Everything We Know About Woe’s Hollow & Dieter Egan

This post contains spoilers for “Severance” season 2, episode 4, “Woe’s Hollow.”

In “Severance,” the shadow of Lumon Industries founder Kier Eagan looms large over the severed floor, even though the man has been long dead. Kier’s name is spoken with reverence since Lumon functions on his core values and beliefs to this day and reframes workplace ethics through the lens of his teachings. Episode 4 of the show’s second season, titled “Woe’s Hollow,” digs deeper into Kier Eagan lore by revealing snippets about his personal life to the Microdata Refinement (MDR) team during an uncharacteristic outdoor retreat. This outing, dubbed Outdoor Retreat Team Building Occurrence (ORTBO), completely alters the status quo between the MDR innies, namely Mark (Adam Scott), Helly (Britt Lower), Irving (John Turturro), and Dylan (Zach Cherry). Mind you, this is no run-of-the-mill team-building exercise, as Kier Eagan’s “sacred” texts lie at the center of the tragedy that engulfs the MDR team, which will never be the same after the end of this episode.

After the four MDR innies wake up near a snowy forest, the ever-eerie and compelling Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) sends them on their first outdoor fetch quest. He starts by explaining the goal of the ORTBO: Learning more about Kier Eagan’s lesser-known Appendix IV, which mentions his twin brother, Dieter. This comes as a shock to everyone, as Dieter doesn’t exist in the official Eagan lineage that Lumon employees know about. The Dieter Eagan National Forest — the site of the retreat — houses this forbidden fourth Appendix inside Scissor Cave, where MDR has to venture and retrieve said diary. Once they get a hold of Kier’s diary, we learn about his long-lost twin Dieter, and how the two traveled to a waterfall nestled against a cliff. This cliffside paradise, Woe’s Hollow, hides unsavory secrets about the Eagan legacy and raises baffling questions about the founding of Lumon.

Let’s dive into the possible interpretations of the bizarre fireside tale about Dieter Eagan, and Kier’s mysterious fourth Appendix.

The episode plays into the show’s ongoing duality motif by placing the doubles of each MDR team member as guides, who look like wonky doppelgängers pointing their fingers toward Scissor Cave. Kier’s fourth Appendix claims that Dieter took him for a trip to Woe’s Hollow, as he fancied living in the forest together as paupers and never returning home. Kier (quite abruptly) describes his brother’s act of masturbation during this outing in obtuse verses, noting how he “became an instrument of nature” and “spilled his lineage upon the soil.” Milchick reads the rest of the story near a bonfire, relaying how Kier’s brother melted grotesquely in front of him after this act, seemingly punished for his “wantonness” for becoming “chaos’ whore.” An entity that Kier describes as a gaunt bride seemingly appears after Dieter’s death and confirms this hypothesis. Kier dubs this entity Woe, one of the four Tempers.

Now, it is natural to be confused by this odd little story, as it is, indeed, bizarre. Helly bursts into laughter, making light of the ridiculous premise, while Irving earnestly asks Milchick whether Dieter truly existed. Although Milchick insists that all of Kier’s words are true, it is unlikely Dieter was punished by some cosmic entity for defiling the forest grounds. This could simply be an allegorical tale referring to the death of Kier’s alter ego (which extends to the concept of the severed self) or a veiled admission of murder that is justified through fantastical elements. Or maybe, this did happen as a part of some messed-up, surreal mind experiment that the Eagans have been honing for decades.

It’s crucial to note that Kier identifies Woe’s Hollow as the physical space where he “encountered” the Temper Woe, which is part of his philosophical framework that helped establish Lumon. Kier believed that humans are made up of four Tempers — Woe, Frolic, Dread, and Malice — and that by taming each, they can master self-control and even take over the world.

But what does this mean in the context of the larger picture at Lumon?

Intense, meticulous theories about the Four Tempers already exist, but the latest episode affirms that there is something darker at play here than what we initially imagined. The Dieter incident at Woe’s Hollow could be a horribly distressing event that induced grief in Kier, manifesting as the gaunt bride he encounters there for the first time. The other Tempers (Frolic, Dread, and Malice) must have manifested somewhere else along the line, as Kier’s lifelong goal was to tame them — and he did, as illustrated in the “Kier Taming the Four Tempers” painting. Moreover, his core guidelines urge every Lumon employee to also do the same, as he wishes to pass this “great and consecrated power” to them.

I’m inclined to believe that Temper entities do not actually manifest, but are psychological constructs used to help Lumon employees tame these four emotions until they’re “ready” for the next stage. This next stage could be brought about by the completion of a severed employee’s individual file, which, in Mark’s case, could be the Cold Harbor file referenced several times. It’s also interesting that the Tempers are directly coded into the four categories of MDR file numbers:

• WO for Woe (green)

• FC for Frolic (yellow)

• DR for Dread (red)

• MA for Malice (blue)

Each numerical set elicits the emotion associated with them, and I believe that MDR has to “balance” the Four Tempers by grouping them correctly and completing their respective files. This ties into Irving’s unsettling nightmare about the Woe entity haunting him while the file numbers swirled ominously on the Lumon computer screens. I also think that Irving’s grief (woe) over losing innie Burt (Christopher Walken) plays heavily into the events that lead to the seemingly permanent termination of his severed self. After all, his woe-addled mind makes him hyperaware of everyone’s behavior, including Helena Eagan, who was pretending to be Helly all along.

Now that Irving is gone and Helena has been outed as a mole, MDR will never be the same. Things have never been bleaker, but when has “Severance” ever been about the joys of existence?