I don’t know what the best Severance episode is, and I don’t know which one is the most bonkers. But I feel very comfortable declaring that “Woe’s Hollow,” Severance Season 2 Episode 4, is the most dangerous hour the show has yet aired, and that any serious list of the first two categories has to include it as well. The show’s conceit make this premise – the gang goes on a team-building retreat! – literally otherworldly where we might expect it to feel hackneyed. It also means that one character’s discovery of another’s secret (nestled, as it must be, in another one that’s even larger) has potentially lethal consequences. And this is before we even consider all the fucked-up new Lumon shit going on. So let’s get into that underbrush!
WARNING: This is a review of “Woe’s Hollow.” It presumes that you have either seen the episode or don’t care about spoilers. If you don’t want to get spoilt, turn back now. Spem omnem relinquite qui huc inrtatis and so forth.
Lumon Trips On Its Own Dick
This episode takes place entirely within the friendly confines of the “Who the Fuck Is” Dieter Eagan National Forest. From this, I would like to extrapolate one immediate question: Which nation? Are we to believe that the United States saw fit to honor a phantom Eagan so? I for one am of the firm opinion that the “PE” following “Kier” on all Severance‘s correspondence and other printed material stands for “Principality of Eagan” or “Province of Eagan” or some related declaration of sovereignty, and that this National Forest is yet another brick in the crumbling, Sovietesque wall of Lumon’s self-deception and faded grandeur.
In any case, our Core Four are tasked with recovering the heretofore unknown Fourth Appendix of Kier Eagan’s collected gospels. Why? So they can learn the tale of how Kier first tamed the four tempers, in the very Woe’s Hollow whence this episode’s title comes. And what better way to learn than while hiking through an endless frozen forest, with only their creepypasta-slash-ai-looking holographic doppelganger projections to guide them? And what better way for their learning to influence them than by a reinforcement-through-campfire story from Mr. Milchick himself, after a bounty of “copious meats” and before the promise of literal Kier-stamped marshmallows?
In the midst of such an overwhelming visual and rhetorical cornucopia, it’s too easy to overlook the cracks in Milchick’s plan. He tells the innies that he’s arranged this Outdoor Retreat and Team-Building Occurrence in response to their frequent daydreams about and requests to see the outside world. But going from the severed floor to this is like hearing your best friend muse about climbing a mountain someday and lining up a K2 death march followed by the Sizzler buffet. It’s similarly batshit to load these noted Lumon skeptics up with a literal tome of completely new company mythos, allegedly dictated by Kier on his deathbed and capped off with a narrative climax that involves the prepubescent Dieter’s midnight orgasm (who among us hasn’t needed to break away from the campsite and rub one out ‘neath the moonless sky, with only the silent pines to bear witness?), followed by Dieter’s horrific and instantaneous decomposition into the very arboreal matter upon which he only moments earlier “spilled his legacy.” This is not a literal mind-fuck. But it might as well be.
Helena and Helly and Mark and Mark
So here’s where we’re at with these two. Innie Mark (IM), who knows that Outie Mark (OM)’s wife Gemma died in a car crash and is also alive in Lumon HQ as Miss Casey (MC/G), has enlisted the help of Innie Helly (IH) to find her; except that IM, who never knew G and never had feelings for MC, has instead developed feelings for IH, and did in fact kiss IH at the elevator before the OTC (although it would be more accurate to say that IH kissed him), and so it’s of course natural that things might be a little awkward between IM and IH in the wake of the OTC, since IM wants to do right by OM and therefore really does need his kinda-sorta girlfriend IH’s help finding his kinda-sorta wife MC/G who he’s never met – except that the whole kinda-sorta thing boils over at post OTC-MDR’s first-ever ORTBO, when, given more freedom than they’ve ever had in their entire innie lives, IM and IH consummate their relationship in their top-shelf REI tent by the sensual light of the biggest space heater Lumon produces…but what IM doesn’t know during the act of consensual conjugation and only finds out the next morning, during what in the world of Severance and Lumon amounts to a walk of shame that would make any real-world Catholic simply overguilt and faint dead away, is that IH was not the person to whom he gave his virginniety, but that it was Outie Helena (OH) who shared IM’s ORTBO bed, that in fact OH has been playing the role of IH ever since IM managed to get his MDR team back together, and therefore that the entire virginnietaking experience between IM and IH was a shambolic ruse orchestrated by OH, one based on deceit and misanthropy and the fallout from which will likely define, in large measure, the rest of Severance‘s Season 2, if not well beyond.
Hang In There
It’s difficult to fathom how MDR can ever again be the Core Four we’ve come to love. (To be fair, though, it also felt like we’d never see these four in the same room again after the Season 1 finale, and Severance managed to pull that off about twenty minutes into the Season 2 premiere.) As a union between plot device and character development, though, Irving B’s farewell is a supernova. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the 39 minutes his innie spent in the outside world effectively ended his life as an innie; “Woe’s Hollow” was just the coda. Ever since he came back, Irv has been unable to think about anything but Burt. His loyalty to Lumon turned into the thin ice that could no longer support him. It also feels like there might be connections to be drawn between Irv’s intuition in deducing Helly’s true identity, the ruthlessness with which he acts when he makes the final deduction, and the still-unaddressed military uniforms and smuggled Lumon employee data he’s hiding in his apartment. We’ve been too fixated on Burt and Irv’s love story – and rightly fucking so – to remember that Severance has yet to explain what Irv is up to. Now that his innie is no more, it stands to reason that we’ll find out.
Pond Seal
If you think of it as another entry in Severance‘s canon list of weird and / or funny turns of phrase, “pond seal” is effective enough. This crew doesn’t know major pop culture references; how are they to know a seal’s habitat from a hole in the ground? But I’m also reminded of the scene, early in Johnathan Glazer‘s 2000 film Sexy Beast, where Gal and Aitch are out hunting with Enrique the pool boy, and the gun falls apart. It’s played for laughs, but the scene is also meant to underscore how vulnerable these retired criminals are to the unexpected force of nature that is Ben Kingsley‘s Don Logan, who arrives only a few scenes later and brings with him all manner of woe. In that sense, the pond seal is an even deeper, more grotesque harbinger of disaster: not only do none of the innies recognize what kind of animal this carcass was, they’re too bewildered and gobsmacked and plain old hungry to keep from arguing about whether they should eat it. The fundamental elements that make life possible – movement, consumption, agreement – start to slip past their capacity to hold on, and all because of a change in environment.
I wonder too about the human capacity for recognition in the face of discord. We understand the carcass to be an animal; but, because it’s too charred and rotted to interpret further, the merest interpretation becomes unusable. Mark understood the victim of the car crash to be his wife, yet she appears to be alive, if not well, just outside his grip. If that seems like a weak comparison, I would only suggest that Severance doesn’t throw in details for their own sake.
Grade: A
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