This week’s episode of Severance — which we also learned just days ago is now the most-watched Apple TV+ series ever — reminded us once again that when it comes to the little details in this show, there’s nothing bigger.
Take, for example, the pet name that Burt and his husband Fields share with each other, which doubles as the title of this week’s episode (“Attila”). Instead of honey, Burt (Christopher Walken) and Fields (John Noble) call each other hun, as couples often do. From there, however, they’ve progressed to now referring to each other as … Attila. Attila the hun, get it? I suspect, however, that this was a very deliberate and revealing choice on the part of the Severance writers.
To understand why their mutual term of endearment is probably more than just a play on words, we have to first look at — just who was Attila? One of the most feared military leaders of the ancient world, Attila the Hun led the Hunnic Empire from 434 to 453 AD. His enemies called him the “Scourge of God,” and he conducted devastating military campaigns across Europe. By sacking cities and demanding massive tributes, he terrorized large sections of Rome.
Here’s the interesting part, to put this the context of Severance: Many historians believe Attila had his brother assassinated in order to seize sole control of the Hun empire. Hmmm — a man engineering the death of his brother in order to “temper” any obstacles facing him. Where have we heard something like that before, fellow Severance fans?
In terms of what else we learned in Episode 6 of Severance Season 2:
Mark and Helly: Let’s start with our favorite severed floor romance. Mark confesses to Helly that he knocked boots with her outie during the calamitous ORTBO, underscoring the fact that he didn’t know it was her outie at the time (on account of the fact that Helena was a Trojan horse in the process of fooling everyone, not just Mark).
Helly, of course, feels violated when she learns the news, spends a considerable amount of time pondering it, and then decides that she wants to reclaim her bodily autonomy with Mark — by having sex with Mark herself, so that she can have her own version of the experience. As an aside: I love how Milchick, during last week’s episode, was all like, “I’m tightening the leash.” And then, this week, basically nobody is refining anything on the severed floor, which has also turned into a love shack.
Hi Mark, fancy meeting you here: While Mark’s outie enjoys a meal at a diner, looking incredibly pitiful and alone, Helena abruptly slides into a booth facing him — as if the daughter of a CEO makes a habit of just randomly showing up at the kind of normal eateries where fetid moppets probably dine. She tries to turn what was obviously an engineered encounter into a flirtatious exchange, I suspect on account of the fact that she got to experience something with Mark in that ORTBO tent that eludes her outie (remember how she was fixated on that video of Mark and Helly kissing?).
However, referring to Mark’s dead wife Gemma by the wrong name seems to trigger something in him. If he was on the fence before, now he’s all in with an extraordinary action he’s about to take. Helena seems to have inadvertently convinced him that Lumon knows more than he thought. Did Mark pigging out on all that food also reveal something about his status? We’ve never seen severed people eat other than munching on office fruit — but Helena notes that, gosh Mark, you sure are hungry. A lot going on, and left unsaid, in that scene.
Mark’s reintegration: Fueled by his interaction with Helena, Mark leaves the diner determined to speed up his reintegration. Despite the inherent risks, he acquiesces to Reghabi’s suggestion that they flood the severance chip in his head. Once that procedure is complete, we see him struggle and fail to lift up a glass of water. He then collapses, crumpling to the ground. Will the increase in electrical activity to his brain help him access buried memories?
Burt + Fields + Irving = awkward and creepy: The big centerpiece of this week’s Severance episode, of course, was the dinner at the home of Burt and Fields, to which they invited Irving. The evening is fraught with tension, especially when Fields pointedly inquires about the nature of Irving and Burt’s relationship on the severed floor. Fields, indulging in wine, reminisces about their past, inadvertently revealing inconsistencies regarding Burt’s tenure at Lumon.
We learn, for example, that Burt apparently worked at Lumon prior to the existence of the severance process. The conversation takes an uncomfortable turn when Fields pointedly inquires whether Irving and Burt had “unprotected sex” on the severed floor, further intensifying the awkwardness. There was also that weird story about how Burt and Fields believe that innies can go to heaven after they die, separate from their outies. Their church told them so!
The way Walken plays the scene, you sort of feel like he’s done some awful things in his past, and severing himself was almost a kind of way to atone for it. To create a purer version of himself, as it were (I may be reaching here; we shall see).
Odds and ends: Among other memorable moments from this week’s episode, Dylan’s wife Gretchen is grappling with the fact that she kind of digs his cheerful innie more than his kinda deadbeat outie. Milchick, meanwhile, didn’t get a lot of screen time this week, but as always, he makes use of whatever he’s given to leave a big impression on you. When he stares at himself in a mirror, trying to force the “big words” out of his vocabulary that he got in trouble for last week, it’s yet another reminder that there is an Emmy statue with this man’s name on it.
