A Revelatory Interlude as Woodland Paupers: Severance’s “Woe’s Hollow”
Published on February 7, 2025
Screenshot: Apple TV+
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Screenshot: Apple TV+
I generally watch Severance as an appreciator. An admirer, a fan, a dork who loves the color schemes and the design and the layered, spectacular performances. I start watching shows because of their premises; I fall in love with them, get hooked and immersed, because of their characters. I have generally not been a wild theorizer. Some ideas, sure. But I’ve not been trying to find answers in the paintings created by Optics & Design or analyzing the soap dispensers.
This week, though? This week might have broken me. And it’s not just because I have a sort of emotional allergic reaction to the very concept of team-building exercises and work “retreats.” Thank you, creator Dan Erickson; thank you, director Ben Stiller; thank you, writer Anna Ouyang Moench; thank you every single person who designed the outfits and found the locations and put this field trip together.
Here there be spoilers. All the spoilers.
There’s so much to talk about that I don’t know where to start. There’s hardly a situation, a setting, a line, or a hint dropped that doesn’t tie into something, or everything, else. It’s an hour with the innies, and while it presents as a field trip… I think we might have been on the severed floor the whole time.
I will explain. Eventually.
The episode opens with Irv in the open, in a great wide space of snow and trees. We hear the telltale ding of the elevator arriving on the severed floor. But he’s on the ice, outside—which means his outie put on that wacky outfit and walked there. How did Lumon pitch that to the outies? I would love to see our buddy Seth doing those little home visits.
Or maybe something else happened.
Irv is on the ice, Mark is on the cliff, and Helly and Dylan join the group eventually. Their voices echo dramatically, and I am not sure it ever makes an iota of sense that they can hear each other so clearly at such distances. Everything is frozen, of course. I can’t think about the perpetual cold here without thinking of Narnia: “Always winter, but never Christmas.”
Once they’re all together, an AV cart from your average middle school appears, except that it’s on top of a cliff where presumably there are no average power outlets. Mr. Milchick welcomes them to their retreat, mid-explanation of their whereabouts, predicts Dylan’s question, though to be fair, I asked exactly the same question—“Who the fuck is Dieter Eagan?”—meaning that it was not a hard question to predict.
The whole shenanigans, this outdoor adventure, is called an Outdoor Retreat and Team Building Exercise, or ORTBO, which, yes, we all get a gold star for realizing that anagrams to ROBOT. Severance’s creators are far too clever to drop something like that and let it mean Giant Answers to All Our Questions, but they’re also far too detail-oriented to do it with anything but a great sense of purpose.
Maybe the robots are the doppelgangers, the not-quite-right versions of the MDR team that appear in this frozen world. Maybe the next step in a severed workforce is a robot workforce. I mean: If you really want to separate someone’s work and home life, what if you could just, somehow, recreate them as a robot version of themselves? Is that what they’re refining? Is Miss Casey a robot? Are the Mammalians Nurturable folks there so that Lumon can understand human-animal interactions, for some other sort of work? I can make all of this work in my head, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct. (Remember that one of the other offices had animatronics in the Perpetuity Wing, though.)
The eerie doppelgangers are provided for the team so that they may share Keir’s experience of having a twin, the revelation which sent me straight down Professor X/Cassandra Nova roads in my head. (If that doesn’t mean anything to you, it’s okay, I promise.) A side note that is totally related: I picked one hell of a week to read Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, which is about her getting mistaken for Naomi Wolf, but is also about doppelgangers, shadow selves, mirror worlds, and other strange doublings.
This one is really strange. Dieter Eagen wanted to live as a pauper in the woods, a phrase that repeats a few times, but then he got Annihilationed into the woods, grotesquely (Milchick seems to relish that bit of the reading). Keir wrote about his twin in the fourth appendix, “a text of such sanctity that it is forbidden upon the severed floor.” The MDR team finds the text in Scissor Cave, then read from it as they walk; Irv’s voice is doubled with Keir’s voice, which crackles like an old radio.
(As an aside, so much of the sound and the music in this episode is really different than it is when they’re indoors; the tinny, hymn-like music that plays from the TV before going pure ’80s at the end; the horror movie strings; Miss Huang playing the theremin. The opening credits are skipped; the show’s title floats in the clouds where the sun is never clearly visible. The vibes: they are off.)
