‘Severance’ Season 2, Episode 5: Is the Real Helly R. Back?

Speaker 1 Did you and Heliar catch up?

Speaker 1 We did. Did you tell her that you fucked her Audi at the Orpo?

Speaker 1 Helena Egan,

Speaker 2 leader-in-waiting of this company.

Speaker 1 Have a restful evening.

Speaker 3 Hello, welcome back to the Prestige TV podcast feed. I'm Joanna Robinson from the void.
That's Rob Mahoney from home. And Rob, where do you think your affection index is these days with our listeners?

Speaker 2 You can't ask me to self-evaluate. Look, I would, you know what? I was going to ask for those scores.
I don't want those scores. Don't, don't tell us, please, what our affection is.

Speaker 2 Absolutely not.

Speaker 3 I would say, based on the number of emails we got in response to you sharing your nightmare about your recurring nightmare about not being able to drop a class,

Speaker 3 we got so many people saying, yes, Rob speaks for the people. He is a man of the people.
I would say you're in the 80s this week. That's what I think.

Speaker 2 I have never felt more seen in my entire life. So, shout out to everyone who is also failing exams in their dreams or not knowing their exams in their dreams.

Speaker 2 I just feel very connected to the outside world in a way that, as I am currently recording in my closet, I don't often.

Speaker 3 We're here to talk to you about Severance season two, episode five:

Speaker 3 Trojan's horse.

Speaker 3 just a wonderful rickonism exactly before we do that we should mention in case you haven't noticed there's a lot of white lotus content uh coming in this feed so on sunday night bill and mallory and i will be doing an instant sort of reaction viby pod and then a few days later rob and i are doing

Speaker 3 what is known at the ringer as the precap but we don't really fully understand exactly what that means but what it means is that we will be reading your emails covering theories uh diving deep into white lotus We'll have two White Lotus episodes per week and then our usual severance coverage.

Speaker 3 And then before all is said and done, we will be heading back to the pit. So that is what is happening in the Prestige feed.

Speaker 3 And if you are a Yellow Jackets fan and you're like, where's the Yellow Jackets coverage? That's over in House of R. Mallory and I are doing that in House of R.

Speaker 3 So that is what is happening all around the various feeds. PressCV at Spotify.com is how you can reach us for any of the shows.

Speaker 3 So if you've got white Lotus thoughts or feelings, we have not come up with a fun and quirky white lotus email yet.

Speaker 3 So press dtv at spotify.com, pineapplebobbing at gmail.com to let Rob know what his affection index score is. Please do.
Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 This week's episode of Trojan's Horse was directed by Sam Donovan, written by Megan Ritchie.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I've just got a few responses that I want to cover to last week's episode, Ghost Hollow, that we got from people.

Speaker 3 A lot of people wrote in about our question about the creepy doppelgangers that we saw out in the wilderness.

Speaker 3 And what a lot of people pointed out, we don't, since we usually watch on screeners, we don't get a previously on and we don't get sort of the post-credit in conversation thing that they do.

Speaker 3 In the previously on last week, they made sure to show the animatronics in the sort of like creepy cure museum that is exists in Lumen.

Speaker 3 And so a lot of people said they thought maybe they were animatronics. That seems like a lot of effort to haul those animatronics out for the Orpo, just for creepy vibes.

Speaker 2 Just for the Hall of Presidents out in the wilderness, it's unnecessary.

Speaker 3 How big do you think that Orpo team was? Because we've got Milchik and Miss Wong, but like Miss Wong's not dragging those animatronics out into the middle of the snow, right?

Speaker 3 We've got a whole SWAT team.

Speaker 2 Nor is she pitching a tent.

Speaker 2 I just think there's a lot of like logistical legwork that has to be done. And

Speaker 2 shout out to the AHEAD team who really set all this stuff up, the mysterious and important Lumen employees who we never see.

Speaker 2 But they're doing the good work.

Speaker 3 I think to that end, we got a lot of emails before this week's episode asking us if we thought the Orpo took place in some sort of holodeck, some sort of virtual space.

Speaker 3 I think this week's episode does the work to try to underline that that's not the case in the conversation that Mark has with Devin about not just the sort of like permission slip aspect of you can take my Annie somewhere

Speaker 3 fun and mysterious and exciting, but also the comment about him being wet. Right.
You know what I mean? It's just sort sort of like something physically happened to him that they had to explain to him

Speaker 3 when he was awoken.

Speaker 2 I also assume, like, I wasn't quite sure what to read into Mark having a cough in this episode, if that's supposed to be because he got wet on the Ortbo and it was cold and therefore now has a cold, or is it a side effect of the reintegration?

Speaker 2 But he's clearly feeling something. He's got a little head cold.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I would say a dip in the icy waters might do that to you, perhaps.

Speaker 2 Also, those just terrible-looking post-op smoothies might do it to you. I don't know what's going on in there, but I don't want any part of it.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 that goes to something I wanted to talk about next. But before we wrap up on last week's feedback, I want to say that a bunch of people

Speaker 3 or people wrote in about anagrams, which I love an anagram in a mystery box show. So Natalie T wrote in to let us know that Dieter Egan, the mysterious masturbating twin,

Speaker 3 if you rearrange Dieter Egan, it says AI generated. Yep.
Which is exciting and new. It is.
And then a lot of people pointed out that Ortbo is an anagram of robot, which is just

Speaker 3 something to think about.

Speaker 2 Which I think fueled some of the speculation about it being some sort of simulation, but it apparently is not. So, you know, you can get a red herring with these anagrams, too.

Speaker 2 You should, oh, all the time.

Speaker 3 And last but not least, Crispy wrote in to draw a connecting line between Irving's Final Moments in the Woods and a really famous John Totoro scene in Miller's Crossing, An excellent film, an excellent early Totoro performance.

Speaker 3 So if you've never seen that movie, why not?

Speaker 3 Use severance as an excuse to watch Miller's Crossing. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Speaker 3 On that sort of gross post-ops movie point that you made, I did want to do quick opening credits imagery check-in because those slimy little vials are in the opening credits.

Speaker 2 I didn't even clock that. Where are they? Yeah.

Speaker 3 They're like on a table and they get knocked over and they sort of like spill around and stuff like that. On the Reddit, someone on the Reddit called it uh Garmembozia, which is this Twin Peaks.

Speaker 3 I don't wait, have we talked about Twin Peaks? Are you Peak Sed, Rob? I've never seen it.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 In

Speaker 3 I just need to explain. In Twin Peaks, there's this like mysterious substance.
Justin Sales is on this call shaking my head at my inability to

Speaker 3 explain what this is.

Speaker 3 But it's supernatural nature. It is maybe you're consuming the soul of someone.
I don't know, but it's called Garmembozia and it's essentially creamed corn. And like it does look a lot like

Speaker 3 what we're drinking here.

Speaker 2 At least blend it up. You know, the canned cream corn, the least ideal possible cream corn.
And I say this as a southerner with deep affection for cream corn, but this is not the kind you want.

Speaker 3 And someone else on the Reddit called it the substance, which, hey, if you haven't seen the substance, why not use Severance as an excuse to watch both Miller's Crossing?

Speaker 3 What a double feature that would be, the substance of Miller's Crossing.

Speaker 2 Why not?

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Speaker 3 And I wanted to sort of enter into our conversation of this episode today

Speaker 3 with a clip from Jen Turlock who plays Devon. One of our listeners, Joseph T.U., sent this in.
It's an interview clip where she's talking about what she thinks the show is about.

