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Spoilers follow for Severance season two episode four, “Woe’s Hollow.”
The familiar ding of the elevator to Lumon’s severed floor rings out as John Turturro’s Irving B. opens his eye in the middle of a snowy, iced-over lake surrounded by foreboding mountains. The wind howls around his fur-clad head and body.
That’s how Severance season two’s fourth episode opens, a visual that stemmed from an idea Dan Erickson, the Apple TV+ series’ creator, had while writing season one. “I always wanted this image of one of the Innies waking up in a vast, frozen area and not knowing how the hell they got there,” he says.
This episode, titled “Woe’s Hollow,” enabled Erickson to take that image and run wild and weird with it. The surreal odyssey places Mark, Helly, Irving and Dylan on an ORTBO — that’s Outdoor Retreat and Team Building Occurrence, obviously — designed to strengthen their loyalty to Lumon. Making the episode was like its own retreat for the series’ cast and crew, too, who trekked to the Catskills for the duration of the 23-day shoot, the longest Severance has spent in production on a single episode. (It takes 18 days on average to shoot an installment of the series, says Stiller.)
Production took place in March 2023, which coincided with a major Northeast snowstorm that dumped tons of wintry precipitation on upstate New York. It was a boon for production, which wanted natural snow in many scenes, but also a challenge that made it even harder to access remote locations. In some cases, getting to set required the use of a snowcat, something the MDR Innies surely would’ve loved to borrow for their trek to Woe’s Hollow, the “sacred ground” within Dieter Egan National Forest named for Kier’s twin brother.
“It was a whole ordeal,” Stiller says of the logistics involved in pulling off the 51-minute chapter in the Severance story. The end result is an episode that looks chilly and is frequently chilling.
Trial by Television
Shortly after Irving awakens, he connects with his three co-workers, who all separately found themselves in the freezing wilderness in the middle of nowhere. It is unclear precisely how they got there, though it seems likely that rather than stepping out of the elevator into the office like usual, Lumon’s technology somehow transported them to this massive forest.
“One of the fun things in this show is that you’re often in the subjective reality of the Innies,” Erickson says. “It occurred to me that they could wake up somewhere and have no idea how they came to be there, and that if we put the audience in that same confused space, we can solve that mystery along with them.”
As they question their surroundings, the foursome notice a television set and DVD player set up on the edge of a cliff. It plays an orientation video in which Mr. Milchick tells them they must venture to Scissors Cave to retrieve the Fourth Appendix, an important text that explains the relationship between Kier Egan, the mythologized founder of Lumon Industries, and his twin, Dieter, who the employees didn’t even know existed. Immediately things seem off, not only because of Milchick’s odd instructions, but also because the TV and DVD player setup seems to have been wheeled out of a high-school science classroom and onto this cliff without any of the necessary electrical equipment.
Hindle’s team actually built a fake plug into the rock adjacent to the TV, but the scene “was just better without it.” Adds Stiller, “sometimes you want to pay attention to the logic. Then other times you assume viewers can figure it out for themselves, because you just want to live in the imagery.”
A Double Bind
As Mark, Helly, Dylan, and Irving hike to Scissors Cave and eventually Woe’s Hollow itself, they are guided by their respective doppelgängers, lookalikes who appear one by one, standing at a great distance and pointing in the direction the group should travel next.
Stiller explains that production dressed up actors to resemble Scott, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, and Turturro and outfitted them with masks. “We played around a lot in terms of how we wanted to see them and even just how much you would see of them,” Stiller says. A scene later in the episode in which Irving runs into his doppelgänger in the woods ultimately got cut.
“The story line in that episode is much more about Irving figuring out what’s going on with Helly,” he says. “This was more about him confronting his own shadow. It was really good, but it was off-topic for what the episode was about.”
Seal Team Four
“There’s a sense permeating this whole episode that Lumon is trying to instill a fear of nature, and of unbridled human nature, in the Innies,” says Erickson. “The fact that they take them to this terrifying place and there’s death surrounding them, that’s all intentionally created by Lumon to paint a specific picture of the outside world and human nature.”
