‘Severance’ Episode 6: My Chemical Romance(s)
This post contains spoilers for this week’s Severance episode, “Attila,” which is now streaming on Apple TV+.
Midway through “Attila,” Gretchen impulsively kisses Dylan during her latest trip to the severed floor. Dylan, awestruck by this wonderful woman and this romantic gesture, laments that he can’t be with her all the time. Gretchen insists that they are always together, but Innie Dylan bitterly points out, “You and him are. But I’m not.” To Gretchen, this man in the family visitation room is the exact same person she’s married to. To Innie Dylan, his outie is a wholly separate person; Innie Dylan will never meet him, nor ever experience the exact things Outie Dylan experiences.
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It isn’t a coincidence that this kiss happens in an episode where romantic and emotional lines are being blurred between the innie and outie worlds. Note that the kiss happens at the same time that Helly is recalling the moment in Season One when she kissed Mark. Like the song says, everybody needs somebody to love. But how is love meant to work in a world where anybody can contain more than one individual?
It’s an episode featuring a love triangle (involving Gretchen and both Dylans), a love pentagon (involving both Irvings, both Burts, and Outie Burt’s husband Fields), and a love… I’m not even sure what kind of shape would be required to depict everything going on at the moment with Helly, Helena, both Marks, Gemma, and Ms. Casey. But no matter the geometry, we are reminded over and over this week that severed life adds up to less than the emotional sum of its parts, whether you’re an innie or an outie.
There are a few non-romantic bits of business sprinkled throughout the hour. Milchick masochistically does his penance for the sins alleged against him by Mr. Drummond in his performance review: obsessively placing all his paper clips in the same direction until his hands are shaking, and forcing himself to express ideas in plainer English, so that “You must eradicate from yourself childish folly” eventually gets pared down to “Grow up.” We see that Drummond is keeping tabs on many severed workers, including Outie Irving(*). And we see Reghabi continually working with Outie Mark to accelerate his reintegration, which eventually leads to Mark foaming at the mouth on his floor when Devon arrives to interrupt the process.
(*) Of note: Drummond finds that Irving has a “Kier Regional Road Map,” and several of the employees on Irving’s paperwork have addresses that end with “Kier, PE” followed by what in our world are New Jersey zip codes (one for Upper Saddle River, one for Ridgewood). So there seems to be both a city and a state in Severance world that don’t exist in ours, on top of the ambiguities about when this is supposed to be set, given the mix of retro and futuristic technology.
But even that subplot is about Outie Mark’s desire to find his not-so-late wife, which here leads to him seeing the version of her that his innie knows. So let’s see if we can get this all straight:
Outie Mark is looking for Gemma, whom he loves and wants to be reunited with, but…
Innie Mark knows Gemma as Ms. Casey. Ms. Casey has no romantic feelings towards Innie Mark, nor does he towards her, because he’s in love with…
Helly, who conveniently is also in love with Innie Mark, but is vexed by…
Helena, who has slept with Innie Mark and here attempts to at minimum flirt with Outie Mark, if not outright seduce him…
which she already did with Innie Mark, while posing as Helly…
which here inspires Helly to give Innie Mark a chance at a do-over with the woman he actually cares for, while…
Outie Mark sensibly gets the hell away from Helena, not only because he loves his wife, but because he knows this woman is part of the reason he thought his wife was dead.
Got all that? Do you need to take a minute to meditate? Have an ibuprofen?
It’s to the show’s credit that this all comes across as emotionally confusing to the characters, but for the most part not narratively confusing to the audience. “Attila” does a better job than “Trojan’s Horse” did at articulating the horror that Helly feels over having her identity usurped by Helena, and over the fact that she has to share a body with such a monster. “What sucks is that she got to have that and I didn’t,” she says of Helena and Mark’s night together at Woe’s Hollow. “That she used me to trick my friends, used my body to get close to you, that she dresses me in the morning, like I’m a baby, that she controls me and this company. It’s disgusting.” She can’t do anything to harm Helena directly, but she can at least give Mark the experience he thought he was having, even going so far as to create a tent of sorts using the plastic sheeting in an unused nearby office. An argument could be made that one or both of them would still feel too traumatized by Helena’s actions to fully enjoy this unusual form of revenge sex. But when you’re an innie, you have to seize any chance at joy that you can find.
Out in the cold of Kier, PE (wherever that is), Helena approaches Outie Mark at his favorite diner. Her primary goal is to ensure Cold Harbor (whatever it is) goes off without a hitch. But she also seems fascinated by Mark Scout in general, beyond this huge role he’s playing for her company. She was at minimum curious about him when she saw Helly kissing him, and perhaps envious, because in a perverse way, Helly has certain freedoms that Helena doesn’t. She’s also enough of a narcissist that it feels like she would want to do a kind of side-by-side taste test to see if the experience is the same with both versions. And for a few moments, their style of banter feels almost startlingly similar to when Helly and Innie Mark do the same. Even if Helena is far more different from Helly than any other outie-innie pair we’ve met, they still have the same DNA and some of the same personality traits. If Outie Mark still thought that Gemma was dead, it’s not hard to imagine him leaving that diner with her, if only as a distraction from his grief. But because he knows that Gemma is for some reason in Lumon custody, he wisely gets out of there and insists that Reghabi try to make the reintegration go faster. Even if he doesn’t know of his innie’s history with this woman, Helena’s very presence unnerves and angers him to the point that he will risk anything to get away from her and back to his wife. (Specifically, it’s her attempting to play dumb about Gemma’s name that breaks the spell cast by their earlier jokiness.)
The episode’s title comes from the pet nickname that Outie Burt and Fields (wonderfully played by Fringe alum John Noble) have for each other, which evolved from them previously calling each other “Hon.” They explain to Outie Irving that Burt agreed to severance from a desire for at least a part of him to make it to Heaven, since his outie self was a “scoundrel” in his younger days, whatever that means. Is their religion something resembling Christianity, or are they, like Innie Irving once was, disciples of Kier? It doesn’t matter at this point, because the two of them are lying to themselves, and at times to one another, about a whole lot of things. Most notably, Fields is not OK with the idea that Burt’s innie might have slept with Irving’s. And when Fields recalls an incident at Lumon from 20 years ago, Irving realizes something fishy is going on, since severance was only invented — or, at least, only went public — a dozen years before. So either Fields is misremembering, Lumon has been more secretive than even we know, or Burt worked there well before he got severed, and is keeping that part of his life — more scoundrel-ish behavior, no doubt — a secret from even his husband. Earlier, Fields jokes to Irving that “what’s mine is yours,” but, like Gretchen does with Dylan, he sees both halves of Burt as the same person, and is pained at the idea of having to share him with anyone else.
However naive Gretchen might be about the full extent of a severed life, she is at least smart enough to realize she shouldn’t just go home and tell Outie Dylan that she kissed another man — even if that man was another version of him.
As Reghabi works to reassemble Mark into the person he was before Lumon got its hands on him, time and space begin to blur for him. Gaps begin to develop in his own chronology, so that Ms. Huang is tending to Innie Mark’s bloody nose at what seems to be the exact same moment that Reghabi is treating Outie Mark, even though he of course can’t be in two places at once. But the barriers between the innie and outie worlds are being pushed, and at times outright broken. Hearts and souls are not meant to be divided this way. Is it any wonder things are falling apart?
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