Speaker 3 And I kind of wanted to take that concept and maybe check in with all of our characters inside of this episode through that concept. So Donnie, will you play that clip? People have asked me

Speaker 3 what I think Severance is about.

Speaker 3 I think, you know, the sound bite is it's about the work-life balance, but I've always said I I think it's about American loneliness and ennui and what it means to be in so much pain that you have to cut off half of your consciousness.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so loneliness.

Speaker 2 Yeah. A little bit of that going around this week.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I would say a lot. I would say,

Speaker 3 given that we ended, and we talked about this a little over the last couple episodes, about

Speaker 3 how season one ends with this defiant act of fellowship between the Corps and how immediately Lumen sort of scrambled the Jets in order to figure out how to isolate them by luring Dylan with his own sort of

Speaker 3 side plot treat by putting Helena in there instead of Heli. We're all sort of broken up, and now they've removed Irving entirely from the group.
So

Speaker 3 let's run through it. And I actually want to start with Milchik because this is a performance review episode for Milchik.

Speaker 3 He gets rebuffed by

Speaker 3 Natalie's attempt, like his attempt to

Speaker 3 find common cause with Natalie is rebuffed.

Speaker 3 And then it seems pretty clear based on what happens inside of that performance review and the way that she was sort of talking about it before that, that Miss Wong narced on him, um, I would say.

Speaker 3 And so, and in reality, in response to that, in response to him feeling isolated, he doesn't have an ally, Miss Wong, he doesn't have an ally in Natalie.

Speaker 2 He, he burned that allyship the moment he refused to let her play the theremin. theremin.
Like, I mean, you got to let her cook. This is her moment.

Speaker 3 Do you think it wouldn't have gone as poorly for him if he had just let her play the theremin?

Speaker 2 Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Maybe she doesn't understand the reason for the funeral. And I want to talk some about some of these scenes, too, between Miss Wong and Milchik, the performance review.

Speaker 3 Of course.

Speaker 2 I wouldn't say they hit me the best of any of the scenes in this show, and we can circle back to that in a second, but ultimately, you got to give her her moment. This is her time to shine.

Speaker 2 She's going to get two recitals. One got interrupted, I would say, unfairly.

Speaker 2 We didn't even get to see the marshmallows through, and now you're not even going to let her play. You're not even going to let her play like taps.
What's going on?

Speaker 3 At a funeral? Come on.

Speaker 3 That's the moment for a theremin if you're ever going to use one. But I.

Speaker 3 Like the way that she narced on him, justified or not,

Speaker 3 similar, we presume, to the way that he narced on Cobel,

Speaker 3 you know, and so it's just sort of this like

Speaker 3 predatory circle of life inside of

Speaker 3 corporate culture. And also,

Speaker 3 I was thinking about this email we got from a listener a couple weeks ago about this idea of Miss Wong being that like much younger coworker in charge of you from like Mark W's point of view or something like that.

Speaker 3 And that is that is one thing, but also this idea of like someone younger than, you know, Milchik was younger than Cobel, and now there's someone even comically younger than him, like coming up behind him, nipping at his heels.

Speaker 3 So I just thought, I thought all of that was interesting. And the fact that it resulted in

Speaker 3 how did Milchik respond to that? Not by finding common cause with his fellow Lumen employees, but by bringing the hammer down on Mark Harder. Yep.

Speaker 2 You know, and so that is just sort of like the nature of this trap we find ourselves in sometimes in a corporate setting of just sort of like, or, or any setting where authority rains down on you instead of just saying like, hey, we're all together under this authority, you just sort of wield what what little power you are allowed on the people below you um a tale as old as time unfortunately and it i think it's heartbreaking for milchik because it's so clear he doesn't want to be kobel and and wants to try something different whether for efficacy reasons or moral ones or however he sees the world he wants to do something else and even the slightest resistance to that initial rollout of the softer friendlier lumen now just leads the whole thing to be kaput like there's just no shot anymore and we're all tightening the

Speaker 3 Tell me what didn't work for you in those mil chick scenes that you want to talk about.

Speaker 2 So, I would say, overall, for this episode,

Speaker 2 great for answering questions. We get a lot of like very direct answers to a lot of the things we've been talking about.
You know, will we see Irving B again? What happened at the Orto?

Speaker 2 Was it a physical space?

Speaker 2 Like, all those things are asked and answered in a way that I think is really good for clarity purposes and certainly for our podcasting purposes as we're trying to unravel what's going on in Severance week to week.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 There was also a little bit too, like, too much of saying the quiet thing out loud and saying things very directly when previously they had been left up for a little bit of mystery a little bit of interpretation and i don't see that in sort of a plot mechanic way but things like milchik and miss wong having their exchanges they're preparing the bereavement materials and she tells him up front like you should not let them have have a funeral because it lets them think that they're people.

Speaker 2 It's like, okay,

Speaker 2 that's a theme that we're talking about, but when it's coming out of the character's mouths directly, I don't, I'm not as receptive to it. Like, I want it to be a subtler touch than that.

Speaker 2 And in particular, the exchange we get between Milchik and Natalie, in which all of the unsaid things are now just said, was kind of disappointing, to be honest with you.

Speaker 3 I don't know that I was disappointed, but I agree with you that I much preferred the version where they said all of that sort of with their, their eyes and, and her, like, rictus grin and all that sort of stuff.

Speaker 2 It's like when this happens, what it communicates to me is they didn't trust that.

Speaker 2 They didn't trust that as an audience and as a performance, that would be conveyed effectively when I thought it spoke. It said everything we needed to know.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 No, I mean, I agree with you. I want to watch that space.

Speaker 3 I think I just want to watch to see if we're progressing towards something, if we're progressing towards a moment for Natalie where she changes her mind about which side she decides to sit with.

Speaker 3 Dylan.

Speaker 3 Dylan is alone.

Speaker 3 Sort of the

Speaker 3 best, I think, way to exemplify the way in which they're all alone inside of this episode is the scene when all three of them go into Milchik's office and they're all demanding different information.

Speaker 3 And Dylan is single-minded.

Speaker 3 He doesn't give three dry fucks about anything else, right? He's like single-minded about what happened to Irving. Is he dead?

Speaker 3 Then I demand a funeral, you know? And so he is like, he's not part, you know, he has been lured away from the agenda of the group all season because of, you know, his relationship with

Speaker 3 his wife, if you put it in the middle of it. It's complicated.
It's complicated.

Speaker 2 There's love geometry happening all over this show.

Speaker 3 But now he's isolated inside of this, like,

Speaker 3 I have to make something up to Irving. I failed him, and I have something to make up to him.
So that's where Dylan sits.

Speaker 2 The whole dynamic across MDR with Irving's funeral is fascinating to me.

Speaker 2 Because on the one end, yes, you get Dylan given the eulogy speaking from his heart, which, as Milchik points out, not something that happens very often for Dylan in this office.

Speaker 2 Helly is still so shaken up by her circumstances and everything that's happened, but clearly mournful in her way in losing Irving and losing someone she cared about, and even someone who attempted to kill a version of her, or at least like kind of smoke out the reality of who she was, hiding in her own skin.

Speaker 2 And then there's like everything that's going on with Mark in this episode.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 of all the things that he is showing, and there's a lot, and I'm fascinated by it, and I love peeling it back.

Speaker 2 And there are layers within layers and with layers within layers of what's happening with both Mark and Mark S right now.

Speaker 2 Him being so cold and cavalier about Irving dying is the part that I'm trying to understand the most right now.

