The Severance Cast Breaks Down the Innies' Grim Trip to Woe's Hollow: It's the 'Survival of the Fittest'

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Severance Season 2, Episode 4, "Woe's Hollow."]

When you think of Severance, your first thought is likely of the sterile '70s aesthetic of Lumon's Macrodata Refinement office, with all of its fluorescent lighting and dated technology. It's what makes the fourth episode of the Apple TV+ series' second season so jarring, as much for the viewer as it is for the innies — who suddenly find themselves waking up in a frigid forest with no memory of how they got there and no authority figures around to explain. It's another purposely disorienting move on Lumon's part. The company has sent the Refinement team out on what Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) describes as an ORTBO: Outdoor Retreat and Team-Building Occurrence. But things are not as they seem in the forebodingly named Woe's Hollow, and therein lies one of the central questions of the season: Can the innies ever trust what Lumon is putting in front of them? As we find out by the end of the hour, the answer is, of course, a resounding no.

The purpose of the ORTBO, as Milchick says in a pre-recorded instructional video, is to placate the innies in their desire to see the outside world, sending them off on a quest to discover the identity of Dieter Eagan. They're guided eerily through the snowy forest by a series of their own doppelgängers until they reach a cave with a book inside, which informs them that Dieter was Kier Eagan's twin. The double meaning, of course, is that a twin is lurking among their foursome as well. Since Season 2 began, Irving (John Turturro) has been alternating between a state of mourning over Burt (Christopher Walken) and skepticism toward Helly (Britt Lower), stuck on her mentioning a mysterious "night gardener" that she supposedly saw in the outside world at the end of Season 1. While we know that Helly awoke to find that her outie is Helena Eagan, the daughter of Lumon's CEO, the big question mark hanging over the season's first four episodes is whether Helly has really been Helena in disguise since the season premiere.

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Director Ben Stiller told TV Guide that he wanted Irving's sense of uncertainty to permeate the episode. With the innies in a place they've never been (for Dylan [Zach Cherry], it's his first time seeing any part of the outside world: "I knew there was no actual ceiling, but this is f---ing insane") and left to figure out their own way forward, it was necessary to take a different approach than usual. "I'd always felt like the episodes should be pretty stark and hopefully a little bit strange, not a lot of dialogue until it was necessary, and sort of a feeling of unease," said Stiller. He credited production designer Jeremy Hindle, cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné, and location manager Ryan Smith with bringing Woe's Hollow to sinister life. "[We] tried to just put the innies in this world that would really be off-putting to them, and try to have this sense of dread underneath everything."

The group is eventually led to an area where Milchick and Ms. Huang (Sarah Bock) have set up camp for them, outfitted with tents (in "MDR blue," no less) and an outhouse, and stocked with "luxury meats" and marshmallows. Lumon's signature brand of uncanniness presides over the outing, but the innies still make efforts to connect with each other. In a private moment between Irving and Helly, he tries once more to get her to tell him the truth of her overtime contingency experience. "It won't change anything," he promises, but she continues to insist she told them everything. 

"I think if you've ever been lied to, or someone's masquerading, it's a big shock to your system," Turturro said. "He has a relationship with Helly, he formed one with [Dylan], and with [Adam Scott's] Mark, so everyone's at risk. Maybe because of his background, he's aware that something is wrong. Sometimes people do one little thing and they reveal something very strange, and you either follow that or you discard that."

In Helly's case, it's a series of strange things. There's the night gardener detail that Irving can't get past, but there's also a jarring moment of juvenile humor that comes out over the campfire. After Milchick reads them the story of Dieter's gruesome death, Helly dissolves into hysterics, having interpreted the story as Dieter's punishment coming after he masturbated in front of Kier. "That's actually the dumbest thing I've ever heard," she tells Milchick, as a "goo-goo eyed" Mark laughs beside her. The night comes to a screeching halt when Irving puts Helly on blast in front of the group, accusing Mark of not being able to see past his feelings for her. When Helly callously flips it back around on him, needling at Irving's grief over Burt, Irving storms off alone into the dark woods. 

The night ends with Mark and Helly having sex in Helly's tent as Irving wanders around in the woods by himself, eventually falling into a delirious sleep. In the morning, Irving finds Helly by herself, staring out at a waterfall they passed earlier. He tells her she was "cruel" to him the night before, the final red flag he needs to prove that Helena has been pretending to be Helly since their return to the office. "Helly was never cruel," Irving says, before dragging her over to the freezing water, where he repeatedly dunks her head, threatening to drown her unless Milchick "turns her back." Milchick grabs for his walkie and barks an order to "remove the Glasgow block," while Stiller's camera focuses on Helena's face as Helly — the real Helly — wakes up under water, Irving's suspicions officially proven true.

It's a dramatic escalation for Irving, the formerly obedient company man. After a season of being lied to and an entire episode of being disrespected by the people he cares about, he reaches a breaking point. "He takes it to the point where he doesn't really care," Turturro said. "He's thinking about, 'We're at risk. And this is a person who's gonna put us way more at risk.' It becomes sort of a survival of the fittest type of thing." His rebellion, Turturro mused, was a long time coming after seeing what happened to Burt in Season 1. "I think that people who follow the rules, when they break [them], they go a lot further when they do it. We read about that all the time, the perfect student, and then they're not perfect anymore."

Though the characters are operating on opposite sides of the innie vs. outie war, Lower found a connection between Irving's revolt and Helena's decision to descend to the severed floor herself. "[It] is kind of a parallel with Helena on the outside, being in this indoctrinated, high-control group," she said. "Her inner child, her inner rebel, is really on fire. You see that consciousness wake up in Season 1. That's within the outie. These are parts of the same person, and different experiences open up different sides of them." 

By the end of the episode, Irving is sentenced to the worst fate an innie can suffer: permanent and immediate dismissal. "It will be as if you, Irving B., never even existed, nor drew a single breath upon this Earth," Milchick swears, ordering Irving into the forest, where his innie is effectively killed right in front of his friends, who watch in powerless horror. It's an eerie echo of a line from Mark earlier in the episode, when the four stumbled upon the corpse of an animal: "Maybe this is what dead things look like."

Cherry saw Irving's dismissal as a wake-up call for Dylan, calling it a "culmination" of his entire existence. "[It's] this moment that kind of crystallizes everything," he said. "He's maybe been kind of ignoring these relationships at the office because he's been in his own world, and this moment jars him back into, 'Oh, yeah, these are the people who I'm here with.'"

Lower agreed, noting the "meta-quality" of losing Irving's innie, which also meant that the actors would be spending less time with Turturro on set. "We really missed him!" she said.

"We know John is still around, and we knew we were gonna see him here," said Cherry — but to the innies, Irving's outie means nothing. "Even though it's not exactly the type of death we think about in our lives, it's this really important thing for the innies," said Cherry. "It's very meaningful for them."

Turturro agreed, connecting Irving's "death" to the very human process of aging. "That's part of adjusting to life," he said. "When you're younger, you don't really think about that that much. As you get older, you're surrounded by a lot of ghosts, and people who are alive who you don't see."

For weeks, fans pored over the clues in the Helly/Helena mystery, but Lower is leaving it up to the audience to decide whether Helena was actually supposed to be good at fooling us or not. What it ultimately comes down to, Lower said, is the fact that Helena underestimated how much love exists between the members of MDR team and how well they'd all come to know and understand each other during their time on the severed floor. "This family has already been formed in Season 1," said Lower. Through that view, it's tough not to see Irving sacrificing himself for Helly as an act of love in itself.

New episodes of Severance Season 2 premiere Fridays on Apple TV+.