The Past and the Hellish Present in Severance's "Chikai Bardo"

 I first became aware of Dichen Lachman when she was a regular on Dollhouse, likely the last TV show that Joss Whedon would create (given his public downfall) and really the lesser of his projects. It's rather fitting, though, that she would have been on that show as well as this, because the premises are actually similar: in Dollhouse, a shady company rewrites the personalities of people it has taken in to serve various functions for those who can afford to rent one of these "dolls," who in theory have all voluntarily signed a contract to do this work, but of course live in a state of naive innocence when they aren't having the memories or personality of an escort, a security guard, a girlfriend or boyfriend for the guy whose parents won't get off his back about finding a partner, etc. The deeper plot involved some kind of sinister plot to use this technology on the general public and create people who could be overwritten to serve the few and powerful, and both seasons ended with a flash-forward to a post-apocalyptic future overrun with dolls.

The show suffered in part because of a steadfast commitment to mostly being episodic in an era when we were really more into serialization, and also in part because its star, Eliza Dushku, while not a bad screen presence, didn't really have the range to pull off the out-there premise. However, the other two main-cast dolls, played by Lachman and Enver Gjokaj, were incredible, possessing that chameleonic quality that allowed them to seamlessly transform with each installed personality.

Lachman has been part of Severance since the first season, but up until this episode, she has largely been more of a plot point than a character in her own right. We first met her as Ms. Casey, who performed the odd function of calming the Innies by telling them supposed facts about their life outside the office. She was kind of just another weird Lumon thing, until we discovered that Ms. Casey is, in fact, Gemma - Mark's wife who supposedly died in a car accident.

Of all the evidence of Lumon's nefariousness, Gemma's faked death and seeming imprisonment has been exhibit A. And, well, it gets worse.

Chikai Bardo fills us in on a lot of things, but the main structural shift is that Gemma is the episode's protagonist, giving us probably more screen time with her since than all her previous appearances combined.

The episode splits its time between flashbacks to her and Mark's relationship, and then seeing the hell she's going through on the Testing Floor, which lies below the Severed Floor.

First off, it appears that she and Mark were previously college professors - her of literature (perhaps primarily Russian lit) and him of, it seems, military history. Notably, it's amazing what a haircut can do to make Adam Scott look about ten years younger (even though the flashbacks start 5 years earlier). They meet at some kind of blood drive (that happens to be being run by Lumon) and bond over the students' papers they have to read and grade. ("All Quiet on the Western Blunt: Drug Use Among Soldiers in World War One" is an amazing title.)

The two are clearly a match, and we kind of hazily go through their courtship, moving in together, getting married, and then trying to have a kid.

But it's this effort that starts to drive an wedge between them. Gemma miscarries, and their efforts at getting fertility treatment don't seem be working. And, as they try to deal with this in different ways - Gemma becoming more closed-off while Mark is getting frustrated with the effort of getting her to open up to the point where he starts to be dismissive and uncaring - this beautiful relationship starts to lose its luster.

Notably, in these good times, we actually get to see their home in a season other than winter. Seeing warm sunlight on green leaves is such a huge departure for this show so perpetually set in a winter of discontent that it truly feels like another world.

And then, it's the stupidest thing: Gemma is going to a party, which Mark has decided he's not going to attend. And, as he works late in his home office, a couple of cops pull up and take off their hats as they approach the door - Mark sees them through the door's windows and we watch as the horror of his realization falls on him.

It's a rough episode. But also beautiful, in a way.

And that's really only half of it. Because the terror here is really what is going on now, with Gemma stuck down in the sub-basement of the Lumon building.

Confirming something I had suspected, Severance need not be limited to just two personae. Gemma's mind has been split into something like eight. Gemma herself lives in this hypogean, clinical world where she has some books to read and some music to listen to, and is attended to by a nurse and a doctor. And then, every day, she is led into multiple rooms, changing her outfit and hair in each one, and as she enters, the persona associated with that room takes over.

And it's hell.

