‘Severance’ Episode 5: Funeral for a Friend
This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Severance, “Trojan’s Horse,” which is now streaming on Apple TV+.
Among the most disorienting aspects of last week’s spectacularly weird field trip was that it came immediately after an episode that ended with Reghabi reintegrating Mark’s innie and outie selves. Why would Severance skip over showing us the immediate effects of that process? And why were we seeing only Innie Mark throughout the ORTBO, other than perhaps during one brief glitch where he pictured Gemma/Ms. Casey in front of him instead of Helly?
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The answer comes quickly in “Trojan’s Horse,” as Outie Mark complains to Reghabi (who has moved into his house to avoid being seen by Lumon’s spies) that he still doesn’t remember anything that’s happened to Innie Mark. Reghabi suggests that maybe the opposite has happened already, and Innie Mark has started to recall his outie’s life. Clearly, the reintegration — even this new-and-supposedly-improved version, versus the one that killed Petey — does not work instantaneously, and the breakthroughs will come in fits and starts.
That is more or less how “Trojan’s Horse” works as a whole. It has a very difficult task in both following up all the huge events of “Woe’s Hollow,” and in living up to the spell cast by that episode. It is also attempting to juggle innie and outie stories, for only the second time this season, after three of the first four episodes focused on only one side or the other. Parts of this one work incredibly well, while others feel rushed.
The most significant of the latter group is Helly’s return to work — and, really, to life. Based on her response to emerging from the elevator onto the severed floor, it does not seem as if Helly was left in control of her shared body for very long after Irving exposed Helena’s duplicity. So this is her first real chance to not only process that her villainous outie stole her identity — the sole aspect of her whole nightmare existence that she can really call her own — but to fully grapple with her discovery in the Season One finale that her outie is part of the Eagan dynasty. That is an enormous amount of information and emotion for any one person to have to deal with, all in a rush — and, yes, Helly is a person, despite claims to the contrary that we will get to in a bit. Because as far as Helly is concerned, no time passed between her protest speech being interrupted and Irving trying to drown her at Woe’s Hollow, and then again between that and her meeting Ms. Huang. We have seen that severance doesn’t disconnect the innies from human emotions themselves, but only from their outies’ emotional memories.
So this should be an enormously traumatic series of events for Helly, all of them playing out across only a few minutes from her perspective. And, to be fair, she seems horrified to learn (some of) what Helena did in her name, and upset about the loss of Irving. But she also seems to recover with remarkable speed. Or, at least, the episode seems less concerned with her response to what’s been done to her, as well as to learning that her outie is the absolute worst-case scenario person for her to be, than it does in Dylan’s grief over Irving, and in Mark’s own trauma in having been fooled and violated by Helena Eagan(*).
(*) If Helly and Helena were two wholly separate individuals — whether twins, or just two women who could pass for one another with the right disguise and lighting conditions — and Helena tricked Mark into thinking she was Helly in order to sleep with him, then this would be sexual assault. Because they are two aspects of the same person, it is more legally complicated. (Not that innies seem to have any legal rights in this world.) But from the perspective of Mark, he has been assaulted. To Helly, he seems like an unfeeling, victim-blaming asshole. To Mark, Helly is wearing the face of the woman who abused him, and it pains him to be around her.
Those are traumas obviously worth exploring as well, and Zach Cherry and Adam Scott do impressive work showing their characters struggling with each. Both men seem utterly broken by recent events, and Mark has given into defeat, convinced that he will never be able to outmaneuver the Eagans and do anything to improve either his own life or his outie’s. But it feels like the one who should be most scarred — or, at least, the one whose scars require the most attention at this specific moment in the story — is Helly, and “Trojan’s Horse” has too much else on its mind to linger there.
Some of that focus goes to doings in the outside world, where Helena has to deal with the fact that two different innies have now tried to kill her — and that her family keeps insisting that she surrender control of her own body to one of them. The reminder of Helly’s failed suicide attempt from Season One — and the realization that Helena’s father forced her to give herself back over to Helly afterward — only underlines the sense we’ve gotten this season that she despises her family and all its mythology, and would very much like to never be in this building again. But while she has more power over her own life than Helly does, she ultimately also has to do the bidding of management, at least for the duration of whatever Cold Harbor is meant to do.
Given the many ways we’ve seen the Eagans and Milchick indulge the dangerous whims of Innie Mark this season, the Severance writers are placing a huge burden on the eventual explanation of what Cold Harbor is. It doesn’t have to live up to Drummond’s hyperbolic suggestion that the project’s completion will stand as “as one of the great moments in the history of the planet,” any more than Awosting Falls had to look like the tallest waterfall on the planet. But it does have to on some level justify the many risks that management is taking with the innies this season. If it turns out that Mark is just helping them finish a new piece of software that will increase Lumon’s profit margins by 0.3 percent, then this all falls apart.