Speaker 2 Like I can, I can get behind and find my way to some sort of motivation for most of the things that Mark is doing in this episode.

Speaker 2 But the way he's just like bolting out the door at first instance from the funeral, I don't, like, I don't, I don't know what to make of that just yet.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so Adam Scott talked about this a little bit on the official podcast. Um, he was talking,

Speaker 3 I actually kind of see it a reverse side of this because from his perspective, Mark is like done. He's so devastated by the betrayal that he's just like, let's just put our head down and do the work

Speaker 3 and forget rebellion, forget fellowship, forget any of this. I'm just here to do the work.

Speaker 2 The nihilism is coming through real strong by the end of the day.

Speaker 3 Right, so all of that makes sense to me as like a sort of trauma response to,

Speaker 3 you know, thinking you're having sex with someone when you're having sex with someone else, or all of that, uh, all of that stuff.

Speaker 3 The insistence that he still has Heli with him

Speaker 3 is actually the flip side of that that makes less sense to me. If he's just given up, if he's just in, you know, nihilism, let's just get the work done mode.
You know, what

Speaker 3 Drummond and Natalie say is that he will not do it without Heliar. Yep.

Speaker 3 Quote, so we have to give her to him, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And in a plot mechanic sense, actually a plot, I was like, how are they ever going to get Heliar back in this plot? Like, how is that ever going to happen?

Speaker 3 So they figured out a way through twists and turns of the plot to make it happen. And I'm glad for that because I love Heliar and I'm glad she's here.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 But to your point, I think with the

Speaker 3 nihilistic state we find market in this episode, and also what feels like to me an incursion of

Speaker 3 the Audi Mark attitude. Yeah.
Bullshit Gazette is such an Audi Mark thing to say to Milchik in the elevator. It's not, and so I don't, I think some, some, some viewers were confused.

Speaker 3 They were like, is that actually Audi Mark in the elevator? I don't think it is,

Speaker 3 but we're reintegrating. So things are sort of seeping through, you know?

Speaker 3 And so I think along with the memories, there's like this snarky attitude that Audi Mark had that any mark never had, but it's like, we're all coming together.

Speaker 3 It's sort of how I was reading it inside of this, you know?

Speaker 2 And coming, as we said, from a very fair place. Like his whole world has been shaken up.
And I think what he tells Helly in terms of.

Speaker 2 having to confront the idea that everything they have been working for has been sabotaged.

Speaker 2 That every, you know, they thought they were so smart with their cute little plants, but they are three little people, well, four and now three within a giant machine.

Speaker 2 And everything that they've accomplished has been something they were allowed to accomplish. And that's, that's a hard thing to reckon with for anybody.

Speaker 2 And where it, I think, leaves Mark is: you know, we have this conception of Mark as, okay, there is Mark as and Mark Scout. There are these two guys, two versions of the same person.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Throughout this episode, I think we basically get four marks because you have classic sad boy Mark Audi, who is presenting to the world, his sister included, as a certain kind of thing, and then also going through this process of reintegration with Rigabi.

Speaker 2 That's a whole separate life now he is carving out, even within his Audi life.

Speaker 2 And then inside, you have some version of company man Mark S still there, like diligently putting the numbers into the buckets,

Speaker 2 who doesn't want to take the funeral too seriously and just wants to kind of move on because he doesn't know what else to do.

Speaker 2 And then you also have, I don't know, like nihilist Mark, Comrade Mark, whatever version is kind of like staring himself in the mirror, trying to get his shit together.

Speaker 2 And by the end of the episode, all of these versions have kind of started to bleed together.

Speaker 3 I love that you, so I really did want to bring up, in terms of this isolation, loneliness theme that I am insisting we put on every single person,

Speaker 3 Audi Mark lying to Devin about what he's doing when Devin was like.

Speaker 3 That was his community. Yes.
Was his sister. And now he's lying to her about this.
And sure, Rigabi's living in his basement, but they don't seem like they are the most chummiest of housemates.

Speaker 3 And so.

Speaker 2 Yeah, how are you feeling about the developing like a roommate sitcom between Mark and Rigabi?

Speaker 3 I don't know. He's just got to get that dryer fixed.
I got to say, if I moved into, if I moved into some basement and I was promised a washer dryer

Speaker 3 and there was no dryer.

Speaker 2 Furious.

Speaker 3 I rate.

Speaker 2 What are you going to do? Hang dry in a one-bedroom apartment? Come on.

Speaker 3 In the winter?

Speaker 2 Absolutely not.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 that's Audi, Mark. And then Innie Mark, inside of this,

Speaker 3 like he in he insists on having Helie there. Yes.
This actually breaks my heart. It's so human.
He insists on having her there. He wants her there.
He wants to know she's alive. He wants to see her.

Speaker 3 Yeah. But he's not allowing himself closeness with her inside of this episode.
And to your point, this is where I bring up Lost in the scene in the bathroom when he's looking in the mirror.

Speaker 3 This is a very late season lost thing. There's a whole season with a motif of characters looking in the mirror and having this moment of sort of like, where am I? What am I doing?

Speaker 3 I can't explain it very well without spoiling anything, but just know.

Speaker 3 So the fact that he's looking in the mirror, but then when she comes in to talk to him, it's a torturous camera angle to get her reflection. So there's two hellies there as he's talking to her.

Speaker 3 And like, you know, obviously, it's like, you know, obviously the fractured natures of these people. But like when he says to her in that, in that bathroom counter, I don't really know you.

Speaker 3 You know, and she's like, yeah, you do.

Speaker 3 But like, what, what an earth she, not just the portrayal of someone was there undercover, but she's upset that he couldn't tell the difference and he's upset that he couldn't tell the difference because he's like, I really thought I was falling for someone.

Speaker 3 I thought I knew someone and I couldn't even tell that it wasn't her. So, how real is this connection that I thought I had with her in the first place? Do you know what I mean? Totally.

Speaker 2 I love, from a big picture perspective, that none of this is as simple as you flip Heli R back on, the team is back together. Like, everything is pulled so far apart already and so tense.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 That even leading into this, you can understand why Mark would be so shaken up and not sure what to trust or who to trust.

Speaker 2 Do you even know Heli on any level whatsoever if you were so easily deceived? Like, it is a self-indictment of him as much as anything when he says, I don't really know you, right? Like,

Speaker 2 that is a personal lapse on his part. And I love from Helena's perspective that

Speaker 2 Helena using Helly's body is not just a deceitful act to trick Mark and do, and worse to him, to, you know, deceive the rest of the MDR team, to sort of infiltrate and sabotage whatever they had going on.

Speaker 2 But it's also like very harmful to Helly herself. And

Speaker 2 the absolute violation of someone else using your body.

Speaker 2 And as you said, the double whammy of the people in your life not being able to understand who you are underneath, which is, I'm sure, something that all of us would hope that the people in our lives could do.

Speaker 2 But realistically, who is anticipating body swap shenanigans? Maybe the people in the world of severance should be a little more open to the idea than we are.

Speaker 2 But it's a harder thing to pull, like to pull out. Like, is this person having a weird day or are they another

Speaker 2 consciousness in the body of the person I care about?

Speaker 2 It's a heady question.

Speaker 3 Oh, are you the chilly, evil corporate version of yourself or are you you today?

Speaker 2 Who's you you are? But Britt Lauer bring in the absolute most to both versions of Helly and Helena. And I think getting to spend time with Helly for the first time in a while.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, you see the physical transformation.

