Rewind Review: Severance, "Hide and Seek" | Season 1, Episode 6
It takes a lot of style to make up for what's basically a half-episode, and this ALMOST gets there
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When you make a show like Severance that has such a distinct visual style, there is an inherent risk of falling into the trap of “style over substance.” And when you deliver a shorter-than-average1 episode that ends in the middle of a scene—calling it a cliffhanger is giving it too much credit—and doesn’t add much to audience’s grasp of the situation six episodes into a nine episode season, you’re sort of begging for someone to suggest that style is leading the charge, as it were.
“Hide and Seek,” like last week’s episode, mostly just extends our existing questions about Lumon and the severance process. MDR and O&D take their first steps toward banding together, but Milchick immediately shuts them down before they can try to figure out what hatchets and watering cans and lambs have to do with anything. Milchick makes an extra-curricular stop to Dylan’s house to wake up his “Innie” to demand information about the flash card he stole from O&D, but we don’t see what chaos will ensue when Work Dylan wakes up realizing he has a kid after his son walks into the closet against Milchick’s explicit orders. And while we get a glimpse of Harmony’s shrine to Kier and a sense that she is a true believer in every sense of the word, her whole deal remains an enigma as she continues to show special attention to Mark by visiting Devon, Ricken, and the new baby as a lactation consultant.
I do think that it’s clear the writers on Severance miscalculated how long bread crumbs were going to suffice from a storytelling perspective. The Devon storyline is a good example of this: the idea she encountered a pro-severance senator’s wife when she was at the birthing center who appears to be severed in “the wild”—whether during the birth or when Devon sees her in the park—is a key nugget of worldbuilding, and it’s not a coincidence we learn about it in the same episode where we see Lumon has the power to “wake up” their severed employees in their homes. But because of how the show has soft-footed the political dimensions of severance, the broader debate hasn’t really achieved much momentum, and so few of the elements in “Hide and Seek” achieve that sense of accumulated narrative that pushes the plot forward. And the one area that does accomplish this—Mark digging back into the trash can for the cell phone he threw away and answering it, discovering the woman on the other end just as Lumon is closing in on her—is the one that’s cut short before we get any real answers, left to wait another week.
And yet I do think that as much as this gives the feeling that Severance is more style than substance, the way it’s using that style remains beguiling, and “Hide and Seek” has some compelling parallels that stood out to me as the episode played out. This is the episode where Patricia Arquette really gets to unhinge Harmony, whether it’s the cinder block bedroom and the shrine to Kier that we see in the episode’s opening or her outburst with Mark, but her performance of what one presumes to be the Lumon Anthem is the standout. It’s a striking moment—I’m frankly shocked Irving doesn’t start harmonizing, but I suppose he’s distracted at the moment—but the episode doubles down by having Outside Mark encounter a very different Lumon Anthem in Petey’s daughter’s punk scream anthem, “Fuck You, Lumon.” Both, we learn here, are deeply felt: while I’ve questioned Harmony’s work “performance,” the shrine indicates that her affection for Kier is pure and genuine, while certainly punk rock captures the essence of the growing public discontent with Lumon in the dank alleyways of the town. It’s a stylish structural parallel, more than a particularly deep thematic one, but it helps the episode hold together into a clear statement even without significant plot momentum.
And then there’s two scenes, one of which moves the plot forward and another that doesn’t, shot in similar ways. The latter is our early glimpse of Burt and Irving in the “plant” room, which Burt suggests to Irving could become their “secret place.” It’s a moment of intense intimacy, as Burt suggests a kiss and Irving struggles with the implications, settling for a touch of foreheads. But director Aoife McArdle places us and the camera at a distance, the plants creating a sense that they are hiding in a forest. The slow zoom creates a voyeuristic lens that captures the uncanny notion of intimacy for these shells of human beings, grasping at something approaching real emotion and feeling against the will of their circumstance.
It’s notable because the same strategy is used on the outside when Mark finally picks up the call to Petey’s cell phone. Here, a similarly voyeuristic angle—this one a crane shot from above—brings the feeling of surveillance into the outside world, with another slow zoom in on Mark as the call starts to take on an uncanny quality with the caller—a Dr. Ragabi, seemingly a former Lumon employee who has gone rogue at the local university—knowing his identity. The show has very clear aesthetic distinctions between outside and inside, but both carry a certain degree of dread, and stylistic continuities like this go a long way to selling the show’s world in productive ways.
It does also help half-episodes like “Hide and Seek” resonate more than if the show were a bit less visually interesting, and why I completely understand if there are viewers growing frustrated with Severance if that part of the show isn’t connecting with them as strongly (or even if it is). I’m mostly content with a nebulous search for meaning in this world, but there’s definitely a limit, and whatever Mark is about to discover does feel like it needs to be a catalyst for something more tangible than what the show has been grappling with so far.
Stray observations
The opening scene is a lot of little easter eggs: we’ve got a hospital bracelet for what I presume is Harmony’s mother (born on this day in 1944, coincidentally), a brochure for a “Kiernival,” and various Lumon Industries swag, along with a photo from the Myrtle Eagan school for girls that is either her or her mother, it’s hard to say.
Patricia Arquette continues to have a lot of fun as Mrs. Selvig, but the whole multiple personalities thing really reached its apex when she was humming the Kier anthem to soothe baby Eleanor. Just delightfully creepy.
The casualness with which Dylan wakes up from his moment with Milchick reinforces how much the Outies are co-conspirators in what Lumon is doing to their Inside selves: Milchick arrives, says that they need to wake him up, and just goes along with it, either never considering or choosing to ignore the potential implications.
As expected, Nikki M. James remains a presence, as Alexa decides to give Mark a second chance and is charmed by his attempt to absolve his guilt over Petey by almost getting stabbed in a dark alley. Not sure Alexa has a lot of agency in this story, but I see the value in giving Mark a foil, and we got some new insight into Mark’s wife in the process.
“WE SERVE KIER YOU CHILD”—I have to say, understanding Harmony as a true believer makes it a bit harder to grasp some of her choices, but it would appear that she is so fanatical about Kier that she doesn’t trust Lumon’s bureaucracy to enact his policies as she feels best.
In the comments on last week’s review, Sarah noted a sense of dread for Irving and Burt, and it made me realize something important: I don’t even know what a happy ending would look like for the “Innies.” What do we want for them? On some level, the ethical dimensions of severance suggest it’s wrong that they exist at all, but we know they have lives, and feelings, and erasing them once they’re created seems cruel. But what does happiness mean to them? What do we desire to see? I’m not sure I have an idea, and that’s part of what compels me about the show but also seems incompatible with the narrative thrust of the season. Curious to see how they square that circle in the three remaining episodes.
Let the record show I am entirely in support of more streaming shows delivering 40 minute episodes, but I think this one narratively should have been 50 and resolved the cliffhanger, thank you for coming to my TED Talk.