All of this takes place in Dieter Eagan National Forest, the name of which implies that Dieter’s existence is known of in the outside world—assuming they are in the actual outside world. But nothing about him is in the handbook the innies have, presumably, read. But—again with the buts!—this forest is also home to the grotto where Keir “tamed the four tempers for the very first time.” So, presumably, a big place in Keir mythology.
But the sacred fourth appendix! The appendix is very weird.
“His every thrust found rhythm with the trill of the crickets and the moaning of the wind and the snowfall’s yearly thaw. Dieter became on that night an instrument of nature and nature played Dieter with elegance. I had no choice but to listen as he spilled his lineage upon the soil.”
Can you blame Helly for giggling, when Milchick reads the next part? After all they’ve been through on this long, strange day—waking up on a cliff, trekking through the woods in odd clothes, finding a very strange dead thing, discovering their MDR-colored tents, being fed “copious luxury meats” (what even)—can you blame her for laughing? Does it not sound like Dieter jerked off into the woods and then became the woods? Does that make any sense?
But this brings me to the main part of this episode, which is Helly. Irving’s suspicion grows, and grows, and is entirely justifiable: Her story about what she saw, in her outie’s life, did not hold a drop of water, and she has been off. The way she says “I just wish I knew where we were going” seems off. Irv pushes, she resists. Her expression changes so drastically, at one moment, that I thought her face had done the elevator-shifting-thing. I wish I could pinpoint what it is about her hair that I find so disconcertingly not quite right. Britt Lower plays her character like Helly, and then she doesn’t. It’s body language, gestures, a face that is not as open, a curiosity that points in different directions. Is her voice flatter? Is that it? It’s incredible work.
When she starts giggling at Milchick’s serious reading of the appendix, at his insistence that every word is true (she clearly believes otherwise) there’s a shift. The laughter doesn’t spread, exactly, though Mark joins in. Watching this scene—this whole episode, really—the second time through, once Helena’s deception has been made clear, you can see the difference between an innie and an outie: the knowing, And when Mr. Milchick says, “The team I thought I knew would have processed more thoughtfully,” he is absolutely telling Helena to knock it off and stop changing the vibe.
Except that he can’t really tell her anything, because she’s an Eagan. An Eagan who spells out what’s wrong with Irv in a way that no innie has ever or probably would ever done. Innie psychology is different than outie psychology in ways that I would love to hear from an actual psychologist about. But regardless, pinpointing Irv’s loneliness was not a Helly thing to do.
So much of this episode is a Helena/Irving duet, an awkward dance of suspicion and secrecy that culminates in Irv’s weird frozen dream, the encounter with Helena and Mark, and what comes after. I’m calling her Helena now because it was Helena all along, and as for that encounter… well, to be honest, I think that’s rape. She had sex with him knowing that she was not the person he wanted to be having sex with. It was uncomfortable to watch the first time, when I was still uncertain about Helly, and agonizing the second, especially when something glitches and Mark sees Gemma for that brief second. I do not have any theories about that, except that it’s a powerful reminder that he may or may not be integrated. And if he is, then they’re both not being clear about who the other person is sleeping with. It feels bad.
I’m glad, though, that John Turturro got this Irv-focused episode; he spends this hour carefully walking this beautiful line between Irv’s inherent elegance and his growing suspicions, playing off Britt Lower and Tramell Tillman in ways that are gorgeous; I could just watch his face for hours. It’s like his outie self is seeping through—the man who’s making lists of severed employees and looking into something. Does emotional distress rattle the severed mind? They certainly all have reason to be distressed.
Irv’s dream feels like the perfect culmination of the Woe’s Hollow/Keir theme: Back at his desk, he sees Burt, too briefly, and then looks over and sees the temper woe, the “gaunt bride.” She’s sitting in Helly’s chair, which is not at all subtle, really, but also incredibly creepy. The numbers on Irv’s screen begin to spell out EAGAN. And then he wakes up and makes a choice.