Speaker 2 You see the completely different vocal delivery, which I would say say is like a higher register overall and also more tentative and a little bit more wavering, even relative to Helena, who God knows has her own share of anxieties to deal with and is, to be fair, isolated in her own way in this episode, but just an awesome performance.

Speaker 3 Helena's next on my list. Her sitting opposite Drummond and Natalie and her asking, you know,

Speaker 3 Is my dad okay with this? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Father approved it.

Speaker 2 What was your read on not just that line, but Drummond saying father encouraged it? Yeah, father encouraged it.

Speaker 2 On the one hand, like, I think that could be sort of a mocking tone of her asking, did father approve this? Like, yes, your father did.

Speaker 2 Could be kind of a more general term of authority that people use for James Egan, calling him father, especially within the company.

Speaker 2 I've also seen people throwing out, like, does this suggest that Drummond himself is part of the Egan family?

Speaker 3 We did get an email about that, like, that is he an Egan bastard or something like that, which is very, a very thronesy way to think about it.

Speaker 3 I think it was more him mocking her.

Speaker 2 That's how I rate on it.

Speaker 3 But yeah, that is definitely a question people are asking.

Speaker 2 And the mocking, I think, facilitates that scene, which really hammers home the point that this is not what Helena herself wants to do.

Speaker 3 Well, what I think is interesting to learn about the power dynamic is like we assumed that he was like her muscle, her hench. And then it's like, no, he has authority above her.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 You know, where is her power inside of this company?

Speaker 2 In her name, I think. And that's about it.
And it's being, and she's being controlled and manipulated, not unlike the way that everyone on MDR is.

Speaker 3 But it doesn't seem like it gives her much. No.
Last but not least, to wrap everything up on this sort of loneliness, alone list,

Speaker 3 Devon alone. Mark is lying to her and her husband.
I don't know if you noticed, sucks.

Speaker 2 More than usual, I would say. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It was interesting listening on the official podcast this week.

Speaker 3 They

Speaker 3 had the actor who played ricken on and they were talking a lot about ricken and they were talking about the rick and devon marriage and they were very sort of like

Speaker 3 defensive of against the critique of what that people are asking what the hell is devin doing with ricket right like you don't know what goes on inside people's homes you don't know you won't you only see a sliver of their lives something like that opposites attract all the time i don't know it was very weird to me i was just sort of like not weird i understand why they're defending it but i was like i

Speaker 3 i've definitely seen couples where there are opposites and I've definitely seen people who are with someone who doesn't seem like

Speaker 3 worth their time, all that sort of stuff. We see that all the time, but I think that would tell us something about, like, what did Devin need that Rick and can provide? Yeah.

Speaker 3 That's interesting to me, you know, because

Speaker 3 their idea was like he awakens some sort of like creativity or bohemianness in her. And I'm like, no, but it's, you know, it's sort of, it's like when you think about,

Speaker 3 I don't know, some of the relationships on succession, you know, there's just sort of like you see people together and you're like, why?

Speaker 3 But also, I see how hurt and broken you are, and how you're grasping for anything that will sort of fulfill that for you. But Devin, we don't know enough about Devin to know anything about that.

Speaker 2 So, no, and I think what would be necessary to sell a characterization like that is some little beat off to the side.

Speaker 2 And it does not, it's not a big plot point, but as you're saying, if his value or even just what she's reaching for is some sort of artistic side of herself or fulfillment in terms of her creativity.

Speaker 2 Like, we just don't have any evidence to suggest that based on their interactions on screen. And I like Rickenscenes personally, but they are incredibly broad.

Speaker 2 It's the broadest characterization on the show by far. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But also, I thought the most interesting thing they said on the official podcast about him is that he is such an essential part of the storytelling because he is so important for us understanding what the outside world is like.

Speaker 3 Obviously, he doesn't stand for everyone on the outside outside world, but we don't spend a lot of time outside of the like lumen coterie, right?

Speaker 3 And so we don't know what it's like for people on the outside outside of like Rickens weird no dinner parties and book readings and what is Rebecca like, et cetera. So all of that.

Speaker 2 And for it to come from a skeptic and like a faux intellectual who can so easily be pulled into this orbit with like a single check and really just the assurance that what you do is important.

Speaker 2 And who among us is not so susceptible to that? Who among us this week of all weeks, Joe, would have to ponder the idea of like, what if we could create change

Speaker 2 within the machine? What if we could be the resistance that is actively changing things as we ourselves are co-opted and corrupted? It's just not relevant at all.

Speaker 3 But it never works out that way, does it, Rob?

Speaker 3 Irving

Speaker 3 alone, except he's had this encounter with Burt now.

Speaker 2 Well, he's also on a cruise experience.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 3 yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 3 We'll see.

Speaker 3 Who do you think he's calling?

Speaker 2 I feel like from the Roger Ebert economy of characters, it's got to be Cobel.

Speaker 3 Okay, Cobel is a theory. Rigabi is still on the table to a certain degree.

Speaker 2 Yep. And I think there's some merit to the idea that

Speaker 2 maybe he hasn't been reintegrated fully, but at at least is aware enough of the procedure to try to blend between his consciousnesses, to try to work some things.

Speaker 2 Like, I ultimately, I don't think that Irving has been reintegrated, as I've seen theorized, because if he were, then he wouldn't need to try to pass messages from any to out of it.

Speaker 2 Like, it's clear that he's still pretty distinct. It's just he's trying to navigate the border.

Speaker 3 What we learn inside of the bereavement

Speaker 3 process is that he has, I think it's 12 quarters, right? And so he has been severed for three years, but he's been a Lumen employee for nine years. Yep.

Speaker 3 So there's six years, and we've talked about this before, there's six years that Irving was there, that he wasn't severed.

Speaker 3 We know that he's got this trunk full of sort of information on other severed people.

Speaker 3 So yeah, he, he, it seems like he severed himself voluntarily in order to try to infiltrate MDR or that sort of stuff, experiment with the sleep deprivation thing.

Speaker 3 Because, yeah, he does know some things about the procedure and maybe how to try to get around it to try try to get to that elevator down that hallway if he can.

Speaker 2 He's not trying to burn notes into his retinas. You know, he's a little further along in the progress, in the process.

Speaker 3 He knows a bit more.

Speaker 2 Let me ask you this, Joe. While we're on the Irving beat,

Speaker 2 the watermelon visage of Irving is horrifying.

Speaker 2 It did give me like Night King vibes for some reason, but obviously juicier. Like there's something about the way he's carved into that fruit that reads as the Night King to me.

Speaker 3 A real juicy Night King situation.

Speaker 2 That's the last thing you want your Night King to be.

Speaker 2 But do you yourself have a fruit of choice that, you know, when you do pass on from this mortal coil, how would you like to be carved and into what fruit?

Speaker 3 Rob, thank you so much for asking me. I think I'm going to stick.
I'm going to be like wildly predictable and I got to stick with the pineapple. I think it has to be a pineapple.
It's a great one.

Speaker 3 I think it would make a great canvas for carving in terms of like the shadows and texture you could get using the, you know, the outer skin and the inner flesh all of this sounds terrible

Speaker 3 rabba what kind of fruit would you like your visage carved upon do you think if you put me here at spotify core

Speaker 2 memorialize you

Speaker 2 do you think if you put like um a hair straightener to the strands to the to the greenery at the top of the pineapple could you get it to curve down as hair is that a thing that is within the power of the pineapple

Speaker 3 well i don't think it's a hair straightener i think what you have to do is you have to sever the stem take the individual sort of things off and and then like reattach them in a hair-like setting.