One of her personae goes to endless dentist appointments, her mouth tortured, only to return to consciousness for the next. Another is forced to write endless Christmas thank-you cards, living as if her entire life is Christmas and all she can do is feel her hand cramp as she writes card after card after card. One travels on an airplane (I assume it's a simulator) with profound turbulence. And while she meets a new person in each of these rooms, it's actually just the same doctor, playing a role in each room, where that room's particular Innie is none the wiser.

Each room has its own name, but the one room she has yet to enter is called Cold Harbor. Indeed, now that I think of it, each room I think has the name of one of the folders that the MDR team sorts numbers into. Gemmas comes out of these rooms sometimes with a hurting mouth or a hurting hand, and she is grilled (with an image of her skull via some Lumon device) on whether she experienced various emotions - some of which we will recognize as Kier's "tempers."

Gemma is assured that once she visits all the rooms, she'll usher in some new world that will be a benefit for everyone, including her husband. But she is, notably, also not told she can ever see him again.

The episode climaxes with Gemma attacking the doctor and fleeing the Testing Floor. But as she rides the elevator up, she emerges not as Gemma, but as Ms. Casey. And when she approaches the hallway that could take her to see Mark or any of the other Innies, she instead finds Mr. Milchick, who gives her a BS story about her Outie getting lost in the Lumon building after coming to attend a public art show, and that she must go back downstairs. When Gemma re-emerges, she weeps as she realizes just how trapped she is.

It's interesting to see the Buddhist themes brought up here. I am by no means a theologian, and I'm not deeply versed in Buddhist philosophy, but there is a notion that is echoed in some Western thought about "Ego Death." Essentially, as I understand it, ego death is not a cessation of consciousness, but more a letting go of the self and all the myopic self-obsessions to just be one with existence. Severance is kind of the most fucked-up version of this - contradicting the Lutherans from last episode, we could imagine that the consciousness persists between shifts, but the individual egos of the various personae are left behind.

But if Buddhism's goal is to escape the cycle of reincarnation by becoming this ego-less consciousness, severance could be interpreted as forced reincarnation - any progress toward enlightenment wiped out by forcing you into a tabula rasa state, generating a new ego (and in a culture that pushes you to treasure the most utterly trivial rewards).

Bardo is a state between death and rebirth, or more broadly, the term for liminal states of being. Chikai Bardo (and caveat - this is just from my reading of Wikipedia when writing this post, so there are probably lots of nuances I'm missing) is the state that occurs right as death is approaching.

It's interesting, because our framing for this episode is the immediate aftermath of Mark's collapse during the previous one, where Devon watches over him and argues with Dr. Reghabi, and we could interpret the flashbacks here as taking place from his perspective. But I think that really, this is our moment to see things from Gemma's point of view. Still, while Gemma connects with these ideas from Tibetan Buddhism (Lachman herself is Nepalese-Australian) it looks like Mark is the one in this bardo space for the episode.

Given that we've known Helly for the entire series, we're pretty invested in hers and Mark's relationship, fraught though it is that Helly's other half is the villainous Helena Eagan. But it's kind of fascinating to see a younger, confident, and very-much-in-love Mark with Gemma, and understanding both the intoxicating joy of the relationship's early days juxtaposed against the cruel coldness. At least Gemma reminded Mark to tell her that he loved her before the accident - but she did need to.

The Paradox of Identity on Full Display in "Atilla," Severance S2E6

 The movie Dark City was somewhat overshadowed by a film exploring related themes and even using some of the same urban sets that came out the following year, namely The Matrix. While The Matrix is the greater presence in pop cultural memory (and one whose concept or the Red Pill and Blue Pill has been appropriated, most ironically, by misogynists, cribbing from a movie that could easily be read as a queer allegory).

In Dark City, a strange, noir-infused city where it is always night is actually a research station run by aliens, who wipe the memories of all the captured humans there and upload new memories (this premise is explained to us in the opening narration, an executive-mandated addition that robs the movie of the chance to let its bonkers premise slowly reveal itself). The protagonist, waking up with his old memories gone and nothing to replace them, goes on a journey to discover who he is and what power is being held at bay by this constant effort to rob him of a core identity.

