Movies & TV Severance This One’s In Tents: Severance, “Attila” Time to eradicate childish folly! By Molly Templeton | Published on February 21, 2025 Image: Apple TV+ Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Apple TV+ The corn is very special, and this is all spoilers. So let’s get to it. You know, there was a moment, earlier this season, where I kind of felt for Helena Eagan. She clearly is not in control of her life, no matter what she likes to say. She had no choice in having her innie sent back to the severed floor once her deception was revealed. Her father loathes her for reasons unknown. I thought, maybe she’s the weirdo outcast in this family? Maybe there’s a story here?  Now I think she might just be a monster. Severance is about a lot of things—so many times that every time I see the sentence “Severance is about” it ends a different way. But one of those things is the way that work asks, and sometimes requires, that we fracture ourselves, hiding bits of who we are, behaving in ways that are alien to us, prioritizing things about which we don’t care at all in our lives outside of the office. In some ways, this can be harmless and sometimes it’s a choice: I don’t put my whole personality on display in an office job because it’s none of those people’s business who I am. When you make the choice for yourself, it’s about privacy. When work makes it for you, it’s about a whole lot of other things: Power, control, capitalism, the inconvenience of people’s personalities, corporate secrets, to name a few. Where Severance is concerned, we don’t really know. What about MDR is so secret that people can’t know about it outside the office? What is it about the goat room? What is it about optics and design? Why are all these things hidden? It’s easy for me to get caught up in all the character interplay and forget to look at that bigger picture: Why invent severance in the first place? You don’t invent something like this out of concern for people. You invent it so you can do whatever you want to people without the world knowing. What is it that Lumon needs to hide?  Image: Apple TV+ Helena, in this episode, is not hiding. She is casually, terrifyingly present in the restaurant scene with Mark. I watched that scene with my hands over my mouth like it was a horror movie. Her pretend casual vibes. Her joking that isn’t joking. The way she tosses off, “I’m like the head of the company.” (Are you, though?) The way she watches him, searching for any clue that he knows what they did. And the clear kick she gets out of his ignorance. The whole thing is a power trip, including calling Gemma by the wrong name. She’s a predator and we are watching her play with her food. And she kept referring to the OTC as “the other night.” I am hung up on this timeline. The ORTBO was over the weekend; Mark referenced that in “Trojan’s Horse.” Was the OTC only the week before that? How compressed is time in this season? Or is she trying to refer to the ORTBO, to see if he knows, somehow, that she was there? Do they know Mark is trying to reintegrate? Are they letting it happen? What is her evil deal? What kind of threat is offering to take him home to father, anyway? The way Helena looms over the first scene with Mark and Helly this episode is also awful. I’m glad the show didn’t drag out the moment of letting Helly know what really happened, because that kind of forced lack of communication is such a cliché, and all these characters have going for them is their communication with each other. They don’t know much, but what they know, they share. Except for Dylan, still keeping family visit time a secret. Also: “We shared vessels.” What Lumon handbook horror is this turn of phrase? It sent me into a spiral about what innies actually know. They don’t have memories of their lives outside the severed floor, but they know about things. They have concepts of things. They have all their language skills, but then again, innie Mark doesn’t know what a deviated septum is. Where is the line? If it’s personal, do they not know it, but if it’s factual, they do? Wherever that line is, Helly knows about the tent, because innie Mark, a genuinely good dude, tells her about it. It was hard for me to watch him apologize when what happened was not his fault; it was satisfying to watch him come to the conclusion that Helena tricked them both. Which she did. She sexually assaulted both of them, in a very real way. Helly’s reaction is heartbreaking and real, and feels so true: She doesn’t want to be touched, she needs to be alone, she has to process. And then she decides she wants to experience vessel sharing for herself.  