SPOILERS for Severance Season 2, Episode 6 are ahead. If you aren’t caught up, you can stream the series with an Apple TV+ subscription, then come back and read this.
As Severance Season 2 continues its run on the 2025 TV schedule, I’m becoming more fascinated by Mark, Helly and Helena’s relationship with each passing episode. During their trip to Woe's Hollow, Irv figured out that Helly was actually Helena, which meant both her innie and outie have been romantically involved with Mark, and this week, Helena decided to go meet Mark’s outie. However, he wasn’t fully having it, and ultimately bolted away from the interaction. So, obviously, I had to ask Adam Scott and Ben Stiller why this happened.
While Mark’s innie now knows that he’s been spending a lot of time with Helena, his outie only knows her as an untouchable, powerful, corporate figure. So, when she meets him at this restaurant he’s feeling a lot of unsettling emotions, as Scott said during CinemaBlend’s interviews with the Severance cast:
What he knows of Helena is terrifying. I think that he finds her and her family to be threatening, and what they've done to him and his family is horrifying.
However, there’s also this kind of magnetic chemistry underneath the surface between the two. Mark is clearly confused by this in the moment, and as a viewer, I was fascinated by this too, because his outie does not know Helly. To that point, Adam Scott told me that this spark is not something his character was ready for, explaining:
I think face-to-face with Helena they have a strange chemistry that I don't think either of them probably expected. But they start talking and they're oddly locked in with each other in a weird way.
During the scene, they’re bantering back and forth, but when Helena calls Mark’s wife Hannah instead of Gemma, something seems to flip for him. He starts to look more off-put by the interaction, and then once they say their goodbyes, the guy gets out of there. Explaining why his outie basically ran out of that restaurant, Scott told me:
Then once he kind of snaps out of this weird sort of spell that he's under talking to this person, he has to get the hell out of there. Not only is the fact that he talked to her and saw her a huge piece of information, but he feels like maybe this person is closing in.
Considering Mark’s outie has been working really hard to merge with his innie, interacting with a higher-up at Lumon must have been deeply unsettling, but also fascinating. Plus, there’s this romantic tension between Mark and Helly on the severed floor, and Helena played into that while she was pretending to be her innie. So, all those feelings are percolating under the surface of this conversation.
Ben Stiller touched on this point during our conversation, explaining:
You know, as an audience, I think it's interesting because we as an audience know what those two people have – you know, the interaction they've had over the last few days, which has been quite intimate. So, you know, there's always that question of what permeates the severance barrier.
That’s the question I want to leave us all with. Throughout Season 2, we’ve seen Mark experimenting in seemingly painful ways to merge his innie and outie. How is that impacting him? How is it impacting his emotions? And importantly in the case of this scene, are his innie’s feelings about Helly and Helena coming through?
We’ll just have to wait to find out as this great Apple TV+ show continues to drop on Fridays. In the meantime, I’ll be thinking about these words from Scott and Stiller, because I have a feeling they’ll carry a lot of weight as Season 2 continues.
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