Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Severance S2E6, “Attila” (written by Erin Wagoner and directed by Uta Briesewitz)
Severance S2E6 begins with Mark (Adam Scott) telling Reghabi (Karen Aldridge) about what he experienced at the end of last week’s episode, which makes sense, but they don’t take the process of reintegration any further before Mark’s next day at work (except for whatever those pills are he is taking and whatever that gross stuff is that he’s been drinking).
Cutting to the Lumon office, Dylan (Zach Cherry) tells Mark and Helly (Britt Lower) about how he found Irving’s (John Turturro) drawing of a dark hallway, along with directions, behind the Hang in There poster in the breakroom. Helly gives him grief about leaving the note there and says she will get it herself immediately, but then Mark opens the fridge and experiences flashes to his outie’s life. Thus, the plan is disrupted.
Milchick (Tramell Tillman) spends the episode grappling with his negative performance review. First, he reminds Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), who obviously filed the complaints about his usage of big words and his incorrect deployment of paperclips, that she needs him to sign off before she can graduate from her fellowship and go to Wintertide (whatever that is). Then, he tells Miss Huang that he’ll need her to steward the floor for the day, which Milchick proceeds to spend fixing paperclips and trying to talk more plainly while looking in the mirror.
I’m not sure what to make of Milchick at this point. In many ways, Severance Season 2 has made me more sympathetic towards him, as it’s made clear that he is in the horrible double bind of middle management. On the other hand, he’s still the guy who psychologically tortured people in the breakroom in Season 1 and has just committed to being as harsh as he needs to be to make the severed floor successful. His kindness initiatives didn’t work as intended, so now he has to shift gears. But Seth is also a little disgruntled, so there are various paths his character might take from here.
As for Miss Huang, she doesn’t seem to do much in terms of overseeing the severed floor, at least insofar as Mark and Helly appear to be completely unsupervised. Mark tells Helly that he had sex with her outie, which upsets her. But, after sitting in the hallway for a while, she returns to Mark and tells him she wants her own version of that memory. So they find an unused room where the desks are all under plastic tarps, turn those tarps into a tent, and get down to it right there in the office.
Meanwhile, Dylan has another session with his outie’s wife, Gretchen (Merritt Wever), and they end up making out. Later, when we see Gretchen at home with outie-Dylan and he asks her about the session, she lies and tells him it was cancelled. So… is it cheating if you hook up with your husband’s innie?
Such questions structure Severance S2E6 thematically.
Irving takes up Burt’s (Christopher Walken) invitation to dinner and meets Burt’s husband, Fields (John Noble). Fields seems jealous at the idea that Burt and Irving’s innies had a relationship, even as he tries to couch it in a practical worry about whether they might have had unprotected sex. But, of course, neither outie-Irving nor outie-Burt know for sure with regard to that question. Fields insists that he believes innies deserve love, for what it’s worth, but there is at least a little tension that runs throughout the dinner.
The more noteworthy remark from Fields occurs when Burt is explaining how they started calling each other “Attila” as a metonym stemming from calling each other “hon.” Burt says they started doing that about 10 years ago, but Fields insists it was 20, pointing to an occasion when they were having drinks with Burt’s partner at Lumon.
Severed employees have only existed for 12 years, so Burt is at pains to convince Irving that Fields was just confused. However, I think we’re getting a strong indication here that Burt worked at Lumon before becoming severed. Maybe he decided to undergo the process because he believed it would give his innie a chance to get into heaven, but perhaps some of his sins occurred as part of Lumon’s management prior to that.
Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) enters Irving’s house. He finds his files on severed employees while Irving is at dinner with Burt and Fields, so perhaps Burt continues to work for the company and set the evening up specifically to give Drummond this investigative opportunity. We still don’t know exactly what Irving has been up to or who he has been calling from that payphone, so I’m curious to see how this all comes together.
The fact that outie-Irving has knowledge of the Exports Hall such that he could paint it over and over again implies that he, too, may have been a non-severed employee in the past, and I wonder about that history.
