Spoilers and CW for discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation

It’s the day of the Cold Harbor file’s expected completion…

Everyone’s moving in this episode, except Helly/Helena. Dylan, Milchick, Irving, Cobel and Mark seem to be unable to stay still. For each of Dylan, Mark and Irving it’s love driving them, leading them forward to some desperate decisions and situations.

The unifying theme for all of them though is the worm that turns – even if that worm is turning on itself.

Season 1 focused almost solely on the MDR team. Everyone else was an adjunct to their experience of Severance and its immediate and most intimate consequences. Season 2 has broadened that world. That broadening is inevitable. No story can persist with such a narrow focus and limited set of points of view.

So we’ve had episodes from Cobel’s perspective, we’ve seen Milchick in an entirely different set of circumstances. We’ve seen the point of view chop and change. This is no longer a mystery box, this is about a village of people wrestling with their part in the world in which they find themselves.

It turns out almost none of them chose the lives they’re living, having had their circumstances thrust upon them.

Cobel most of all is like the sociopathic version of Gandalf the Grey returning as a vengeful and ring bearing Galadriel, terrible and beautiful as the sea and presiding over the most important member of the fellowship – Mark.

It’s been suggested that Mark remembers his history incorrectly, that Gemma never came home because Lumon staged her death in order to have him agree to the Severance procedure.

Mark’s imminent completion of Project Cold Harbor also means two calamitous events – Gemma’s permanent disposal and Lumon’s ascension of the Eagan’s to some untold horror. Yet if Mark is the thread holding all of this together he is a trunk to Helly, Irving and Dylan’s branches.

Dylan is faced with all the meaning he’s been secretly accruing being taken from him. By his Outie. He is so devastated he tries to resign which, in Severance speak, is suicide by retirement.

This isn’t so surprising. It’s also one of the reasons why American slave holders tried to deny their slaves a sense of their humanity, of the possibility they could lead their own lives. It’s why they sexually abused their slaves without regard for their gender or their survival.

Lumon has been breathing down Milchick’s neck, demanding he does not treat them as human. There is an implicit understanding that for someone to be expendable, for them to be a good slave, their humanity must be stripped away.

Whether this is in contemporary American prisons where slavery is legal, whether it’s in indentured servitude picking our vegetables or sewing our clothes – slavery denies its citizens the right to think of themselves as having a future.

It’s at the heart of the Christian Nationalist movement in the US – the idea that only White people can think of the future and plan for it. It is used by masters to aggrandise themselves into feeling justified for their inhuman behaviour and against their slaves to convince them they are existing in the life meant for them.

Dylan, in the storm of this, shorn of the meaning given to him, sees a future stretching out without hope and makes a horrible if entirely understandable decision.

Irving on the other hand, outside and free, finally arrives where he’s wanted to be his whole life – at being ready to be part of something larger than himself. It’s just unfortunate he’s fallen for a man who is the very symbol of the banality of evil. A man who has driven others to their own murders and comforts himself that he wasn’t the one pulling the trigger.

Except I come back to the idea that Irving, somehow, is reintegrated, that he is himself both on and off the severed floor. Irving’s name and sensibilities appear to be the same inside and out of Lumon. I don’t think that’s coincidental. It doesn’t quite add up, the OTR clearly had his innie self seeing the outside for the first time but since then? I’m not sure and, when his innie told Burt he wasn’t ready, outie Irving tells him he is.

Outie Irving cannot know that prior conversation except there’s some form of communication between them or he is, actually, reintegrated. We shall see because I cannot accept we’re done with Irving who is last seen getting on a train to whereabouts unknown.

All of this is pre-amble to the character I really want to talk about.

Helly.

Helly has been the jelly bean among the raisins, free to be unexpected in a way that no one else is. Even in the aftermath of discovering who Helena is and what that means for her, Helly has seen the world as problems which have short paths between them.

These aren’t necessarily easy problems, but she’d not been dragged back by wondering what others think of her, of fearing social disapproval. After all, what’s the worst that can happen?

For Helly in particular, now she knows who her Outie is, there’s literally nothing that can touch her. She is free to explore what it means to be her but also what it means to be someone who, crucially, isn’t the evil mannikin she discovered was called Helena.

For her part, Helena has watched her innie, has pretended to be her and it has become increasingly unclear if Helena wants to remain the woman she was before the OTR or if, having discovered the unselfconscious freedom of her innie, she longs for and is deliberately blurring the edges of these two identities.

In the exploration of self, in the process of actualisation, Helena has had an epiphany that is slowly transforming her from what she was into something new. It is unclear what that will be. Will Helena be one of those hippies who ended up working for President Bush and decrying their descendants as feckless or will she reject the world that, to this point gave her meaning even if it hemmed her in on all sides?

The implication for Helly is unclear. In some ways Helena would probably be more open to the concept of reintegration than Mark but the chances of it seem distant. Which gives me pause. Helena in this episode is deliberately indistinguishable from Helly and we’re once again trying to divine who is who.

It’s a biting comment on how men see women, that they can’t tell them apart, but it’s also a story about how the imprisoned, no matter the gilding on the bars, can resist, can find ways to actualise themselves and can render external authority powerless.

Helly is my hero in this because never once has she done anything with her setbacks other than try to understand herself in them so she can move on. Thing is, right now, both Helly and Helena are women alone. There have been glimpses of what they could achieve, of how quickly their ambitions would scale if only someone, anyone, would stand with them in solidarity.

Why? Because none of us can successfully resist power alone and we need people like Helly, their energy, their hope, their clear sightedness as part of our community if we hope to resist oppression but, more importantly, to build good societies.

Helena does not, I think, consciously understand any of this – but she sees Helly’s emotional connection, the respect she has from her team and somewhere deep down knows this is something she lacks entirely.

That yawning hole is a great motivator for change once it’s recognised.

Look, the season has voyaged across different landscapes than season 1 as it’s sought to broaden its canvas and tell us a story that matters. I’m still here without any doubt that it knows where it’s going. Even if it crashes the landing, its explorations of how people find meaning in their own being and in the relationships around them, how they resist those who would crush them for their own ends – well I’ve savoured every moment of it.

Next week is the end. A double length episode. With all our people having made devastating choices this week (even Milchick) it remains to be seen where their paths take them and if, together or apart, they can save Gemma when Mark returns to work.

8/10 train lines to nowhere

Stewart Hotston