are that was solicited by Lumon. “Your sovereign boss may own the clock that greets you from the wall, but you get to enjoy its ticking and thus should be happy,” she reads, pausing to point out that this is the “literal opposite” of his usual whole vibe.
She’s got a point: In the original book, Ricken writes: “Our job is to taste free air. Your so-called boss may own the clock that taunts you from the wall, but, my friends, the hour is yours!” But Ricken explains that Nat said—Nat, Devon snorts—innies thrive on structure, so he’s just trying to speak their language. Perhaps he’ll even “beget a revolution!” When Devon pushes back, he hardens, reminding her that he could make bank with this job—“unless me selling millions of copies of my book and the life that manages to give us has lost its appeal for you.” Devon disengages from the conversation, and her parting shot is a trilling “No thank you!” in the tone of someone preemptively de-escalating a tantrum, which she basically is.
Somewhere out there, we are finally reunited with Irving’s outie and his, shall we say, insider art. He does not appear to be on a cruise, elongated or otherwise. Instead, he heads back to that same phone booth we’ve seen him cryptically visit before and makes a new call. “It’s me again,” he says. “So, they fired me. I think they knew what my innie was up to. I’m telling you to—I have to go.”
He hangs up and then goes up to a car that’s been parked nearby, asking the guy inside why he’s been tailing him. It’s outie Burt! “I got this thing—when somebody shows up on my doorstep, I wanna know why,” Christopher Walken says, all Christopher Walken-ly. “Call it a quirk.” He seems to see that Irving doesn’t fully know what all that was about and tells Irv about his own history with Lumon: that after he was canned, “they said my innie had a sanctioned erotic entanglement with another worker”—a revelation that did not please Burt’s IRL husband, Fields, who “cancel[ed] our trip to Milwaukee. Thanks for that.”
Burt invites Irv to dinner with him and Fields and lets him know (I’m paraphrasing here) that they like their wine the way Lumon likes its forbidden elevator lights: red and expensive.
Back at his house, outie Mark is coughing again as Reghabi rifles through Gemma’s old stuff in his basement—some knitting that once helped her think, Chekhov’s necklace, the ashes of who knows whom. “She’s not dead,” Mark mutters, echoing an earlier remark that Dylan made about Irving. “She’s just not here.”
And then he starts spiraling again, his split selves superglued into one fractured whole. He sees hallways he’s not standing in; he hears affirmations about his own self. Your outie can roller-skate with grace. Your outie once captured a butterfly. He is standing on the severed floor, face to face with Gemma and/or Ms. Casey. Your outie is going to—
Then it all snaps away, and all Mark can do is cry. It’s a respite from all that coughing, I guess.
Unanswered Questions
What’s a mystery box show without them? Here’s what we can’t stop thinking about.
Mark’s outie is going to … what?!
Hopefully, the answer is more “take down this whole messed-up corporation” and not so much “go out like your pal Petey in a Kwik-E-Mart”—but, for now, we simply do not know. (As he points out to Dr. Reghabi, she doesn’t exactly have a long track record with reintegration surgeries.)
Why did our society regress from the dot-matrix printer?
The technology in Severance is fascinatingly both dated and modern. There are iPhones … but also parking lots filled with extremely 20th-century cars. As Mr. Milchick and Ms. Huang printed out “mournful signage” for Irving’s celebration of life, I felt a genuine jealous pang as their trusty dot-matrix printer absolutely cranked. Used to be, any 10-year-old kid could design and print 10-foot-long banners to welcome their friends home from camp. We’re talking drop shadows, gradients. These days? You’re lucky if your printer ink hasn’t been remotely bricked because you forgot the password to renew some productivity suite subscription. RETVRN.
For the second week in a row: What is the Glasgow Block?
If you felt a strange disturbance in the Force during this episode, it was Redditors everywhere crying out in unison at this close watcher’s cockblock of an exchange:
Mr. Milchick: It’s called a “Glasgow Block.” It allows one’s outie to—”
Helly, interrupting him: Wait, wait, wait, are you saying she was down here? As me?