Let me give you my big theory on the subject, which started to come to view to me after I wrote my S2E5 recap, but which has an important starting point in that episode. If you recall, back in Season 1, Petey (Yul Vazquez) was fired, and Helly took his place. Milchick took a new team photo, and there were several scenes about Mark replacing the photos in MDR too early, and so on.
In contrast, with Irving gone after the ORTBO, he has simply been photoshopped out of the team photo, and this put me in mind of the famous old-school removal of Leon Trotsky from photos after Stalin came to power in the USSR. Trotsky had been there from the beginning and was almost as prominent a figure as Vladimir Lenin in moving Russia to Communism, but when Lenin died, Trotsky lost the power struggle with Stalin, was exiled, and was airbrushed out of photographs.
He was basically erased from history, which is what Milchick told Irving would happen to him at the end of S2E4. But exiling Trotsky wasn’t ultimately enough for Stalin. He was still out there in the world, writing books and hanging out with Diego Rivera in Mexico. So, Stalin set cronies to the task of assassinating Trotsky, and they tried several times before finally succeeding in 1940.
If it wasn’t clear already: my theory is that Irving is basically Trotsky and that the creators of Severance are drawing these parallels on purpose. This would imply that Irving not only used to work for Lumon as a non-severed employee, but that he did so in a significant capacity, approaching the upper rungs of management.
That would track with innie-Irving’s devotion to Kier and with the fact that Irving’s paintings are from Milchick’s perspective on that hallway when he sent Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman) down the elevator in Season 1. Perhaps Irving used to have Milchick’s job. The question, then, would be what happened, and how much does the current Irving remember of it? Did they do something to his brain besides severance? And are they going to try to kill him now?
After Mark and Helly have sex at work, she asks him if it was different from his experience with her outie, and he kisses her in the hall. Unfortunately, he has a nosebleed and gets blood on her face. We cut to Miss Huang attending to Mark’s nosebleed and asking him if he has any other symptoms, but then Mark starts flashing between the Lumon office and his basement. He loses time and his experience settles in his basement with Reghabi.
We should note that we are thus in the dark about how Mark’s day at Lumon ended. Did he say things to make Miss Huang suspicious? And what happened after that before he went home?
He’s freaked out about that himself, and it makes Reghabi want to go fast with reintegration all of a sudden. But, beyond not being keen on the possibility of bleeding to death, Mark is very hungry, so he storms out and goes to a Chinese restaurant for a large amount of food.
As he finishes his dinner, Helena Eagan shows up, and she’s pretty flirtatious. Of course, we know that innie-Mark has now had sex with both outie-Helena and innie-Helly (is that a throuple?), but outie-Mark doesn’t know that, or at least he shouldn’t. One gets the sense that he’s feeling more than he knows during this scene, which we could explain through the process of reintegration he’s undergoing.
Regardless, Mark gets a bit freaked out by his interaction with Helena. That makes sense in terms of how his outie knows that this woman is basically the head of the company he works for, and she’s now randomly shown up at this restaurant. Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) was kind of stalking him and pretending to be Mrs. Selvig previously, so that could feed into his reaction as well. But it’s more than all of that. Mark feels like he knows Helena in a way that he shouldn’t.
Thus, he runs back home to tell Reghabi he wants to move forward with her idea of flooding his chip (whatever that means). She cuts open the back of his head and injects whatever fluid into it. Mark starts shaking a bit, but then there’s a knock at his door. Reghabi urges him not to move, but it’s Devon (Jen Tullock), and Mark knows she won’t simply go away. His car’s in the driveway.
So, Mark gets up and answers the door. Devon wants to be involved in whatever Mark is up to. He tries to dissuade her from that, but it doesn’t work, and then he collapses onto the floor. Reghabi comes out to attend to Mark, Devon asks her who the hell she is, and that’s all for this week’s episode of Severance.
See you next week.
