‘Severance’ Recap: A Harmony Scorned
This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Severance, “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig.”
Among the many ways Severance stood out in a crowded TV landscape back in 2022 was its opening credits sequence. Too many shows of recent vintage seem to have taken “Skip Intro” as a command for them, rather than an option for viewers, resulting in generic, ill-defined, computer-animated collages that all but invite you not to watch them. But the Severance credits looked distinct and cool, neatly captured the tone and thematic meaning of the show, and offered a perfect mood-setter for each episode:
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“Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig” gives us a new sequence for a new season. It incorporates many of the same visual motifs, with Outie Mark in red longjohns and Innie Mark in a suit, Outie Mark trying to operate a severed workstation while seated in Innie Mark’s open head, etc. It also adds some new imagery, like the goats and Ms. Cobel, but the bigger difference is in the story it seems to be telling. The Season One credits were about the two sides of Mark trying to do the best they could with the weird half-lives Outie Mark had chosen for them, confused but coexisting. This time around, it seems like more of a push-pull — literally, in some moments. If it’s not an outright battle for control of their shared body, it’s at least an acknowledgment that Innie Mark wants a lot more than what he’s been given, and the credits end on the striking image of Innie Mark trying to force his way out of the back of Outie Mark’s head — to get a chance to stay in the outside world, by any means necessary.
It’s another stunner, and one that also seems appropriate coming early in an episode that’s all about the push-pull that Severance itself is dealing with regarding its innies and outies. “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig” is designed as a mirror image for last week’s “Hello, Ms. Cobel,” offering the outie perspective on the events that happened immediately after Milchick shut off the Overtime Contingency.
In retelling the same story multiple times from different perspectives, a show risks testing its audience’s patience. Lost, a show to which Severance owes a large creative debt, did that at the start of its own second season, as we kept arriving at the same moment of confrontation inside one of the Dharma Initiative stations. On top of that, there’s the thorny issue that in Season One, Severance was generally much more interesting when it was dealing with the innies and their strange and unusual world than checking in on the sad life of Outie Mark.
Here, though, it doesn’t feel like the series is killing time, or taking us away from the most exciting parts. It’s essential that we get the proper context for what happened to Innie Mark in “Hello, Ms. Cobel.” Now that we have four outies to visit rather than just one, our journey into the bleak, endless night of the real world feels more varied. And thanks to Innie Mark’s outburst right before Milchick turned off Overtime, Outie Mark now has a mystery to investigate. And that’s on top of the mystery this episode introduces for the audience: Why is Mark so important to Lumon, and to the secretive “Cold Harbor” project, that Milchick would be ordered to go out of his way to keep him working and appeased?
That last answer will have to wait, though, since first we have to pick up where outie world left off, starting with a very puzzled Outie Mark waking up at Devon and Ricken’s party(*), no more sure of what his innie meant than Devon is. From there, we bounce around between Lumon headquarters, where Helena Eagan is trying to undo the mess her innie has just made, and what all four outies are up to in the hours and days between “She’s alive!” and the resurrections of Innie Helly, Irving, and Dylan.
(*) Outie Mark’s ongoing contempt for his brother-in-law gets an amusing new wrinkle when he discovers, to his great surprise and horror, that Innie Mark loved Ricken’s book.
Yes, it should come as no shock to anyone that the redacted newspaper Milchick showed Innie Mark was, in fact, nonsense. Five months have not passed. The world has not embraced the concept of innie civil rights. Helena and her team understand crisis PR well enough to blame Helly’s cry for help on booze and “a non-Lumon medication” causing Helena to behave erratically. The bad guys are once again set to win, the good guys again don’t seem to have a chance. Time is a flat circle.
Of the four outies, Helena is unquestionably the most different from her innie. Both Dylans are more or less the same, though Outie Dylan is having a hard time finding a new job because being severed will get him blacklisted from most non-Lumon companies(*). Irving is Irving in any place, even if Outie Irving hasn’t studied the gospels of Kier, and isn’t sure why his innie went looking for Outie Burt. The Marks are more distinct, because Outie Mark is still deep in his grief over Gemma, while — as Milchick notes to Outie Mark, in trying to convince him to return to work — Innie Mark isn’t burdened by those feelings.
