[Severance] "Woe's Hollow" post-episode notes
Irving, I love you! The way he held Helly... You’re back. I know I’m going to die over this, but you left a mark on me even if they try to erase you, even if they try to erase me. His eyes. “Helly was never cruel.”
Mark S. is about to have his body violated, his vulnerability exploited, by both having had sex with Helena without knowing she wasn’t Helly and Mark Scout’s arrival, and I am in shambles about it.
In the end, the autonomy Helly got in S1 and what Irving did just now were so intertwined with destruction… The price of change cost them both their literal lives, not just part of them. Can Irving even reintegrate if his innie is dead? Where do those memories go? That’s a whole person. He had a whole life.
Dylan, aghast as he yells, I’m sorry! I should have listened!, who kept him from suicide, whom he made his family willingly through the care the uprising instilled. Mark is utterly paralyzed, his face soaked, cradling Helly, who just had sex with him and doesn’t know whose body he entered without real permission, still trying to process and retreating back into terror. Helly woke up after weeks, drowning in freezing water by the man who wanted to encourage her every time she hurt herself or she wanted to give up on MDR (as a department, as family.)
Irving, looking back at them without saying a word. with pride and determination.. To remember? (Do you remember the times of your life?, they played as they killed Burt G.) to reassure? Walking to his death with his eyes open and spit in his mouth and pride and a smirk.
You can’t sanitize this. You can’t make this act into a motivational claymation. You will make him a villain; he will be a horror story around the campfire, and yet his friends get a chance to hang in there.
a refusal to be commodified, at the cost of your whole existence. I suppose both Irvings had that in common in the end.