And so we never do learn the particulars of the Glasgow Block. Instead, Milchick teaches everyone about “the story of the grakappan.” Back in the day, he says, the king of Sweden would don a gray cloak—a grakappan—and “go incognito among his people in hopes of learning their true grievances.” Later, Kier Eagan himself did the same “in his ether factories,” Milchick says.
Who is the gentleman pushing the cart in the beginning, and what is he whistling?
I don’t know who the man from the exports hall is—my initial thought was that maybe it could be some version of Irving, whistling old tunes from his days in the Navy, but that feels off given Irv’s conversation with Felicia about the Exports Hall Guy in this season’s third episode. My new completely unfounded theory is that it’s some recombobulated form of Petey—look at that head of hair! Another option: the mysterious “Oswald.”
Anyway, as for the whistling, the Marchese interview with Stiller continues with this exchange:
But do you deny that [the lyrics to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”] are perhaps a Rosetta stone for deciphering exactly what Severance and Lumon are up to?
I’m not going to say anything.
Looking at the lyrics, there are a few here and there that stand out, like: “Does anyone know where the love of God goes / When the waves turn the minutes to hours?” But I was interested to learn that there’s another song to the same tune: “Back Home in Derry,” based on lyrics written by Irish Republican Army volunteer Bobby Sands while he was imprisoned outside Belfast. And this one’s really worth whistlin’:
Five weeks out to sea, we were now 43
We buried our comrades each morning
In our own slime, we were lost in the time
Endless night without dawning
Lost comrades? Endless night? SLIME? Now we’re getting somewhere.
Why is Ben Stiller so online?
If you’re a Bluesky user who likes to post TV takes, even en français, just know there’s a very good chance that Stiller himself will wind up in your menchies, often bearing Memoji. I blame Jim Dolan for this behavior: If the Knicks hadn’t been so bad for so long, fans wouldn’t have lapped up Stiller’s hoops tweets with such grateful desperation last year, and the man wouldn’t have gotten this hooked on that sweet, sweet reply-guy dopamine. Wait, Ben, if you’re reading this: Do you deny that the lyrics of “Back Home in Derry” are perhaps a Rosetta stone for deciphering exactly what Severance and Lumon are up to?
What’s the significance of Gemma’s necklace?
No idea! Let’s put a pin in this and meet back here in a few episodes!
Why does Ricken call it “a Trojan’s horse”?
Such a minor thing that I can’t stop thinking about: When Devon tells her husband that his new work “sounds like Lumon’s language,” he responds, in exasperation: “Well, it’s a Trojan’s horse!” (“Trojan’s Horse” is also the name of the episode.) What could this possessive apostrophe mean? Is it just another of Ricken’s weird little affectations? Does he know the actual (mythical) Trojan horse attacked Troy, and not the other way around? Is he a Trojan in this scenario, trying to fight back against the wiles of Lumon, or has he always considered himself more the Odysseus type? Either way, this show has turned my mind into the contents of Mark’s fridge.
What’s the significance of Ms. Huang’s instrument of choice?
To play the theremin—a touchless instrument built around a pair of antennae—is to look mysterious and important, moving like a sorcerer who’s conjuring spells out of midair. (One theremin-led group of musicians here in the real world calls itself “The Divine Hand Ensemble,” which sounds like it could be a Lumon business unit.) To hear the theremin is to feel like you’re in conversation with whales. (Or maybe a seal?) And to think about the theremin’s relation to Severance is to suddenly warp the mind.
You can’t spell “theremin” without HR, which seems about right for the childlike empress straight outta corporate. The acoustic principles underlying Ms. Huang’s instrument are beyond my grasp, but they involve pairs of oscillating waveforms that are reminiscent of the ones displayed on Dr. Reghabi’s equipment during Mark’s reintegration procedure! One early name for the instrument was “the etherphone”—and once upon a time, Kier Eagan worked at that ether factory!! (No wonder “frolic” is one of his four tempers.) The inventor of the theremin was a Russian dude named Leon Theremin, and outie Mark wears a Soviet-era “komandirskie” watch, and his dead wife taught Russian lit!!! Theremin had a sister and a daughter named Helena. I REPEAT, A SISTER AND A DAUGHTER NAMED HELENA.