There’s also a bit of time devoted to Ricken in full sell-out mode, working on a new innie-oriented version of his book that, as Devon argues forcefully, is the philosophical opposite of everything he wrote about that so entranced Innie Mark. He’s doing it for the riches being promised by Lumon. Ultimately, he doesn’t care about the innies any more than, say, Ms. Huang, who scolds Milchick for holding a funeral for Innie Irving because, “It makes them feel like people,” or Mr. Drummond, who warns Milchick to treat the severed workers as “what they really are.” It is the same kind of terminology used to justify human slavery at various points in world history, and it’s hateful, selfish garbage.
It also does not feel coincidental that so many of these exchanges — including Helly telling Milchick, “You can’t do this to people!” — happen in an episode where Milchick tries and fails to engage Natalie in a discussion of the paintings he was given back in “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig.” Lumon management assumes that seeing a version of Kier as a Black man will make Milchick feel more intimately associated with the company. But the opposite seems to have been proven true. The paintings instead only underline how he is in service to a dynastic white family who view everyone who is not a part of that family to be much less than them. Milchick happens to be considered degrees better than, say, Innie Dylan, but only because he has thus far proved useful. You can see the barely veiled contempt Drummond has for him during the performance evaluation, where he is derided by the Swedish-accented executive for, among other sins, using “too many big words” — trying, it is strongly implied, to act above his station in both the company and in life.
Is it any wonder that this humiliating exchange is immediately followed by Milchick and Innie Mark angrily confronting one another in the elevator(*)? Both have dropped any pretense of politeness, with Mark referring to the prop newspaper Milchick showed him in the season premiere as “The Bullshit Gazette,” and Milchick responding by coldly asking if Mark has yet told Helly “that you fucked her outie at the ORBTO?” They have each been painfully reminded of how little autonomy they have over their own futures, regardless of what platitudes their superiors give them. (As the one giving those platitudes to Mark, Milchick understands this better than most.) But for the moment, neither of them can do anything about it. It’s a corker of an argument, and the climax of one of the series’ best spotlights on Milchick to date.
(*) The elevator to the severed floor is designed to only accommodate one person, because the outies are not meant to interact in any way, or even be aware that their innies work together. So when you put two people in that space, one of whom is as physically imposing as Tramell Tillman, it feels particularly claustrophobic and tense, on top of the work being done by the actors and director Sam Donovan.
The elevator comes late in a difficult episode for everybody at Lumon. The funeral service that Milchick reluctantly arranges for Innie Irving is a typically surreal, insensitive affair, which includes Irving’s image recreated in 8-bit animation, on coffee mugs, and as a bust of his head made of fruit. Yet when the three remaining MDR workers return to their stations, they find that Irving’s desk is now gone(*), and his image has been airbrushed out of a group photo of them. He is being erased from existence, because Lumon has the power to do that, and is ultimately only paying lip service to the idea that the feelings of the severed workers should be respected.
(*) Between the removal of the desk, Milchick’s attempt to fire Irving and Dylan earlier this season, and various management conversations, it seems as if Mark is the only member of MDR who is actively contributing to whatever Cold Harbor is. Maybe once upon a time, Dylan, Irving, and/or Petey were also a part of it. But by now, Mark is doing it all, and anyone else in MDR is there to encourage him to stay on task.
But the innies know that Irving existed, and it turns out he even left a final present for Dylan: a note and a drawing of the export hall elevator, hidden behind a poster in the break room. Late in the episode, though, we catch up with Outie Irving, who still very much exists, and who seems just as ready to mess with the Eagans as his innie. Back in the season’s second episode, Burt watched him make a mysterious call from a phone booth, and here we get to hear Irving’s side of a similar clandestine call, which includes him telling the person on the other end of the line that he got fired because, “I think they knew what my innie was up to.” The call is interrupted — by Burt, who has figured out that this is the outie of the man responsible for the “unsanctioned erotic entanglement” that got Burt himself fired — before we can learn more, like who Irving’s confidante is, or how Irving himself thinks he knows what his innie is up to. Is it possible that he has also been through some kind of reintegration procedure? The two halves of Irving are able to draw or paint images from the other’s life, and now it seems as if Outie Irving is, like Reghabi, plotting some kind of anti-Lumon revolution.
It’s a lot to sort through in roughly 48 minutes (counting credits), and at times feels like more than “Trojan’s Horse” can handle. The episode concludes with Reghabi continuing to fine-tune the reintegration process with Outie Mark. For a few moments, he finds himself on the severed floor, listening to Ms. Casey tell Innie Mark about, well, Outie Mark. At the very end of this vision, she declares, “Your outie is going to,” followed by a word that is too distorted for him, or us, to hear. Mark is left feeling like he didn’t get all he wanted out of the vision, just as “Trojan’s Horse” comes out feeling scrambled in some parts, powerful in others.
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