Speaker 2 Sounds wonderful.

Speaker 2 I think it would turn out beautifully.

Speaker 2 I think you're on the right track where it's got to be something hardy, clearly something big enough to make a head out of.

Speaker 2 And I want to reclaim a fruit that I feel like just gets a lot of flack for no reason, and that's my beloved honeydew. So shout out to the honeydew, which I think would make for a great carving fruit.

Speaker 2 And I think would display my head particularly well.

Speaker 3 I actually do think a honeydew suits your head very well. It's a disgusting fruit, but I think I understand.

Speaker 2 I take back the thank you then.

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Speaker 1 This episode is brought to you by Mobile One. Mobile One Synthetic Motor Rail knows your car is your happy place.
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Speaker 1 for the love of driving visit loveofdriving.us to learn more this episode is brought to you by salty cheesy cheez-it crackers should this whole podcast just be me eating cheez-it that would be a top-notch podcast you could hear them crunching in my mouth you could think about how salty and savory and delicious they are you could just get cheese it on the brain oh man those cheez-it cravings they get you anyway

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Speaker 3 The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot. Yeah.
Which is

Speaker 3 a tune that the dentist question mark

Speaker 3 is whistling at the opening of this episode. I want to take you on a journey that I went through with this particular tune.

Speaker 3 I heard the whistling. I was like, I know that fucking song.
But I was,

Speaker 3 I can't remember if I was watching the screeners with captions or not, or I can't remember, but I was just sort of like, how am I going to figure out what this is?

Speaker 3 I was like, I know it. I can't Shazam this.
There's no lyrics for me to Google, but I know this tune. God damn it.
And then I was watching it again

Speaker 3 with a friend of mine, and she was like, is that the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald? And I was like, what?

Speaker 2 You just.

Speaker 3 And then we were watching the second time with the captions on, and it says in the caption, like, continues to whistle the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Speaker 3 And I was like, oh, the answer was there all along. I really thought I was going to have to do some major detective work on this.

Speaker 3 The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 There is something to the Gordon Lightfoot element.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of things around the edges of severance that are like vaguely Canadian happening, and I don't know what to make of that other than the fact that they shoot some of the show in New York, and it might be as simple as that for geographic purposes sometimes.

Speaker 2 But I'm just going to say I am flagging that it's a Canadian artist.

Speaker 3 A sad shipwreck.

Speaker 3 And there's a line in this part that he's whistling about Lake Superior, quote, never gives up her dead. Yeah.

Speaker 3 We got a couple emails about this. This one from Mikhail S says,

Speaker 3 could Mark's quest to the underworld for Gemma slash Miss Casey be as doomed as Orpheus?

Speaker 3 Is Lumen the Lake Superior here too determined to maintain its grip on the dead it has swallowed for everyone, for anyone to ever really get them back?

Speaker 3 A depressing thought, much like the song, but it doesn't, but it does seem like a pointed musical choice. I mean, obviously, it's a, it could not be a more pointed musical choice

Speaker 3 than picking this.

Speaker 3 Weird podcast moment on the official pod, and I think this is the last official pod reference I have to make today.

Speaker 3 Adam Scott, before they sort of got into it, he always says we're going to dive into this episode.

Speaker 3 He loves a deep dive. He loves that.
I don't know if it's like, you know,

Speaker 3 a nod to Jason and Mal or whatever, but he loves the phrase a deep dive.

Speaker 2 But he

Speaker 3 really emphasized it this week in a really odd way to my ears.

Speaker 2 Can you recreate what he did?

Speaker 3 The quote is:

Speaker 3 We're gonna, he's like, we're gonna dive into the episode. We're going deep.
I don't know. It was just like, honestly, I should have clipped it for you to listen to.

Speaker 3 It was the intonation, because he says something similar some other podcasts. Okay.

Speaker 3 Now that I explained it to you, it really does sound like I'm grasping it at straws.

Speaker 2 Or it sounds like he really is a big binge head. You know, it's one of the two.

Speaker 3 I just felt like maybe he was like coding something about.

Speaker 3 There's a lot of water-based imagery inside of Lumen. Anyway,

Speaker 3 what do you think?

Speaker 2 I love that this is the straw that you grasped at. But this is why you're you.
This is why you're the best, Joe. No stone unturned.

Speaker 2 No intonation uninterrogated.

Speaker 3 I don't know that I'm the best, but

Speaker 3 Lumen dentist, what do you make of a lumen dentist going down the elevator with no tools?

Speaker 2 I mean, no fucking clue. Dentist seems like a generous interpretation of what's going on there, but some kind of surgeon, it seems.

Speaker 3 Was it not, were those not dental tools?

Speaker 2 I think they were tools to fiddle with something. Is it something in a brain? Is it something in a mouth? Is it something in the human body?

Speaker 2 Otherwise, we're going to have to consult the doctors on the pit for that.

Speaker 2 To me, I think the takeaway for me was less who is this guy and what is his medical profession, although I am interested in that, and more.

Speaker 2 O and D clearly has a wide array of fabricating responsibilities beyond the goofy paintings and the pictograms.

Speaker 2 And we've just only begun to scratch the surface of everything that that department is responsible for.

Speaker 3 It was like, was it like hand sanitizer? Like large bottles of hand sanitizer? Is that what it was like? Green gel of some kind?

Speaker 2 Some kind.

Speaker 2 Some kind of sanitizing gel. But yeah, there's a lot going on there and a lot going on there that is quite mysterious as well.

Speaker 3 The

Speaker 3 tools didn't read to me as like your classic tray of torture device.

Speaker 2 Oh, no. I thought like

Speaker 2 they were like brain chip tools to me. That's what it looked like to me.

Speaker 3 Oh, what do you know about brain chips?

Speaker 2 You know, I have a lot of experience. I do a lot of like backdoor in-home surgery, you know, just like kidney removals and whatnot.
And I will say that looks like a classic set of brain chip tools.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 PyapplepavingaGmail.com. If you are Noah Wiley's Dr.
Robbie and you have other ideas of what those tools might do, please.

Speaker 3 He was wearing something that was slightly giving dentist to me, this sort of like white short-sleeved sleeved uh uniform-esque situation yeah also

Speaker 3 dentist because of marathon man

Speaker 3 why don't make it a triple feature miller's crossing the substance in marathon man because of marathon man dentist and torture always sort of like go hand in hand for me i was detecting some dentist drama in you making this very quick association i mean

Speaker 3 my dentist told me i have great dental hygiene so i i like it and the dentist

Speaker 3 you may not be i'm i'm still skeptical of your of your brain chip meddling expertise, but we do know that you have NBA expertise. Okay.
So we have a question for you from our listener, Rami.

Speaker 3 He says, Ben Stiller, famously a die-hard basketball fan.

Speaker 3 There's absolutely no way the quote, no malice palace sign is not a reference to malice at the palace, where the NBA players, quote, fought back and were then severely punished.

Speaker 3 Can you explain this reference to me and also our listeners?

Speaker 2 Yeah, look, I think the reason Malice Palace works in both cases is because it rhymes.

Speaker 2 But the Malice at the Palace in NBA terms for the uninitiated was an event in 2004 at a game between the Pistons and the Pacers.

Speaker 2 Ron Artest, a somewhat volatile player for the Pacers, was laying on the scorers table as the refs were like adjudicating some bullshit that had happened on the court.