Also! Later in life, Theremin produced another invention: a surreptitious listening device, hidden in the form of a wall-mounted bald eagle insignia, that Soviet schoolchildren presented to the U.S. ambassador to Moscow in 1945. Americans would later refer to it as “The Thing,” but another name for it? THE GREAT SEAL BUG. And last thing, I promise: I can’t shake this interview with Theremin in which he discussed the time he spent assigned to a Soviet sharashka—a research lab within the Gulag system:
Even when I was interned I was treated well. I was not considered to be in prison, but worked as a normal person. I was the head of the lab, and when they liberated me I still worked in the same lab. Then I got married. It turned out that when I was free it was much more difficult to work in the lab. When I was considered to be imprisoned I had a supervisor, and they would say to me that I had to do this and that. Then, when I was freed, I had to do it myself. Then I had to fuss, do much more paperwork, keep an office in order; the work became much worse.
Dang. This sounds like … Lumon’s language, as Devon might say. Crossing my fingers for a future episode in which Ms. Huang and her Sweetwater rep get to chatting about the history of the etherphone and it sets in motion a series of events that unravels everything.
Reddit Theory of the Week
After going down that theremin rabbit hole, I now truly understand the mindset of the mystery-box-show couch detective—what a rush! Lately, I’ve been trying to get more of a handle on Irving and his whole deal, and Reddit provideth information. My favorite two discussions:
- This one, which speculates that Irving is using a combination of wristwatches and the semaphore flag-signaling system to communicate between his outie and innie. (Bonus points to this thread for directing me to The Lexington Letter, a supplemental world-building document released by the Severance folks during the interregnum between the first two seasons that is quite fascinating indeed!)
- This one, which puts forth the idea that we’re maybe dealing with a Dark Irving who is more malevolent than we’ve come to believe. I really dig this one—I like the idea that the real grakappan was Irving all along, or that he’s some rival corporate spy.
Employee of the Week
Well, one thing’s for certain: With a performance review like that, it ain’t Mr. Milchick! (I wonder what he chose for his lunch or if Mr. Drummond went ahead and served up an idiot sandwich.) From the company’s perspective, the two most exemplary (read: spooky and subservient) employees this week were probably Ms. Huang and Ricken—although the latter is more of a 1099 contractor, I guess.
But from my perspective, it’s gotta be this angsty fella:
Dylan DGAF this episode, and he had some wonderful moments as a result. He moves the plot forward time and again—calling out Mark in front of Helly, finding Irving’s directions to the testing department, and cracking a little too wise in front of Mr. Milchick and being subtly reminded that if he wants to hug Gretchen again, he’d better hush up.
But his best moment is when he’s just saying stuff. Dylan’s eulogy for Irving is poignant and profane and delivered perfectly by Zach Cherry, combining the phrases “he put the dick in contradiction” and “suck my fuck” with a tender story involving a water cup that was poisoned with toner just to make a point. “A little sugar with the usual salt,” as Milchick puts it, and it’s tasty work indeed.
Design Porn
Severance isn’t just a story; it’s an atmosphere. Each week we’re highlighting our favorite looks captured by the show’s eerily gorgeous production design and cinematography.
I like how the little portraits of Lumon employees that they have at the ready for printing—on marshmallows, balloons, and funeral mugs alike—have the vibe of those Wall Street Journal stipple portrait hedcuts, Dylan’s in particular:
I also appreciate whoever was responsible for finding just the right fonts and icons to make the first (monthly!) catalog of Milchick’s work fuckups really sing. They even got that ideographic card in there. This is one fine ’zine!
All in all, though, the majority of this episode was so relentlessly blue that it felt nice to get back to a brief shock of green.
Sometimes you have to touch grass, you know? And since another ORTBO is out of the question, that astroturf-green carpet will just have to do.