Memory and identity are deeply linked - after all, it is in my memory where my name, my history, my knowledge of the people who are important to me, even the works of art that have touched me, all reside. Without that memory, is it truly me? Would my continual experience of consciousness matter if my memory were severed, my brain partitioned and a blank "virtual hard drive" created within it?

The Lutheran Church, it seems, has an answer, which is: no, it's not the same person. And we discover that the motivation for Burt's severance was a prayer for redemption.

Irving follows up on Burt's invitation to have dinner at his place with his husband, Fields, played by John Noble (you need only read my posts on this blog about Fringe to know how much I adore Noble as an actor, who is probably most famous for his role as the mad Steward of Gondor, Denethor, in the Lord of the Rings films, but I'll always associate him most with Walter Bishop). If you were looking for a "Baxter"-like rival to Burt and Irving's love in Fields, who can be easily disliked, boy are you in for a disappointment. Fields, it seems, is actually a lovely person who has a totally understandable anxiety about who Irving is and what kind of relationship he had with Burt.

Indeed, he's quite enlightened: he actually expresses approval of the hypothetical scenario in which Burt and Irving had sex down there, feeling that Innie Burt deserves to experience all the good things in life, including romance and intimacy.

Strangely, it's Burt who raises a few hairs on the back of my neck. Innie Burt was profoundly gentle and sweet, but as we've seen with other people, one's Innie and one's Outie need not be equally moral people (we'll get to Helena/Helly - don't you fret.) Burt and Fields are Christians, members of a local Lutheran church, but based on Burt's youthful life as a "scoundrel," they are both convinced, despite their love for one another, that Burt is hellbound while Fields is likely to be saved. (I don't know much about Lutheranism, but my father's brief time attending a Lutheran school when he was in Austria waiting to immigrate to America (which he did to help sell the family was Lutheran so that they could get help from a Lutheran charity, given that the Jewish ones were overwhelmed) seem to suggest that there's a lot of hellfire involved. Forgive me my ignorance if your mileage varies).

Notably, Fields mentions Burt working at Lumon 20 years ago, but Burt corrects him, saying that Severance has only been around for 12 years (which is actually longer than I had thought). Here, my hackles raise a little because I'm wondering if Burt was actually at Lumon prior to being a Severed, and what implications that might have for his Outie's agenda. (Burt also floats the idea of getting together again, with our without Fields present, which Irving agrees to.)

Helly continues to be a hero worth rooting for. Mark confesses to Helly that he and Helena had sex during the ORTBO, apologizing for being fooled. Helly, who has such a strong will and unbreakable spirit, takes some time to reflect on this, and her solution is: well, it's her turn. She leads Mark into an abandoned office, where they have sex under the plastic sheeting keeping the desks dust-free, creating the tent that should have been their to share. Helly had this experience robbed from her by her outie, and it's an oddly practical solution, helping to mend and affirm the romantic bond she has been forming with Mark and reclaiming her own body autonomy.

But this, of course, makes it all the more chilling when Helena tracks down Mark at a Chinese restaurant.

Helly is at the very least the secondary protagonist of this show after Mark, and I could imagine over time seeing her taking a more central position, but her own other half is emerging as one of the most chilling villains.

Helena tracks him down at this restaurant, and her motivations are likely more personal than corporate. Mark is sitting there unaware that he, or at least his body, had sex with this woman recently. It's a deeply uneven interaction. Mark, understandably, thinks this is just Lumon keeping an eye on him, perhaps suspecting his attempts at re-integration.

But it's odd, because Helena is, in this instance, more of a kind of stalker. It's interesting that she talks about "more or less running the company," which seems to be maybe one or two steps away from the truth.

Helena has given us a lot of reasons to dislike her, but I think that her actions must reflect some deep deficiency in the life she was allowed to lead. I think she really... maybe doesn't love Mark, or maybe doesn't even like him so much as she sees the glimmer of what it is to relate to another human being in a normal way, and is obsessed with having that. She even has some fun banter with Mark, as if trying to speed-run flirtation and rapport. But the power dynamic makes this interaction messed up in multiple ways - not just the whole "we had sex and you don't remember" way, but also in the sense that she is an executive at the company where he works.