Speaker 2 And a fan threw a cup, a beverage of some kind. I think it was a beer, and it hit him on the table.
Like the fans grew restless. He threw it.
It hit him. Ron Artest, now

Speaker 2 actually, I was going to say now Meta World Peace, but he's gone through 50 different name changes since then. My all due respect to Meta.

Speaker 2 Jumped up off the table, stormed into the stands, started punching this guy.

Speaker 2 Teammates started coming in after him, also just punching and grabbing random fans and all-out like melee happened on the court. Oh my God.
Jermaine O'Neal, another player for the Pacers.

Speaker 2 wound up so far, it looked like he might end a man's life, but mercifully slipped on the court and pulled back just slightly enough that no serious contact was made, at least not enough to end that guy's life.

Speaker 2 Long story short, lots of players got suspended. It was like a black eye on the NBA for a very long time.

Speaker 2 The commissioner of the league threw the book at these players, understandably so, for jumping into the stands and

Speaker 2 beating on paying customers. But also, no one really came out of it looking great.
You know, it's not a good situation for literally anyone involved.

Speaker 2 Don't throw beverages or food items at professional athletes. If you're a professional athlete, maybe don't punch people who throw things at you.

Speaker 3 All right, so on the one hand, just fun because it rhymes. Yep.
But also maybe just sort of an encapsulation of a failed uprising, an ill-advised uprising.

Speaker 2 Uprising seems strong and generous

Speaker 2 for what happened at the mouse of the palace. And look, I have time to explore that.
particular event from all angles, but I do not think it was an uprising.

Speaker 3 Okay, great.

Speaker 3 Let's talk about birthing.

Speaker 2 Everybody's talking about it.

Speaker 3 Everybody's talking about Birbing.

Speaker 3 So we've already talked about the funeral. We've already talked about the phone call.

Speaker 3 Let's talk about, just in case folks did not do a complete rewatch of season one, I had a lot of people ask me this. They're like, who do you think is going to be playing Fields?

Speaker 3 The good news is who's Bert's husband? Yeah. We've been invited to dinner.
We've been asked to bring an expensive bottle of red wine.

Speaker 3 You know, we're going to meet Fields. We already know who's playing Fields, and we're so lucky.
It's John Noble,

Speaker 3 who a lot of people know from Fringe

Speaker 3 or a lot of people know from Lord of the Rings. He plays Denithor, the Steward of Gondor.
So

Speaker 2 is he

Speaker 2 going to mash a cherry tomato in one of these scenes?

Speaker 3 That's really serving cherry tomatoes at dinner.

Speaker 2 How could you not do it?

Speaker 3 I don't know if they have the restraint to avoid that. But yeah, cherry tomatoes could be on the menu.
I'm really excited for this.

Speaker 3 I'm thrilled we're going to go, I assume, we're going into the Burt Fields home for dinner. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Hopefully serenaded by Pippin, you know.

Speaker 2 Or is that Mary? God, I always get Mary at Pippin.

Speaker 3 No, it's Pippin.

Speaker 2 It's Pippin.

Speaker 3 It's Billy Boyd himself.

Speaker 3 If you

Speaker 3 were told to bring an expensive bottle of red wine

Speaker 3 to a dinner, Rob. Yes.

Speaker 3 How expensive is that bottle of wine?

Speaker 2 Depends on who asks you. Okay.
I think you got it. What if I ask you?

Speaker 3 I say, Rob, come to dinner, bring an expensive bottle of red wine.

Speaker 2 See, you would never do that. I wouldn't.

Speaker 2 This is the catch. I feel like if someone tells you to bring an expensive bottle of wine, it's either one, a joke, or two, the thing you need to take very, very seriously.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So in this case, it reads more as

Speaker 2 a bit of a wink. And so I think you can get away with just like a nice enough bottle.

Speaker 3 Oh, God. I thought he was like really serious.

Speaker 2 You thought he was deathly serious about this? Yeah, I did.

Speaker 3 I did.

Speaker 3 Chris Rawkins says everything with a little twinkle.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Under these circumstances, look, also,

Speaker 2 mysteries need to be unraveled. You're trying to at least get something from this person, whether it's personal, whether it's business.

Speaker 2 Like, I think we're all trying to figure that out for Berving, but everybody's talking about it. So why not splurge a little bit? Yeah.
And relative to a Lumen salary,

Speaker 2 I think he could spring for

Speaker 2 a $40 bottle of wine. Okay.

Speaker 2 $40 to $50 bottle of wine? I was going to say $50. I think that's well within range.

Speaker 3 Like, I would buy a more expensive bottle of wine if someone didn't ask me and I wanted to impress them. Sure.

Speaker 3 But if they ask me, and I'm like, no matter who asks me, I'm a little pissed that they felt like they needed to articulate that. So I'm definitely capping it at 50.
50 is as high as I'm going on.

Speaker 2 If someone asks you to bring an expensive bottle of wine, bring like fucking barefoot or whatever. You know, like they deserve it at that point.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 3 You talked a bit about the Dylan's eulogy, but I did want to point out one line that caught my eye.

Speaker 3 Dylan used the phrase, suck my own fuck. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 And I would like to play a clip for you now, please.

Speaker 2 I already know what it is.

Speaker 3 You can go suck a fuck.

Speaker 2 Oh, please tell me, Elizabeth, how exactly does one suck a fuck?

Speaker 2 How

Speaker 3 does one suck a fuck?

Speaker 2 I literally said this into my living room as soon as it came out of everyone's mouth. Like, how can you, if you are as millennial-coded as, at least I am, you classify yourself as millennial, Joe?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 How can you not reach for this place immediately?

Speaker 3 Here's the deal, Rob. That's not true of every millennial.
And I just want to say this. Yesterday I had the privilege of recording with Bill Simmons and Mali Rubin.

Speaker 3 And Bill was like, Joare, Rob, our most unlikely podcasting duo on the network. Wow.
And I was like, why?

Speaker 3 And.

Speaker 3 His explanation was only complimentary to you about how he thought you were when when they hired you, he thought you were just a basketball guy and he didn't know you had this sort of like pop culture side to you.

Speaker 3 But I was just like,

Speaker 3 there are references that you and like, not that we're alone in the world and having Donnie Darko references, but I was just like, I knew immediately that you would know that that is a Donnie Darko.

Speaker 2 It simply has to be. It has to be.
And also, the funny thing about Bill saying that is he's the person who paired us together in the first place.

Speaker 2 And so he saw some weird alchemy somewhere that suggested that we should do this together.

Speaker 3 That's why he's the pod father. Okay, um,

Speaker 3 here's a wild theory that's running around burning up Reddit. Rigabi,

Speaker 3 uh,

Speaker 3 basement dweller that she is,

Speaker 3 is wearing these earrings

Speaker 3 that the camera sort of focuses on a bit. Okay.
And they are the exact, I think, exact same earrings that Helena Egan wore

Speaker 3 when we met her at the end of season one.

Speaker 3 The sort of gala situation. And so the question is are they some sort of like lumen issued

Speaker 3 You know something be it like a here's your gold watch I was about to say your like earrings or Are they a device of some kind?

Speaker 3 So there is you know when I when I watched this episode a second time with a friend of mine her theory which had never really occurred to me she thinks the whole rigabi thing is still

Speaker 2 lumen

Speaker 3 that rigabi is like false flag in it right pretending this whole you know, reintegration thing, but she's still actually working for Lumen. Interesting.
I'm not all in on that.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But to your point, I love to just entertain every idea, and the matching earrings is very odd to me. So

Speaker 3 what do you think about that?

