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.
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