Image: Apple TV+ This could have been handled so poorly, but it works; it works because Britt Lower and Adam Scott are so gentle with each other in those scenes, from Helly’s anger, to reclaiming her body and wanting to make her own memories, to the very clear consent, to the tousled, sweet walk down the hallway afterward. It works because the writing is spot-on, and because the creative team symbolically clears the decks for the two of them: They get empty halls, blank walls, a clean slate, a reset conference room with makeshift tents. (All hail director Uta Briesewitz and writer Erin Wagoner.) The only bit of theorizing I think you can possibly do in that moment is note that those desks were designed for two people. It was a very faint bit of foreshadowing, maybe, when we first saw them, earlier in the season. (Also, they’re purple.) The gentleness continues right up until Mark starts bleeding—and what gets them Miss Huang’s attention is not their erotic entanglement but Mark’s secret reintegration, messing with his brain. The shift from that scene with Nurse Huang back to Mark’s basement is masterfully done, disconcerting and jarring, just as it would be for Mark.  Mirror imagery is building this season; last week there was that gorgeous shot of two Hellys in the bathroom with Mark, and this week we get the whole MDR team, duplicated in the kitchen mirror, all of them dealing with situations created by innie/outie crossover. Dylan’s wife is basically using his innie as relationship counseling, and hiding it from his outie. Mark is being stalked by his innie lover’s terrifying outie. Helly and Helena are at each other’s mercy in strange, strange ways. Even Miss Huang gets a reflection in her new hairdo: her side part and single barrette have changed to a middle part with mirror-image barrettes.  And then there’s Milchick’s mirror. His penance is haunting, the stuff of a different kind of horror movie. The shaking of his hands after her perfectly applies all those paper clips; the way his voice turns into a growl as his natural phrasing about eradicating childish folly devolves into “Grow up” and then, horribly, just “GROW.” His performance review booklet is there at his side, but it remains not entirely clear whether this is assigned penance or something he has independently decided to do to correct what Lumon sees as the errors of his ways. His performance review itself already included hours of unseen atonements. Is this extra credit? Is there someone on the other side of that mirror? Image: Apple TV+ A third of the way through this episode, I thought maybe it was going to be the breather, the comedown after all the chaos and revelations of the first half of the season. And then I was proven wrong, over and over again. “Attila” is probably 85% two or three people having a conversation, and yet it’s riveting. At multiple times it feels like horror: Helena stalking Mark, but also the reintegration scenes, the way Mark repeats “I remember,” the terrifying hole in the back of his head (that I really think would have bled a lot more!!! But I’m not a medical professional). The way the episode uses sound, from the prominence of Mark’s bubbling fishtank in the first scenes to the way the world sounds as he struggles through the chip-flooding procedure—this show is never less than stellar, but an episode like this really puts the spotlight on the precise way the small parts add up to a whole. Two people talking can be boring and static, or it can be shifting camera angles, Rehgabi eating frosting from a tub, Mark and Helly in a cramped bathroom stall they don’t even need to be in.  It’s gorgeous, claustrophobic, color-saturated, and meticulous. I am not a design geek, but even I can see how the swaths of color, the monochrome spaces, the halls and big rooms serve to isolate the characters, to make them pop against their surreally simple backgrounds. There is always more space than body, because they are so small, compared to Lumon. Each person’s area of control is tiny. Smaller than their own body, in some ways. And then there are Burt and Fields. I have been dying to get to this moment, and it was nothing like I ever would have expected or could have guessed. From the moment Irving steps into that house, everything is off. The house is so nice. Then Fields appears, cooking, and it’s John Noble, and listen: An entire generation, or probably at least two, strongly associates John Noble with Denethor, specifically with that distressing eating scene. You put John Noble in a kitchen and we’re all going to flinch, reflexively. Image: Apple TV+ And flinch I did. But I’m obsessed with the entirety of their evening, with the little slips and the moments of discomfort and the way outie Irv seems moderately comfortable, all things considered. (“What’s mine’s yours” is a wild thing to say to your dinner guest, in this context!). The introduction of religion (other than Kier’s) into the series adds a wrinkle, though I do not know enough about Lutheranism to say if the beliefs espoused here make any sense, or are weirdly warped or tweaked to fit the Severance world. Or if they’re just saying “Lutheran” because it has some letters in common with “Lumon” and this is all some very roundabout Lumon ploy to encourage severance by using heaven as bait.  