Slower, somber, and somehow more sinister, “Trojan’s Horse,” Severance Season 2 Episode 5, sets the table for the back half of the season, which promises to be a waffle orgy that makes Season 1 look quaint. If the stakes feel lower in the wake of “Woe’s Hollow,” be grateful for the chance to catch your breath; nobody really wants the whole world turned inside-out every week, do they? Instead, this episode wants us to contemplate the finer points of compliance. How do you sustain a revolution from within when you’ve been infiltrated by the other side? What’s the difference between admitting defeat and losing faith in the thing you’re fighting for? And perhaps most pressing: How did Severance manage to make delicious delicious watermelon so fucking fucking gross?
Reintegration’s A Bitch, But The Snacks Are Great
I hope I wasn’t the only person who squealed with delight at the reveal that Dr. Asal “You Re-Gotta Be Kidding Me” Reghabi has been hiding out at Mark’s house ever since he began his reintegration. Can you imagine a more-necessary-yet-less-appropriate roomie? “Hey, I know your energy level’s gone to shit ever since I put you on a diet of rotten baby food to help your brain waves sync up, but you really need to get your dryer fixed. How can you live like this? Not cool, bro. Not cool.”
That said, while Mark has yet to undergo a second reintegration session, the good doctor’s work is starting to pay off beyond the Helena / Gemma jumpscare he endured at the ORTBO; Mark’s postcoital innie and outie memories have begun to bleed together in ways that suggest far more than mere transposition. “Trojan’s Horse” ends with an extended sequence wherein Mark ascends his basement steps at home and emerges on the severed floor, the world around him flickering between innie and outie while Miss Casey’s voice grows in strength and persistence – until at last Mark is confronted with his dead wife as her severed self, a person he’s never met and can only grasp at the paradoxical existence of. The only word that does justice to the final shot – a close-up of Mark’s bewildered, tear-stained face – is: raw.
Lunch Will Be Provided
Speaking of getting rubbed raw, Mr. Milchick is going through yet another unexpected twist in the labyrinthine Lumon wringer: it’s time for his first-ever Performance Review! It seems pretty clear that, despite the ORTBO (or, if we want to be by-the-book, the “Calamitous ORTBO”), Milchick came into this thing seriously underestimating how badly he’d fucked things up in Lumon’s eyes. And yes, the question of whether “Do It” Seth is in fact bad at his job is worthy of serious discussion. But it’s also worth pointing out that the three biggest ticks against him –
- 1) He “uses too many big words”;
- 2) His makeshift MDR team failed to gel; and
- 3) The whole Helena Eagan almost dying thing
– are all either not really his “fault” (in the sense that it’s possible to assign individual blame for them) or aren’t faults at all. First of all, “Uses too many big words” is code for “Miss Huang hasn’t taken the SAT yet.” On that note, let’s also point out how hilarious it is that the complaints about Mr. Milchick are supposed to be anonymous when he appears to only have regular severed-floor contact with five people, four of whom have worked with him too long to be baffled by the gilded lilies of his verbiage’s garden. Secondly: as Milchick himself said all the way back in “Goodbye Mrs. Selvig,” he only had 48 hours to put that shambolic ruse together. And since Mark S’ completion of Cold Harbor appears to be the literal key to the universe for Lumon’s corporate godhead, it hardly seems fair to hold Milchick responsible for Mark’s unwillingness to keep living without his friends.
As for #3…yeah, no, OK, it’s maybe fair to call Ole Milk Cheeks out on that one. Because why the fuck – as Sam and I wondered in our podcast episode on “Woe’s Hollow” – did Milchick think it was a good idea to yank the innies out of the office literal days after they’d all gotten back to work and with Mark so close to completing his file? That’s like a basketball coach congratulating his team’s 20-point lead at the end of three quarters and then telling them “You know what guys, we’re going for ice cream now. We’ll come back and finish the game after.” That’s even before we think about how Helena almost died and Irving B. really did sort of die (kinda) and everything the team thought it knew about Lumon and each other shifted fundamentally and irrevocably. Even if the ORTBO had gone well, it would have been a mysterious-and-important distraction from that ever-mysterious-and-supremely important refining.
But I also can’t jump too hard on Milchick for his more questionable leadership tactics because what his performance review amounts to is an intensification of the slavery metaphor that Severance introduced with the gift of the inclusively recanonized Kier cycle pantings in “Who Is Alive?” The founder in blackface functions as both a desecration of Kier and a wedge for Milchick, who seems so stunned by the paintings at least in part because he can’t imagine why he shouldn’t have been able to see himself in Kier in the first place. In “Trojan’s Horse,” the performance review concludes with Mr. Drummond’s oh-so-friendly suggestion that Seth “go back to the basics…Remember these severed workers’ greater purpose. And…treat them as what they really are.” If the suggestion of severed workers-as-slaves wasn’t already strong enough, juxtapose Milchick’s response (“I’m tightening the leash”) with Miss Huang’s suggestion while she and Milchick prepare the bereavement ceremony for Irving (“You shouldn’t let them have a funeral. It makes them feel like people”). Throw in another perfectly blank response from Natalie when Milchick brings the paintings up before his review and we’re left with the feeling that Seth is beginning to ask himself some of the same questions about his identity that led Mark to his own self-discovery in Season 1.
Flock Without A Shepherd
In less heavy-duty news, Ricken thinks that the English language idiom for something unexpected hiding within a gift is “Trojan’s horse” and not “Trojan horse.” I’m on record as an appreciator of Dr. Hale’s unwitting buffoonery in general, but I feel like this particular malapropism is a little unbelievable even for him. Something that rings true: Ricken being too transfixed by “Nat” and her attentions and her promises of Lumon riches beyond his wildest imagining to see that what’s actually writing for the severed employees is less a new edition of The You You Are and more a bowdlerization akin to cutting 1984 down to just its final sentence: “He loved Big Brother.”
Meanwhile, Helena Eagan has to be feeling as powerless as a corporate heiress possibly can. Her cover’s blown; her father won’t talk to her; and she’s lost the ability to say no to her innie, who simply must be allowed to return to work. To be sure, nobody straight-up orders Helena to do so. (Except for Jame, who does it through Mr. Drummond because he is the very pettiest little bitch in all of Kier-dom.) But the moment when Helena realizes she has no choice is also the first time Severance has shown her backed into a corner, non-life-and-death category.
It’s as humiliating for the CEO-in-waiting as it is liberating for our girl Helly R., who jumps back into the game with such vigor that I couldn’t help feeling like an idiot for not realizing it wasn’t her the whole time. What does Helena Eagan say when Irving is still in the aether over losing Burt? A retrospectively milquetoast “We’ve got you.” What does Helly R. say when Mark is all up in his pouts over the fact that he got duped by Helly’s outie and their plans were never going to work? “This is real. Not everything here is a lie. And stop being a fucking asshole.” THAT is what Helly sounds like. It’s a joyous sound, a triumphant call-to-arms, something we didn’t know we’d missed until it had returned to us. Not all of the sheep in “Trojan’s Horse” are in the pen; some of them only appear to have wool over their eyes.
Grade: B
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