Though it's interesting how outie Mark, having an entire life outside of the gospel of Kier, is able to maintain some boundaries, not fawning over her, worshipful. (The kind of fawning that Lumon, and indeed any modern major corporation, would like to see normal people treat them with, like some medieval liege lord.)

Mark, of course, has his own thing going on.

Innie Mark is beset by headaches and nosebleeds, unaware of the dangerous process that his Outie is undergoing to try to re-integrate his memories. Outie Mark has been getting flashes of his life inside, while now, Innie Mark is starting to get flashes of his outside life.

If, as the Lutherans evidently believe, the Innie and Outie have different souls, what does Reintegration actually mean?

I don't know how long this show will go, but I do wonder sometimes about its endgame. I want all the best for Helly, but what does that leave for Helena? Would Helly's full control of her body be just, or is that too horrid a punishment for Helena, no matter what she did? Reintegrating Mark seems like a good thing, but what does that mean for his relationships? Outie Mark has reason to believe that his wife is still alive, and can be saved, and ideally he would be reunited with her. But does that relationship have a higher value than the one between Innie Mark and Helly?

That's setting aside, even, the question of what health consequences Mark faces for his attempts at Reintegration. As we saw with Petey last season, Mark could die from this process. Mark Scout has made a decision that will impact Mark S without his knowledge or consent - not that he would be able to attain it without undergoing the process in the first place.

There are a few other notes this episode:

Mr. Drummond finds a list of severed employees in what appears to be Irving's apartment while the latter is at dinner with Burt and Fields. Dylan shares a kiss with his Outie's wife Gretchen, and we continue to get the impression that Dylan G. represents closer the man she fell in love with than the one outside, whom she seems to need to manage like an irresponsible child (boy does Dylan's home life bum me out, even if he seems to deeply love his family).

Milchick, meanwhile, is feeling broken and vulnerable after his harsh performance evaluation. Likely having figured out that Ms. Huang was the one to criticize him to his higher-ups, he tells her to go work at her own desk while he is busy, a kind of admonishment and act of office passive aggression. But he realizes that the manner in which he spoke to her was overly verbose, one of the three criticisms that he received during his evaluation.

We get a, frankly, heartbreaking scene in which he takes the phrase "You must eradicate from your essence childish folly," which he said to Ms. Huang, gradually replacing and removing words from the sentence until it becomes nothing more than "grow up," and then just, repeated, "grow." As someone who loves finding novel ways to express an idea through word choice, it feels, in this scene, like Milchick is actively trying to suppress some core part of his identity in order to better match the shape in which his supposed betters feel he should be able to fit. Milchick is such a fascinating character - so sinister, and yet we can feel this deep sympathy with him, given his position as both oppressor and also, in a way, oppressed. Bust those unions all you want, but the man is not going to thank you for it. They make you a sheepdog, but you're still an animal to them.

We're now over halfway through this long-awaited second season of the show. I hope that the break between seasons two and three is shorter than that between one and two, but I really have to say that I'm still fully on board. Even if every mystery is not given a satisfying solution, the surrealness and the thematic nuance has really been such a ride.

We still don't know what the hell Ms. Cobel is up to - I might have guessed that Patricia Arquette was stepping away from the show, except that she's there in the opening titles (albeit ominously faceless). Anyway, can't wait to see the next one!

The Fallout of the ORTBO on Severance

 Last week's episode was a seriously consequential one, so perhaps it's all right that this episode, "Trojan's Horse," named for the malapropism spoken by Mark's brother-in-law Ricken as he tries to justify turning his vapid self-help book in Lumon propaganda directed at the Innies (boy, isn't corporate power good at appropriating its own critiques? Something something Apple...), is mostly about reacting to what happened there.

Centrally and most obviously, Irving B. has been fired, and the MDR team has been told that his outie is on a "cruise voyage," because of course they can never be given the proper, normal terms for anything. Also, that's a flagrant lie.

The remaining trio of MDR (and we'll get to Helly R. in a moment) is forced to adjust to this new reality, with Helly and Dylan grieving and Mark being kind of weird about it.

