Has Irving Already Been Reintegrated?

This article contains spoilers for “Severance” Season 2, Episode 4, “Woe’s Hollow.”

“Severance” is rapidly becoming the best show in the game, at least when it comes to creating wild yet oddly plausible fan theories about the true nature of Lumon Industries and its severed employees’ predicament. After the previous episode’s excursion to the wonderfully-named Mammalians Nurturable goat department, Season 2, Episode 4, “Woe’s Hollow,” adds plenty more gasoline in the theory fire.

As the innie versions of Mark (Adam Scott), Helly (Britt Lower), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and Irving (John Turturro) find themselves in a strange wintery excursion at a nature reserve that’s dripping with ominous Eagan lore, Irving becomes increasingly hostile toward the others and eventually targets Helly. His violent and seemingly genuine threats to drown her ultimately lead to the reveal that Helly’s outie, Helena Eagan, has been posing as her innie self for unknown reasons. This is plenty weird in itself. However, Irving’s suspicious and exponentially angry behavior throughout the episode could be a sign of something even more groundbreaking, especially when you combine it with his creepy vision about the Woe lady. After all, he barely seems like the character he was when the show started.

A theory about this, if you’ll allow: Irving B. doesn’t seem like himself because he isn’t, and hasn’t been for quite some time. In fact, there’s reason to suspect that Irving hasn’t actually been a full innie since the early episodes of Season 1, if even then. Instead, unbeknownst to the viewer, he’s gone through Asal Reghabi’s (Karen Aldridge) reintegration process. He may have even been reintegrated before the beginning of the show, possibly around the same time as Petey (Yul Vasquez). Does this seem unlikely to you? Let’s take a look at the available evidence.

The reintegration process comes with some established side effects as the innie and outie selves converge. In Petey’s case, these were deadly. Mark’s supposedly safer reintegration also features unnerving flash-sideways into his other self’s mind, which confirms that the pair’s realities bleed into each other with some delay.

As it happens, this is similar to what Irving has been experiencing since Season 1, Episode 2, “Half Loop.” Here, we first see his black goop hallucinations, which seem to be related to his outie’s dark paintings depicting the severed floor’s mysterious exports hall. If these are not signs of reintegration side effects at play, I don’t know what they could be — and Irving’s worsening visions and erratic behavior in “Woe’s Hollow” may indicate that the process is advancing.

The show has cleverly attributed much of Irving’s anguish to his pain over losing Burt (Christopher Walken), but what if Irving’s tragic romance with the former Optics and Design division head is masking what’s really going on? After all, there’s plenty of reason to assume that Irving is the kind of guy Reghabi might contact for potential reintegration. Considering his outie’s rogue nature and determination to keep tabs on Lumon’s shenanigans, it makes sense that Regabhi would seek him out — and that he would agree to undergo her procedure. It would also make sense that if Irving was reintegrated well before Mark, the side effects would last longer and be more severe since Reghabi was still developing the procedure. Whether this actually turns out to be the case (and whether the whole Irving-Burt situation plays any role in this) remains to be seen … but the thought is intriguing, isn’t it?

The “Irving’s visions and changing behavior are signs that he’s reintegrating” theory is just one way “Severance” Season 2 may or may not be subverting expectations and messing with its viewers’ (and main characters’) minds. The biggest revelation in “Woe’s Hollow” is that Helly’s outie is actually posing as her innie — which is a huge deal, especially since she also sleeps with Mark, who her innie is attracted to. Combine this with Mark’s own reintegration slowly kicking in, the mysteries surrounding the other departments and the new severed floor supervisor Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), and even the Dylan innie’s increasing, Lumon-mandated contact with his outie’s life, and it seems that “Severance” is kicking into a brand new gear.

While Mark is still on his way to full reintegration and it remains unclear where the other real and theorized mysteries mentioned above will take us, the Helly revelation alone signals that there’s no real way of knowing which version of any character we’re watching at any given moment anymore. This, of course, is awesome. The mysteries of “Severance” might make it TV’s trippiest mind-bender, but it tends to thrive when it focuses on the concept of identity. As its revamped Season 2 opening credits have heavily hinted, the show has now opted to throw the formerly reliable innie-outie divide into the wind, which adds a welcome new layer to a show that loves nothing more than keeping us guessing.

New episodes of “Severance” drop Fridays on Apple TV+.