Speaker 2 Could I take this crazy theory one level deeper?

Speaker 3 Please, always. Down to the Snow Fortress level? Perhaps.

Speaker 2 No one ever needs to go to the Snow Fortress level of anything anymore after last week.

Speaker 2 What What if they are in fact not her own earrings? Well, I guess my question is, I did not clock these earrings.

Speaker 2 Depending on when they appear in the episode, could they in fact be earrings that she dug out of Gemma's stuff and is wearing to spark the reaction in Mark that she says she's trying to do by kind of like using some of her physical things?

Speaker 3 Oh, a real Kobel stealing the candle move from last season.

Speaker 2 Exactly. And in doing so, suggests something about maybe what Gemma was really up to.

Speaker 3 Interesting. We're on earring watch.

Speaker 3 Something I did not know that I was going to say here in 2025.

Speaker 2 It's also been huge on, I just started watching Paradise. Are you watching Paradise, Joe?

Speaker 3 No, we got a lot of emails from people wanting us to cover Paradise. And Chris,

Speaker 3 I was asking CR, I was like, CR, do I have to watch Paradise? And he was like,

Speaker 3 Chris is basically like, it would amuse me if you watched Paradise.

Speaker 2 I had flagged it because I love Sterling K.

Speaker 3 Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2 And so I had flagged it when we were looking at stuff to cover.

Speaker 2 And I'm glad in retrospect that we did not because it does not stand up to that level of scrutiny, but it is very fun and very goofy and very surprising at times.

Speaker 2 Also, very heavy in earring-related subplots. So earrings having a huge moment, apparently, in mystery box shows.

Speaker 3 Okay, on yellow jackets as well. Interesting.
Interesting. Okay.

Speaker 3 We got a bunch of emails about inspirations for Kir Egan of various sort of like figures in our American industry culture that I thought it was worth talking about.

Speaker 3 Brady wrote in to talk about

Speaker 3 W.K. Kellogg.
We actually got several emails about the founder of Kellogg

Speaker 3 over the years, over the years, over the weeks of this podcast.

Speaker 3 Everything I know about W.K. Kellogg, I learned from the film The Road to Wellville,

Speaker 3 starring Anthony Hopkins, as I have to mention.

Speaker 3 W.K. Kellogg,

Speaker 3 one of the more perturbing films I've ever seen in my life,

Speaker 3 because it's about sort of early wellness culture in America when we knew nothing and were doing absolutely banana stuff in the name of wellness. We still are, but I was about to say,

Speaker 2 we haven't really come that long away, really.

Speaker 3 Wait, wait till you see White Lotus Season 3.

Speaker 3 But this is what Brady wrote. He was like, W.K.
Kellogg, of course, invented cornflakes to curb sexual desire, ran his own sanitarium where patients would dance on the rooftops

Speaker 3 and led a hugely successful campaign to normalize circumcision in the U.S. Talk about severance.
Michigan is home to Henry Ford as well, another influence on the fictional cure, no doubt.

Speaker 3 Indeed, when the painting of Cure overlooking lakes on a cliffside is shown, the land below resembles a mitten.

Speaker 3 I know the show is set in a made-up state, but where the setting pulls its real-life influence seems intentional.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 we've got Henry Ford,

Speaker 3 W.K. Kellogg,

Speaker 3 and then Fiona wrote in to talk about Joseph Smith and Mormonism. Of course.

Speaker 2 I mean, that one is also right there.

Speaker 3 The main point that she was making, the one that really hit for me is the idea of teaming tempers in a cave in the woods. Yeah.
This lore that we learn. And Joseph Smith and the idea of Joseph Smith

Speaker 3 finding golden plates in the woods and using these special peepstone glasses in order to read it and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 And the way that the Joseph Smith mythology changed to sort of suit the needs of the Mormon church,

Speaker 3 as does this like pure egan

Speaker 2 story. Organized religions would never do such a thing.

Speaker 2 They would never subtly alter their texts over time through convenient lapses in translation, perhaps, or anything related to modernization to make them more palatable.

Speaker 2 They would never do such a thing.

Speaker 3 And you're right. And you're right.
And

Speaker 3 you know that as well as I think you know brain chip devices when you see one. Okay.

Speaker 3 I've just had a couple of other sort of pineapple and Greek mythology based things to get to, but I wanted to ask, like, what other scenes do you want to talk about or

Speaker 3 character stuff do you want to talk about in this episode?

Speaker 2 I would like to take us back to Milchik's first debrief with the MDR team as he is explaining, as we mentioned, the answers to their very specific and individual questions.

Speaker 2 But also, I think putting such a nice and soft spin on this idea of Helena Egan infiltrating Heli's body to be a part of the team and in the most benevolent way possible, which we know is always Swedish.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 The Glockschupen. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Just a marvelous.

Speaker 2 Just a marvelous idea. How do you pronounce that, by the way? How do do you actually pronounce it? Do we know?

Speaker 3 Oh, I'm not Swedish and I'm not going to try, but I do know that everyone who is Swedish said what when they heard that pronunciation of it.

Speaker 2 I will say Dylan's ear, though, very tuned because he brings it back pretty quickly, like throw it to throw it back in Milchik's face.

Speaker 2 And I would say a similar enough pronunciation for being caught off guard with some random Swedish at like 8:30 in the morning. So shout out to Dylan.

Speaker 3 Tramal Tillman's

Speaker 3 delivery of that, of everything, he's wonderful, is wonderful.

Speaker 3 But yeah, that was that was like what I really loved about that is because I think the joke you made in the first episode of the season about Helena posing as Helly was undercover boss, which was like

Speaker 2 hilarious.

Speaker 2 It's literally canon, Joe.

Speaker 3 I love that this is like classy Swedish undercover boss,

Speaker 3 the Gra Grack Schuppen, which again, if you're Swedish, pineapplebobbing and gmail.com. I know that's not not how you pronounce it.

Speaker 2 And I would say true to undercover boss, Helena wants no part of going back amongst the people ever again. Like, she is

Speaker 2 hid it and quit it. She's out of there.
She got what she needed. Does not have any interest in returning to the severed floor and basically has to be dragged into doing it.

Speaker 3 No, I mean, actually, that's not true. I think she's eager to go down herself, but she's not.

Speaker 2 Oh, she's not as Helen. Yes, yes, yes.
That is true.

Speaker 3 She's like, I'll just do it again. I'll just go down by myself.
I'll pretend again. Yes.
Maybe have sex with Mark again.

Speaker 2 That would be nice. Can you imagine? If she did the double deception and Mark fell for it, like there's no coming back from that, Mark.
If you fell for that, it's over.

Speaker 2 It's already pretty.

Speaker 3 It's good for you. Yeah, I think

Speaker 3 she would love to go back down and hang out.

Speaker 3 She loved doing that.

Speaker 3 And so when she's like, they're animals, like that's, that's not how she actually feels. She was like, what she really feels is I felt alive for the first time in my cold, cold existence, you know?

Speaker 2 So it is very true.

Speaker 2 And I do appreciate as we are getting all these answers, as we're getting all these revelations within this episode, and there are many, including introducing the idea of Helly back to the MDR team, we still do have just like the bomb in the back pocket of the fact that Helly does not know that Helida and Mark had sex on the Ort Bow.