Dylan's part of this episode is the simplest: he regrets failing to help Irving with his work on finding the Export Corridor, and follows a clue left by Irving to discover it.

Also, the team gets to hold a funeral, rather than a retirement party, for Irving (who has been unpersoned in all of their office photos) that gives us one of the season's most unnerving images: a watermelon that has been carved into a distressingly accurate shape of Irving's face. (Lumon loves rewarding Severed employees with things that have their faces on it - like paying lip service to acknowledging their humanity, or perhaps by putting their faces on things like watermelons, balloons, and coffee cups, they're subtly trying to tell them that they are things as well.) But this face happens to be pointing to a motivational poster that has Irving's last words to Dylan, now revealed as a hint for a hidden note that tells Dylan where to go to find the corridor.

Helly, then, is in a pretty crazy situation: from the OTC event in which she discovered that she was Helena Eagan, getting turned off for a long time and then literally the next thing she knew she was being drowned by an apologetic Irving. Helena is not excited to let Helly take control again, but she's pressured into it by the unnamed guy with the longish hair who might be her brother or another Eagan or something. Thus, some time after Helly's sudden awakening in Woe's Hollow and presumably then being shut off before leaving the forest, she wakes up in the elevator to meet Ms. Huang and basically play catch-up.

She doesn't know that she and Mark had sex, and is basically thrust into all this melodrama having literally missed four episodes. Irving's gone, and Mark is treating her strangely - eventually revealing that he feels he can no longer trust her, because he can't be certain that she isn't actually Helena, just playing the role.

It's... a rough time for her.

But it's also really rough for Mark. Let us not forget that Helena had sex with him under false pretenses - which is a type of rape. He's processing the trauma of that while confronted with the person with whom he thought he was consenting to, who happens to look precisely like the person who did this to him. Helly is innocent - if we agree to the premise that Innies and Outies are separate people. But if they aren't, was there even a crime committed against him here at all? The answers are complex, nuanced, and really open to interpretation.

On top of all this, Mark's Outie is undergoing the re-integration process (which apparently involves drinking some very disgusting-looking... I'd call it a smoothie but it doesn't look smooth. If anything it looks like milk that, to put it charitably, has started to have some of its solids congeal) while Dr. Reghabi lives in his house so that she isn't seen constantly coming and going. The treatment has given him a cough that both Outie and Innie Mark experience, and by the end of the episode, Outie Mark seems to have a vision of the Severed Floor and of his wife as Ms. Casey. (While he has the cremated remains of his wife in his basement, Reghabi suggests it's probably someone else's, which is the simplest explanation for Gemma being there).

Despite being the friendly face of evil for the first season, and while he's still, I think, more of a villain than a hero by any stretch of the imagination, we see things a bit more from Seth Milchick's perspective. The tone-deaf recreation of portraits of Kier Eagan as a black man has seemed to open up a crack in Milchick's company faith. And while he is trying hard to do his job, he's second-guessed by Ms. Huang and, of course, has to answer for the catastrophe that was the ORTBO. While not fired, Milchick is on the defensive, and instructed to change tack.

As Mark S. departs for the evening (a few minutes before official quitting time) Milchick confronts him in the elevator, deploying a precision F-bomb when referring to what Mark did with Helena. He's decided that playing Mr. Nice Boss has not worked for him, but is this an overcorrection?

In theory, Lumon is obsessed with Mark - and not the whole MDR team, but Mark in particular - completing something called Cold Harbor. Now: this is maybe the most mystery-box element of the show, and one that presumably has an explanation (possibly involving Gemma/Ms. Casey,) but I kind of don't care about it, at least for now.

One last thing, though, is that Irving does truly seem to be working with someone, trying to call them via a payphone and reporting on the major setback of getting fired by Lumon again. Burt pulls up, and Irving confronts him, only for Burt to explain that he was just trying to figure out who this guy who showed up screaming at his door one night was. Burt reveals that he was fired for having an inappropriate "erotic" relationship with another employee (the first time I think we've heard that Burt was fired rather than just retiring - and of course, giving a false impression of what actually happened) and Burt figures Irving is probably the person that this affair was with. But, assuming there's no painful twist here, we get something a little heartwarming - Burt invites Irving over to have dinner with his husband Fields, and they plan to get to know one another (and possibly start putting together what is going on over there).