(*) In a nice touch for a show about duality, we see Dylan interviewing for a job with a man played by Adrian Martinez, an actor who often plays the same kinds of roles Zach Cherry does; it’s like Outie Dylan is talking to a third version of himself.
Helena, though, seems like a whole other person from Helly. She moves differently, speaks differently. She is cold where Helly is warm, controlled where Helly’s movements are loose. The two halves of the same being are as diametrically opposed from each other as the above-ground floors of Lumon HQ are from the severed floor. When we see Helena dealing with her colleagues(*), their offices are floor-to-ceiling glass, various rooms and even floors visible to one another, where everything on the severed floor is opaque white, and deliberately hard to navigate. It is an attempt to create the illusion of openness for both visitors and lower-level employees who don’t know the full extent of the evil Lumon does. But it’s all a facade. The question is: Is Helena Eagan just as fake? Or is that a performance that the woman we know and love as Helly learned to give in order to survive being in this monstrous family? Perhaps Helena received a slightly different version of severance from everyone else, but based on what we’ve seen of the separate versions of Mark, Dylan, and Irving, it seems as if all the procedure is supposed to do is to partition off your knowledge of work from home. Innie Mark is more relaxed and upbeat than Outie Mark, but only because, until now, he didn’t know he had a dead wife to mourn. And otherwise, it’s not hard to see the connection between the two, beyond the fact that both look like Adam Scott. Maybe Helly is who Helena could have been if she had never met another Eagan? When Helena watches the footage of Helly kissing Mark, she seems more thrown by it than she does by learning what Helly said at the VIP reception — as if the idea of having such a carefree, happy moment either confuses her, or makes her strangely envious of her alter ego. The episode is a great showcase for Britt Lower, and that scene in particular.
(*) One of them, Mr. Drummond, is played by ólafur Darri ólafsson, an Icelandic actor who most recently appeared on American TV — playing a character referred to as “Iceland,” no less — in HBO’s late, great Somebody Somewhere.
Helly’s kiss also comes up, more obliquely, in Milchick’s sales pitch to get Outie Mark to come back to work, where our favorite smiling goon tells Mark that his innie has found love down on the severed floor. That seems to have more of an impact on Mark than Milchick’s earlier passive-aggressive suggestion that Innie Mark’s rebellion was brave, and that, “I’d hate to reward his courage with nonexistence.” But both arguments speak to the impossibility of either version of Mark feeling truly whole and happy. Innie Mark is a slave who never gets to leave the office or stop working, but if his outie quits, than Mark dies. And even if Outie Mark’s primary motivation for returning to work was to support his innie’s new romance, it’s not something he’ll ever know about or truly feel.
Still, Mark goes back, if only so he and Devon can keep investigating what Innie Mark said, and we get an amusing, accelerated outie view of the quick arrival and equally quick exit of Mark W and the other replacements. And we even get a glimpse of the other three outies — including an unhappy-looking Helena — preparing to return to the severed floor.
But the episode climaxes with the exit, for now, of its title character. (Well, that’s not really her name, but Ricken’s suggested “Cobelvig” portmanteau doesn’t quite fit, either.) Harmony warned Lumon about the MDR rebellion and prevented Helly and the others from doing damage that might not have been so easily fixed. Yet rather than get her job back as a reward, she’s instead offered a promotion that she can tell is some kind of meaningless assignment meant to get her out of the way. So she storms out of work, then storms out of the cookie-cutter house she occupied next to Outie Mark’s. Hell hath no fury like a Harmony scorned, and she unleashes some of it on Outie Mark when he tries to get answers from her before she leaves town.
His questions do not get answered, nor do all of ours at this point. We don’t know what Cold Harbor is, don’t know why Ms. Huang is a child (other than because of when she was born), why Gemma is alive but severed, and why Helly (or Helena?) is lying to the other innies. But “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig” turns over far more cards than it could have this early in the season. And even if both the innies and outies are partially in the dark, we now have a pretty good idea of what’s happening, and why, as we head deeper down this path.
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