SPOILERS for Severance Season 2, Episode 6 are forward. If you happen to aren’t caught up, you’ll be able to stream the sequence with an Apple TV+ subscription, then come again and skim this.
As Severance Season 2 continues its run on the 2025 TV schedule, I’m changing into extra fascinated by Mark, Helly and Helena’s relationship with every passing episode. Throughout their journey to Woe’s Hole, Irv discovered that Helly was truly Helena, which meant each her innie and outie have been romantically concerned with Mark, and this week, Helena determined to go meet Mark’s outie. Nevertheless, he wasn’t totally having it, and in the end bolted away from the interplay. So, clearly, I needed to ask Adam Scott and Ben Stiller why this occurred.
Whereas Mark’s innie now is aware of that he’s been spending lots of time with Helena, his outie solely is aware of her as an untouchable, highly effective, company determine. So, when she meets him at this restaurant he’s feeling lots of unsettling feelings, as Scott stated throughout CinemaBlend’s interviews with the Severance forged:
What he is aware of of Helena is terrifying. I feel that he finds her and her household to be threatening, and what they’ve completed to him and his household is horrifying.
Nevertheless, there’s additionally this type of magnetic chemistry beneath the floor between the 2. Mark is clearly confused by this within the second, and as a viewer, I used to be fascinated by this too, as a result of his outie doesn’t know Helly. To that time, Adam Scott advised me that this spark will not be one thing his character was prepared for, explaining:
I feel face-to-face with Helena they’ve an odd chemistry that I do not suppose both of them in all probability anticipated. However they begin speaking and so they’re oddly locked in with one another in a bizarre approach.
In the course of the scene, they’re bantering forwards and backwards, however when Helena calls Mark’s spouse Hannah as an alternative of Gemma, one thing appears to flip for him. He begins to look extra off-put by the interplay, after which as soon as they are saying their goodbyes, the man will get out of there. Explaining why his outie principally ran out of that restaurant, Scott advised me:
Then as soon as he type of snaps out of this bizarre kind of spell that he is below speaking to this particular person, he has to get the hell out of there. Not solely is the truth that he talked to her and noticed her an enormous piece of knowledge, however he looks like perhaps this particular person is closing in.
Contemplating Mark’s outie has been working actually exhausting to merge together with his innie, interacting with a higher-up at Lumon will need to have been deeply unsettling, but in addition fascinating. Plus, there’s this romantic stress between Mark and Helly on the severed flooring, and Helena performed into that whereas she was pretending to be her innie. So, all these emotions are percolating below the floor of this dialog.
Ben Stiller touched on this level throughout our dialog, explaining:
, as an viewers, I feel it is fascinating as a result of we as an viewers know what these two individuals have – you already know, the interplay they’ve had over the previous couple of days, which has been fairly intimate. So, you already know, there’s at all times that query of what permeates the severance barrier.
That’s the query I wish to go away us all with. All through Season 2, we’ve seen Mark experimenting in seemingly painful methods to merge his innie and outie. How is that impacting him? How is it impacting his feelings? And importantly within the case of this scene, are his innie’s emotions about Helly and Helena coming by means of?
We’ll simply have to attend to search out out as this nice Apple TV+ present continues to drop on Fridays. Within the meantime, I’ll be fascinated by these phrases from Scott and Stiller, as a result of I’ve a sense they’ll carry lots of weight as Season 2 continues.