'Severance' Gives Us the Emotional Mess We Crave

(This piece was composed before and does not concern the wild events of this week’s Gemma-centric episode of Severance; a discussion on that is forthcoming).

Ever since that first kiss between Mark (Adam Scott) and Helly (Britt Lower) back in season one, a question has lingered in the back of mind, one that’s now been brought directly to the forefront after the last few weeks: What happens if an innie gets pregnant? It seemed like a distant possibility before, not because of biological incapability, but because, for all of the soul-extracting office culture extremism, it didn’t seem possible that something that calamitous could occur in what previously seemed like a tightly run ship (which invites a new theory: is there a possibility that female severed employees could unknowingly have some birth control device implanted during the severance procedure?). But as increasingly stranger happenings unfurl, among them being the genuine risk of bodily harm—the unsettling goat-minders of Mammalians Nurturable being a prime example—the more it seems Lumon employees having complicated entanglements seem less of a risk and more of an inescapable eventuality.

During the world’s worst outdoor team-building exercise, Mark and Helly finally made their relationship physical, a development that was dampened by the big reveal that Helly is, in fact, Helena Eagan—and this is where I’m going to take a moment to toot my own horn because I absolutely called it back in the season premiere.

“I don’t care who you are out there.” How intoxicating that must have been for the corporate (cult) heiress to hear under the warm lantern glow while cuddling with Mark. Sleeping with a man who, by most definitions, believes you’re someone else, is the sort of unethical selfishness that feels par for the course for a member of the mysterious Eagan clan. If her transgression wasn’t bad enough—Irving (John Turturro) exposing her was, while harrowing, the most satisfying development of the series thus far (RIP to a real one)—stalking Outie Mark renders her all the more frightening; he may be an object of desire when it comes to the physical, but he also represents something outside of her powerful and twisted existence, which begs the question of how far, then, is she willing to go to keep tasting this symbolic freedom? A more urgent, but just as tantalizing, question also awaits: How long is Milchick (Tramell Tillman, who’s earning every bit of awards’ consideration this season) going to keep the knowledge of Helena’s antics to himself?

While this is happening in the outside world, a setting framed as “reality” within the world of the show as opposed to the severance floor, Helly is coping with a disturbing loss of autonomy in concert with her own feelings toward Mark. When Helly seeks to balance the scale of her lived experience (“I don’t want her memory…I want my own”) by having sex with Mark. It’s sweet and tender in its shy moments (awkward to make love to someone who’s already taken that step with you), and once they emerge back into the aggressive brightness of the hallway, Helly’s made as much peace with the situation as she can. As much peace as a person who’s only allowed to experience eight hours of every day can feel, which is the disquieting hell that lies at the series’ center.

There’s no contingency plan that allows for emotional messes, and it’s mind-boggling to think Lumon has neither prepared for nor encountered any intimate coworker fraternization in the roughly fifteen or so years the severance procedure has been around. Perhaps Lumon’s operating under the misapprehension that the innies’ “existence,” confined solely to the office, means any workplace drama never makes it past the elevator doors—accidental pregnancy or an STI excluded—but as we’re seeing with the ill-advised visits between Innie Dylan (Zach Cherry) and his outie’s wife, Gretchen (Merritt Wever), it doesn’t take much for emotional messiness to break containment. What’s worse? Your wife embarking on an emotional affair with another person, or with a better version of you?

I’ve certainly enjoyed Severance thus far, but this deeper exploration of interpersonal chaos is more compelling than any top-secret goat rooms. Sure, it’s fine and all that the Eagans have crafted a weirdo pseudo-religion, but did you catch the tone with which Burt’s (Christopher Walken) husband, Fields (John Noble, who takes the script and wrings every last drop of implication out of each line) tells Irving, “What’s mine is yours”? Whew. I don’t expect a repeat performance of That Uncomfortable Dinner Party each episode, but the series is reaching new heights by asking difficult questions of not just our identities, but our desires as well.

Kaleena Rivera is the TV Editor for Pajiba. She can be found at Bluesky here.