While it works as a metaphor for many of the weird ways powerful corporations manipulate their employees, I've always read Severance as being, at least in its corporate themes, to be about the lengths to which companies will go to prevent workers from unionizing. Helly and Helena occupy the same body, but they are divided by class as worker and capital. And despite how catastrophic the plan seemed to go with Helena pretending to be Helly, what it has accomplished is that the MDR team, which had been working as a quartet that was both unified and rebellious, is now fractured - one gone, one feeling defeated and traumatized, one utterly disoriented and rejected, and basically only Dylan really in a position to continue investigating these mysteries - though he has the special privileges he has enjoyed dangled over him as something that can be taken away if he gets out of line.

Strangely, while Innie Mark is retreating from his efforts to find the truth, his Outie is taking enormous risks to discover it.

I think, in the long term, Mark at least is going to need to let each half of himself trust and rely on the other. I'm curious to see if the other characters go through such an arc. Helly and Helena seem more opposed than any Innie/Outie pair, but I think Helena's actions were not entirely based on rational and cynical attempts to manipulate (hell, Lumon and the Eagan family don't feel particularly rational,) and I wonder if Helena will ever learn to appreciate that Helly's tabula rasa version of her is actually a true and valid part of her. If and how she ever finds the will to rebel against her profoundly fucked-up upbringing remains to be seen.

As a final note: my brother-in-law presented a theory that I find quite fascinating: that Milchick, Cobel, and possibly Huang are all actually Severed as well - and that the deal they were given was that, if they worked for Lumon and continued to be faithful to Kier's teachings, they could effectively replace their Outies - and that perhaps an endgame for the company is to continually convert more and more people into these reformed Innies.

If that's the case, I think Milchick's experience with the paintings might gain a new wrinkle: if he was an Innie, perhaps he didn't have nearly as much awareness of the racism endemic to American culture, and after forming an identity as "Seth M.," he might have been shocked to discover the different way he was treated on the outside. Notably, he asks Natalie what she thought when she got her "Black Kier" paintings, and she acts as if he didn't even ask her the question. Indeed, given the worshipful way that Lumon employees are meant to treat the Eagan family, and how there's a fine line between this kind of royal/aristocratic treatment of a bloodline and full-on racial supremacist thinking (should we have been all that surprised when the British Royal Family kind of imploded when one of the princes married an African American woman?), I wonder - if this theory is correct - if Milchick only started to understand something that had been subconscious to him while an Innie upon seeing the outside world.

Anyway, I do find it funny that Ricken's story this season is basically there to remind us that, had we gained any respect for his vapid philosophy because of its positive effect on the Innies, we should not forget that, fundamentally, he's a dipshit.

The Terrors of a Company Retreat on Severance's "Woe's Hollow"

 You know what would be terrifying? Coming to consciousness standing on a frozen lake, a wintery forest surrounding you, and you've never seen the sky before.

Severance's choice to have it always be winter in whatever town where it takes place (I think it's supposed to be Michigan? Or perhaps pointedly not told to us) has always reinforced the malevolent, menacing nature of the corporate weights bearing down on its characters.

The MDR team awakens in this forest, finding a TV and video with a message from Mr. Milchick that they're there for a... convoluted acronym. It's basically a company retreat, but it's also taking place in a forest owned by the Eagan family, and named for a dubiously historical twin brother to "Eternal CEO" Kier Eagan.

The team finds a "Fourth Appendix" to the holy books they've read as severed employees, which tells the tale of Dieter Eagan, and a recounting by Kier of going off to live in the woods with his twin brother, only for Dieter to be horrifically transformed into a tree after he masturbates. And it's in this tale that Kier meets the first four of the "tempers" that he sorts human behavior into, Woe.

We start the episode with Irving, who sees Mark at the top of a cliff, and eventually he links up with Helly and Dylan as they find Mark. Irving has a problem: while he and Mark were both honest about what they saw during the Overtime Contingency break-out, Helly's story didn't add up. Why, after all, is there a gardener working at night?

