Severance Season 2 Episode 4 Review: Woe’s Hollow

Severance Season 2 Episode 4, “Woe’s Hollow” delivers the season’s most chilling episode, figuratively and literally.

Although you may think the beginning is a hallucination, it’s not. The innies are outside, and this time it’s with permission. 

The team attends a Outdoor Retreat Team Building Occurrence (ORTBO) which feels more like a punishment than reward considering it’s held in the snowy Dieter Eagan National Forest. 

Yes, even the national forest near them is named after an Eagan. 

While the overly sterile and brightly lit interior of Lumon’s severed floor is depressing in its own right, there’s something even more bleak about them being out in the wilderness with no sense of where they are or the way to escape. At least in the building all they have to do is reach the elevator to “escape.” 

It’s more than just the environment that gives you the creeps. The entire backstory of “Dieter Eagan,” Kier’s twin who was maybe murdered by Kier reads like a sick fairytale created by Kier Eagan to indoctrinate his followers.

It’s more or less established Lumon is a cult, but you wonder how anyone who is not severed puts up with this psychotic workplace culture. I don’t care if there are free marshmallows if you’re good! 

Severance has been firing on all cylinders this season, and been plenty weird, but this is the first episode that feels above and beyond the high bar the show has set for itself creatively. 

This episode also explores the unethical side of severing someone’s conscience more starkly without the usual veneer of Lumon’s double-speak or sanitized corporate setting.

Helly and Mark having sex is jarring even on its own because we’re seeing two people who share bodies with “other people” using them for intimacy. How can either person fully give consent when they don’t have the consent of their outie? 

Then again, the innies never consented to being “born” in the first place so do they really owe their outies anything? Last season we saw Helly try to kill herself, and nothing was done by Lumon about it. 

Meanwhile, Mark’s innie still feels some connection to Gemma even if she’s not actually his wife. 

There seems to be no line, or if there is it isn’t being discussed or enforced. As Mark becomes reintegrated we might get a better look at what it means to reckon with all of this. 

Of course, the biggest betrayal of consent is that it’s not Helly at all, but Helena who has been showing up at work pretending to be her innie. Irv’s paranoia about the night gardener thing, which let’s face it was a pretty bad story, leads him to threaten Helena and demand they bring back Helly R. 

It works but unfortunately for him his actions get him terminated, or in Dylan’s words they “kill him.” 

If you check the message boards, some fans already suspected Helly was Helena the whole season, but it’s still quite the mind trip. Especially for Mark. Can this guy get a break or what? 

Severance offers continual shakeups to the status quo. The betrayal and the “death” of Irving are two that seem difficult for the MDR team to overcome.

 

What did you think of this episode of Severance? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Severance airs Fridays on Apple TV+. 

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