I did not see this coming; I did not expect the show to answer the Helly question this fast, but to do so implies that this is only the tip of the secrets iceberg. Now I can’t stop thinking about Helena Eagan. About the way she sounds sincere when she tells Mark she didn’t like who she was on the outside, and was ashamed; about the way there’s also sincerity in her voice when she realizes Irv has put it together, and she says she’s sorry.
Irv was right: Who but an Eagan would have the power to send themself, their real self, to the severed floor? But the next question is: Why? Why did Helena get severed in the first place? Why did her father call her “fetid moppet” with such bile in his voice? I don’t think I’m the first person to begin to suspect that Helena might be the black sheep of the Eagan family. Did she get in such trouble that she was basically forced to volunteer as the face of severed workers? Is this all some kind of ploy to get back in the company and family’s good graces? Am I overthinking this?
When she yells, “Goddammit, Seth, do it,” and Irv sneers, “Yes, do it, Seth,” it’s like everything snaps into place for a split second before all the other whys crop up, one first and foremost: Why do this at all? Is it an Eagan thing or a Helena thing? Is she basically trying to steal her innie’s friends? Is she a sociopath? Was this an elaborate plot to get Mark to, uh, spill his lineage in the woods? Did her family make her like this? What is it like growing up Eagan? I would watch an entire Behind the Music-style episode about that.
And what does it mean when Milchick says “Remove the Glasglow block now”?
This, more than anything, is what led me to the theory that they’re still on the severed floor. If they were out in the world, there would be nothing to remove to put Helly in charge of that body; they’d need the overtime contingency to be turned on. I am making some leaps, here; I am guessing that the “Glasgow block” is what allows Helena to go to the severed floor without turning into Helly. But what else could it be? And if it’s not the OTC, how could Helly appear in the outside world?
The world of Woe’s Hollow is largely silent. There are birds, though, and one very strange dead thing. It doesn’t really seem that cold, despite their outfits. There is an easy path up a very steep cliff face. There is a TV with no cord and a book attached to a cave wall. They have the toilet paper from the office. That is clearly not the tallest waterfall on the planet, no matter what Milchick says. At least, assuming they’re on our planet. (Please don’t let it all be a simulation. Another planet would be wild, though.)
But when Milchick fires Irving, he turns him back into his outie self right then and there—though without that telltale ding. The perspective shifts, the soundtrack glitches, and then: black. I don’t know if this supports or destroys my theory, to be honest.
For the second week in a row, we’re left with a selfhood cliffhanger. This week told us absolutely nothing about what’s happening in Mark’s brain, except for that glitchy Gemma moment. And now I have to wonder if Irving’s outie is just standing there, staring at these strangers, about to get told he’s fired. Again. And for good. “It will be as if you, Irving B., never even existed, nor drew a single breath upon this earth.”
The look Turturro wears as he walks away is satisfied, though. He was going to end his existence for himself so recently. Now he’s ended it on behalf of Helly. (Poor Helly! The last thing she knew, she was getting dragged off stage at that gala. What a way to wake up.)
The last thing Irv says, directed at Dylan, is “Just remember: Hang in there!” I had to go back and check, but yes: There’s a “hang in there” poster in the new breakroom. And it pretty clearly depicts Dylan, hanging off the two switches required to turn on the OTC.
DRIPPING ICICLES
- When the MDR team are on top of that cliff with the TV, their heads are in focus but their feet are very blurry.
- Irv’s choice of word to describe Milchik—mountebank—is an odd one.
- The book on the wall in the cave gave me such Legend of Zelda vibes.
- I feel compelled to note that the fourth appendix comes up in the season’s fourth episode.
- BUT THE DEAD THING, THOUGH.
- Does Milchick actually believe all the things he tells them? Or is this, to him, an experiment of sorts?
- Probably innies have never had dreams, right? Except Irving napping?
- There are four figures in the painting of Keir taming the tempers and yes, one is a bride (less gaunt), but did we really think those were literal depictions?
- The following, unheard chapter is “Keir and the Thieving Nanny.”
- “Marshmallows are for team players, Dylan. They don’t just hand them out.” Interesting to me that Milchick says “they,” here.[end-mark]
The post A Revelatory Interlude as Woodland Paupers: <i>Severance</i>’s “Woe’s Hollow” appeared first on Reactor.