What I do I know is that as far as philosophies go, we get both “innies have their own souls” and “innies can go to heaven distinct from their outies,” which is enough to make my head do a small explosion. And that’s before the bomb drops in the form of Fields’s slip about how long Burt worked at Lumon.  No one believes that was a mistake, right? We are now faced with the likely reality that sweet, lovely innie Burt has a conniving, old-school Lumon outie. (If he was having drinks with a Lumon partner, he certainly wasn’t severed.) Burt may have worked at Lumon before severance. Burt maybe, for all we know, retired, then went back to Lumon to work on the severed floor entirely because Fields wants to see him in heaven. And someone certainly told Drummond that Irving’s house was going to be empty that evening. (Drummond who has a whole ring of keys, seems to be looking for Burt’s address, and is notably not being barked at by Radar the dog.) This could be a major red herring, but the timing is very suspicious, as is the look on Burt’s face at the end of the night.  Image: Apple TV+ But why tell Irving, a virtual stranger, any of this? Why invite him over at all? Is Fields the relative angel he seems—he seems pretty confident he’s going to heaven—or is this all a fiction to intrigue Irving on the matter of his own innie soul? John Noble plays this whole scene so interestingly, so open and yet sly at once; his outburst about whether Burt and Irv might have had sex seems genuinely the words of an emotional man, but everything he does also feels controlled and calculated. Even the way they call each other “Attila” feels like part of a play they are putting on for an audience of one. And absolutely nothing fazes Irv in the least. (Not even the way the fire burns constantly behind Burt, reminding us that he’s done something that makes him so certain he’s not going to heaven.) It feels worth noting that the episode ends with the close of this scene, with Irving leaving Burt’s—even though forcefully reintegrated Mark has just collapsed on the floor, his two worlds meeting in his mind and in his house, as Devon and Reghabi cross paths for the first time. Outie Mark has had a very stressful couple of days, with the two halves of his mind starting to collapse in on each other, and on top of that, he may just have realized/discovered that his innie slept with his boss. His creepy, stalking boss. Adam Scott has to cover some wide ground this week, from his emotionally battered self at the outset, talking about bargaining, to his physically tattered self at the end, possibly having a seizure.  There’s an interesting parallel in how Lumon will do anything, even send Helena Eagan’s innie back to the severed floor, to get innie Mark to finish his work—while on the outside, outie Mark is spurred, by the presence of Helena Eagan, to finish reintegration. Which, by the by, why does Rehgabi suddenly have a new idea for how to do that? Why is she so intense about Gemma and the black hallway? How does she even know about the black hallway? What’s in it for her, anyway? And is Mark going to go to work tomorrow? Poor Helly is going to be stressed, again, if he doesn’t show.  Fortune Cookies “Did everyone sever their balls in the elevator this morning?” This line is designed to make us all wonder how we ever thought Helena was Helly, and it does the job admirably. Helly complaining that Helena dresses her, like a baby, makes that scene of her taking off her ugly pumps just that much more affecting: removing the discomfort Helena has put her in, in a small way that she can control. But the fact that she’s wearing nylons feels like another wrinkle in the what-era-are-we-in question. The question of Miss Huang’s fellowship, and what the heck Wintertide might be, is intriguing! And I’ve got nothing; please share with me all of your theories.  “Wintertide” just means “wintertime” according to Merriam-Webster, which brings me back to Kier, PE’s eternal winter situation. If Mark finishes Cold Harbor, will it be spring? I wonder if Drummond has another temper tattooed on his right hand. Actually, I wonder if he has all four, all over his body. We want to know what Devon was going to say about the rich lady from baby camp, right? The corn is very special. No one did any work this week, did they.[end-mark] The post This One’s In Tents: <i>Severance</i>, “Attila” appeared first on Reactor.