‘Severance’ Season 2 Episode 4 Recap: “Woe’s Hollow”
She doesn’t get caught because she gets overheard plotting with the Board. She doesn’t get caught because she accidentally lets slip that she knows something she couldn’t possibly know. She doesn’t even get caught because she invented a “night gardener” as a shoddy alibi regarding her time on the outside, or because Irving B. has a weird prophetic dream when he sleeps rough in sub-freezing temperatures.
No, it’s simply being a little bit too mean that gives this impostor away. “What you said to me last night, it was cruel,” Irving B. tells her, his suspicions confirmed by this behavior. “Helly was never cruel.” Indeed, the way “Helly” deflects Irving B.’s accusations by bringing up his heartache over his loss of his office romance Burt G. stands out like a sore thumb in the moment, even before you think through what it says about who she really is. It’s the kind of emotional manipulation we saw Milchick use to get Mark to come back to work just a couple episodes ago — straight out of the Lumon handbook, perhaps even literally.
Shows that try their hand at mystery-box storytelling would do well to follow the example set by Severance in “Woe’s Hollow” (Season 2 Episode 4). It’s much more compelling to let the nuances of performance and writing reveal a character’s layers over time, the way they do in a regular drama, than to constantly pull rabbits out of hats like a stage magician.
But rest assured, there’s plenty of prestidigitation still going on here. If you were expecting to find out what happened after Mark and Mark S. were reintegrated at the end of last week’s episode, it seems you’ll have to wait a bit longer. Only a few brief flashes of his wife Gemma/Miss Casey’s face superimposed over “Helly” while they’re making love indicate that the procedure may be in play here.
Oh right, yeah, Mark S. and “Helly”/Helena have sex this episode, because what it does instead of continuing the reintegration storyline is send the four MDR workers (without any warning) on a snowy outdoor team-building retreat, and said retreat involves cozy tents. These two crazy kids are just doing what any red-blooded pair of young lovers would do, except one of them has been partially lobotomized by the company that kidnapped his dying wife and the other secretly helps run that company.
It’s a long and atmospheric journey before we get to that point, though, filled with slow, silent trudging through a wintry wilderness populated by eerie Lynch/Kubrick doppelgängers scattered at strategic points throughout the journey. The team’s mission, explained to them on a choppy video by Mr. Milchick, is to track down the never-before-disclosed Fourth Appendix to Kier Eagan’s handbook. It leads them to a waterfall grotto called Woe’s Hollow, where Kier and his forsaken twin brother Dieter once traveled, where Kier encountered the evil entity called the temper of Woe and Dieter was supernaturally punished for masturbating. That’s about the size of it, anyway.
The script, by Anna Ouyang Moench, is packed with the usual awkward Milchick comedy, especially when he shows back up in person to play host at the campsite while wearing very snazzy white winter togs; I’m particularly partial to the phrases “copious luxury meats” and “now he’s no one’s brother, only Chaos’s whore.” But its primary function is to get the foursome way the hell out of the cramped offices and hallways of Lumon’s basement, to see how they fare against a wider backdrop.
From a visual and atmospheric standpoint, the result is a big success. True, too many of director Ben Stiller’s nighttime scenes exist in that color-graded aquamarine haze that passes for darkness on way too many prestige dramas. But the daytime material is frequently stunning, with the MDR team shot from low angles, looming black and somber in their coats and hats against the bright blue sky and blinding white snow. And despite Milchick’s antics, the tone is pretty creepy: The doppelgängers are monumental horror-images par excellence, while Woe (Faith Vaughn) is a surprisingly effective monster in her brief on-camera appearance during Irving B.’s dream.
The episode’s high point, however, is Irving B.’s method for proving he’s telling the truth that “Helly” isn’t herself: He almost drowns her until Milchick relents and switches the real Helly back on inside Helena Eagan’s head, even though it will mean his own immediate termination. (This unfolds in an homage to John Turturro’s role in Miller’s Crossing that’s endearingly blatant.) It’s such an uncharacteristic burst of savagery and passion from this man, whose experience with Burt G. and brief time on the outside really transformed him. There’s still much we don’t know about him — how he remembers the black hallway while an outie, what his outie is up to regarding the severance program — but for now it’s his love for the real Helly that drives both his actions and our interest in them, not a desire to unearth clues or solve riddles. I’ll always choose a show you can think about over a show you can decode.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