He's worried that Mark is not listening to his skepticism because of the budding romance that Mark and Helly are enjoying, and he becomes more and more alienated from the group as his skepticism toward Helly pushes them away.

After Helly explains away Irving's questions by bringing up his grief over losing Burt, Irving walks into the forest, where he nearly freezes to death. But, as he is wont to do, he has a dream, and sees in Helly's place at their workstation the figure of Woe described in Kier's book.

As he wanders off, Helly comes into Mark's tent, and they have sex, and she confesses that she didn't tell the truth - that she was ashamed of what she was. Mark tells her that she doesn't have to say more.

However, in the morning, Irving confronts Helly - he's put it all together. Helly was acting cruelly the previous night in a way that he didn't think she was capable of. He thinks that she's actually her outie in disguise, and then discerns that only an Eagan would have the power and authority to do such a thing. And, as I predicted in the season's first post, Irving is right - this has been Helena Eagan, not Helly R, the whole season.

Irving shoves Helena's head under the water at the eponymous Woe's Hollow, where Dieter supposedly underwent his horrific transformation, demanding that Milchick switch her mind over to that of the real Helly. Without a choice, Milchick complies. Irving apologizes to Helly, but the inevitable follows: Milchick fires Irving, effectively condemning him to death, and promising to purge all records of any contributions or relationships that Irving had had in the company. Irving accepts his fate, serenely closing his eyes as Milchick activates his outie, presumably for the last time.

A few takeaways:

First off, while we now truly have Helly back, there are a lot of questions as to Helena's motivations. She clearly wanted to keep tabs on the MDR team, but I also get the impression that she really has struggled with human relations. In Mark, she saw a partnership she clearly had never experienced in her life outside. At the same time, though, it's deeply, deeply fucked that she slept with him. The question of whether Innies and Outies are truly separate people or the same is one of the biggest philosophical questions that this show asks, but this definitely feels like a violation of Mark's consent.

Second, man I hope that this doesn't mean Irving's leaving the show. John Turturro is a fantastic presence. It's a great arc - a man of principle who begins as a true believer in the wisdom of Kier, only for him to follow his integrity to a place that can no longer abide what Lumon is doing to them. But I'd be really sad to lose Turturro's presence. Given that his Outie looked like he was doing some sleuthing about Lumon, I hope we'll see him again (also, what was with Burt pulling up and seeing him calling from that pay phone?)

I will say I was surprised that this episode didn't immediately follow up on the ramifications of Mark's choice to undergo reintegration at the end of the last episode. It's actually quite jarring - almost as if the episode order got messed up or something (though given the consequences of this episode, last week's "Who is Alive?" couldn't have come after this one).

The one flash of it we get is when, after having sex with Helena, Mark briefly sees Gemma/Ms. Casey instead of her. But given the way that last episode ended, I really expected to pick up immediately on that cliffhanger.

In fact, this was kind of a Mark-light episode, primarily focusing on Irving and the reveal of Helena's deception.

Still, surely we can't brush past what has happened with Mark, right?

Visually, this episode was a real departure, thanks to its wilderness setting. Notably, it didn't have the usual opening titles, really establishing what a departure it would be.

The mythos of Kier Eagan is fascinating. My instinct is that it's pure fantasy, though I don't think it's purely produced for the severed folk, given that Ms. Cobel seems to have been raised in some kind of Kier-worshipping camp or society. The "four tempers" certainly seem analogous to the four humors in Alchemy (I think they might even be the same colors - Black, Yellow, White, and Red). And given the oddness of Helena's father, I'm inclined to believe that the Eagans are raised to believe all this crap as well.

What's funny, though, is how Helena laughs as the story about Dieter. Milchick goes on to punish the MDR team for laughing at the story, even though he knows that that's Helena Eagan leading the subversive charge. I get the sense that Helly's rebellious streak is not exclusive to her innie persona, but that perhaps the outie version has had a bitter, cruel edge introduced to it thanks to her fucked-up upbringing.

As a final note, the musak-like end credits music after what is possibly the final moments of Irving B. is kind of perfect.