Speaker 2 And for Milchik to throw it in Mark's face so clearly and so maliciously, as he so often does, like the man knows how to wear a turtleneck and he knows how to deliver like a very frightening line of dialogue.

Speaker 3 Jamine knows how to stand way too close.

Speaker 2 Incredible, Like, that's not an elevator for two people. And frankly, the question of, can I come in, the answer is a hard no.

Speaker 2 You're going to have to wait for the next one.

Speaker 3 I'll meet you on the outside.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure. Come on out.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Are you ready for more pineapple lore? It just goes deeper than that.

Speaker 2 I thought you would never ask.

Speaker 2 Okay, great.

Speaker 3 Okay, so what do we have so far? We have,

Speaker 3 it's for like Polyamory, group sex, right? Is something we learned about pineapple?

Speaker 2 Apparently so.

Speaker 3 Margita said something from the Smithsonian Library and Archives about, titled The Prickly Meetings of the Pineapple.

Speaker 2 Very good.

Speaker 3 During the 18th century, the pineapple was established as a symbol of hospitality, with its prickly, tufted shape incorporated in gateposts, door entryways, and finials, and in silverware and ceramics.

Speaker 3 The motif continues, prevalent in Christmas decorations in Williamsburg today.

Speaker 3 But with pride of place on the lavish dining tables of the enslavers of North America, the pineapple continues its association with slavery.

Speaker 3 George Washington, who first encountered the pineapple at the plantations of Barbados, had them imported from the West Indies, a port in the triangular trade of enslaved Africans. So, um,

Speaker 3 luxury, Christmas, slavery.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's the severance mood board, as far as I can see. The trivecta, baby.
That's really all trivector right there.

Speaker 2 And there's also, I would say, this sort of vague gesture away from office life towards something exotic and tropical, right?

Speaker 2 Like every allusion we get, you know, to Irving's Audi going on a cruise, to the music that's playing after the funeral, to the existence of these fruits and like the way that they are sort of held over people's heads as something to covet and want.

Speaker 2 It is very like longing out of your cubicle for the vacation that you can never have. And this is the closest that they can get to it.
And it is very, very sad, Joe.

Speaker 3 Do you think that they think the outside is just like sort of this tropical paradise when, in fact, it's the bleak midwinter always outside of Lumen?

Speaker 2 They would be so disappointed to find out what the real world is actually like, including the Midwest winter, which is no joke.

Speaker 3 I also love that,

Speaker 3 you know, when Mark talks about the fact that he got all wet following, like, that they told him that they had a ropes course, it seems like, on their, on their Orpo.

Speaker 2 Well, which like plays better than a near drowning.

Speaker 3 It does. It's not outside the realm of what they set up.
There were tents, marshmallows. I could see day two being a ropes course,

Speaker 3 but I guess they didn't mention. Also, we hauled animatronic versions of you out into the wilderness to point you towards a cave.

Speaker 2 The other thing about the animatronics that people did point out was that the animatronic, and we say this theoretically, we assume it's an animatronic at this point, Heli

Speaker 2 has a bit of like an askew head situation, like evocative of when she tried to hang herself. So if that is true, look, fucked up work by O and D or whoever came up with the animatronics.

Speaker 2 Like, that's just nasty business and uncalled for.

Speaker 2 But also, if I think it speaks to not everyone knowing and maybe where the circle of trust is as far as Helena's infiltration, like clearly, Milchik knew, some people in the control room knew, but this felt like Drummond, obviously, but this felt like a pretty tight circle of people who understood that that was Helena on the severed floor.

Speaker 3 Real

Speaker 3 haunting of Hill House vibe with the brokeneck lady, but I think also

Speaker 3 I like that as sort of like an illusion because, yeah, she's awkwardly sort of like bent over in a way that the other ones aren't. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But I don't know that like that necessarily means that O and D, who of course made it because they, as we found out this week, make literally everything.

Speaker 3 I don't know that we're meant to then infer that they know everything that happened.

Speaker 3 Last but not least, Tim wrote in about on the Greek mythology front, Tim wrote in about the sort of maze-like quality of the hallways, reminding him of the story of like the Minotaur in Greek mythology, this idea of a monster at the center of a maze.

Speaker 3 I think what was so effective about that running sequence at the beginning of the season,

Speaker 3 as sort of annoyed as Adam Scott seems to have been to have filmed it over the course of several months.

Speaker 2 Can you blame him?

Speaker 3 It really did establish for us, like every time we're down there, it now feels more claustrophobic than it ever did before for me, just knowing how sort of Warren-like it is down there.

Speaker 3 I mean, we walked with them through there before.

Speaker 3 We knew that there were like a lot of twists and turns and blank white hallways, but something about the length of that running sequence just really, you know, sets the world for us when we're down there in the underground.

Speaker 2 So, and a great bit of filmmaking, too, because if you've seen any of the visual effects, like pre-vis shots of this show, it's a pretty limited space of hallway that they're actually working with, and yet they make it feel infinite.

Speaker 2 And I think one of the benefits of having these sorts of drab office interiors is you can do wonders to stretch them out, to elongate them to to push them like a little bit past the point of absurdity and i i am always so interested by like the office satire elements of this show and ultimately how they are tying into the themes and they're tying into this loneliness like how they are feel making characters feel more isolated um and maybe never more never more pointedly than when someone's walking down a long ass white bleak hallway with not a person in sight not a door in sight no clear way to understand even where they're going.

Speaker 3 We love a long white hallway, especially on an Apple property.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 just to recap, Rob Mahoney loves an office. Satire hates the office.

Speaker 3 That has been.

Speaker 2 Also, I will say the bit about Milchik not properly applying his paper clips to his reports,

Speaker 2 a little too office space for me.

Speaker 3 A little TPS report.

Speaker 2 A little TPS report.

Speaker 2 I thought we were getting maybe a little too cute with that part of it.

Speaker 3 Anything else you want to say about this episode?

Speaker 2 Just to return to one of our recurring bits, as listeners have been emailing us about what they would sever from their own lives,

Speaker 2 Joyce emailed us to say that she would sever a great candidate that many people ended up echoing, commuting. Yes.
Very relatable, very understandable.

Speaker 2 And she noted that at least her annie would get to listen to some ringer pods as they are commuting from place to place, which I'm certainly thankful of.

Speaker 2 But I'm also starting to detect a bit of a theme, Joe, between the commuting, the exercise, people flying, people doing their chores.

Speaker 2 Like, these are all things that people are wanting to sever out of their lives and they're also time that they spend with us. So

Speaker 2 I'm starting to wonder, are we severites?

Speaker 3 I'm starting to take it personally. Are we so easily severable from your lives, dear listeners?

Speaker 2 But also, are we, you know, the little bit of sugar that's making the corporate life go down more smoothly? Like, is that our role in the universe?

Speaker 3 How do you feel about that? Does it feel like your face has been imprinted on a marshmallow?

Speaker 2 I wish. I wish I was at that level of authority where I would be, but no, I am but the marshmallow.

Speaker 2 I am but the one being imprinted on and fed to the masses to make them get through their little Ortbo experience.

Speaker 3 All right. Well, this has been another marshmallow episode from us, your lures to get through your corporate day.

Speaker 3 Thanks so much to Donnie Beacham for his work on this episode. Thanks to Justin Sales for his work on the feed.
Thanks to John Richter for helping me find my way into the void.

Speaker 3 No, I'll be in the void, I think, for the rest of the season because I'm down here for the,

Speaker 3 so just get used to it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, get comfortable.

Speaker 3 And we'll see you next time. Bye.