Erickson and his writers initially weren’t sure what kind of corpse the group would stumble upon in the woods. They debated creating a “hybrid creature” that would be virtually unrecognizable to both the Innies and the audience but ultimately settled on a seal because its presence in this climate seemed so unlikely. “As an Innie, do you know a seal doesn’t live in the snow? It was an opportunity to, once again, get into that question of what information does and doesn’t permeate the severance barrier,” he says.
The animal itself was created by Penko Platikonav, a sculptor who works on the series. Studying photographs of dead seals, he sculpted several versions out of foam and other artificial materials — “probably a lot of fake furs and lacquer and latex,” Hindle says — before presenting the options to Hindle, Stiller, and props master Cat Miller. “We’d say, ‘Oh, maybe there’s bones here.’ It’s almost like we reverse engineered to decay it.”
The Tale of Woe
The ORTBO lodging — a campsite that boasts a small tent for each member of the MDR crew, complimentary access to torches, and four-ply toilet paper in the outdoor loo — was located in a mountainous area that could only be reached using snow vehicles.
“That episode was probably my favorite to film, just because we got to actually journey up there and it was really snowing and cold,” says Sarah Bock, who plays Miss Huang. “I couldn’t go back to base camp and do school on set like I normally did in between takes, so I got to hang out and hear people tell stories around the campfire. John Turturro was telling stories about when he was a young actor.”
Hindle, whose department was responsible for, among other things, loading all the set pieces and props into this secluded area “in the middle of nowhere,” has a different take: “That was really hard.”
The production designer spent a lot of time thinking about the structures that would become the MDR employees’ temporary homes. “I wanted tents that were collapsible, but I wanted the inside to feel a little bit like a cage,” he says. The fabric and framing of the tents were handmade by the production team, which also built what Hindle describes as “an amazing, weird, pod-tent thing that was a toilet” for a scene that got cut from the script. “It was pretty fancy, but we didn’t end up shooting it,” he says.
They did shoot and include a portion of Miss Huang’s theremin recital, performed as a part of the campfire entertainment. “I did learn how to play,” Bock says. “I play piano and guitar, so I figured I could maybe pick it up quickly, but it was definitely more complicated than I was expecting.”
Why a theremin? The simplest, most literal answer: Erickson likes the instrument. “Honestly, I just like how it sounds, and I was like, If I can get a free theremin concert out of this thing, then so much the better,” he says.
Ultimately, the most important moments in this sequence emerge as Milchik reads the portions of the Fourth Appendix chapter about Kier and Dieter Egan, which reveals that Dieter’s decision to masturbate in the wild causes him to become part of the forest forever. While Helly bursts out laughing at the absurdity, the other MDR loyalists initially regard this narrative, read by Mr. Milchick as if it’s the actual Bible, with reverence.
“The fact that Dieter is reclaimed back into the forest for the sin of being lustful — there’s a moral there from Lumon’s perspective,” says Erickson. “Ultimately their goal is for the Innies to seek out the comfort of Lumon again.”
The Fourth Appendix — as in the actual, tangible prop — existed in multiple forms and sizes to accommodate different camera angles.“ The shooting book is about two and a half feet big. It’s huge,” Hindle says, “Then you can get nice, close-up shots of the pages, watercolors and drawings and all the handwork and lettering. It’s unbelievable the amount of work that goes into all the different versions for the one book you see onscreen.”
Dream Girl
When Irving accuses Helly of lying about her time in the outside world, she lashes out, responding that Irving is just lonely because he won’t ever see Burt again. Hurt, he wanders off into the woods at night, eventually falls asleep, and dreams that his desk at Lumon is in the middle of Woe’s Hollow. Burt is there, as is Woe, the “gaunt bride, half the height of a natural woman” who appears before Kier in the Fourth Appendix to blame him for Dieter’s dissolution into the soil. Her presence provides the episode’s jump scare, adding to the menace of Irving’s dream.
To shoot this scene, the Severance team did actually put a desk in the woods — specifically at Sam’s Point, over a dwarf-black-pine forest recently burned in a controlled fire. It matched the spooky, abandoned look Hindle was hoping to achieve. Once again, the crew had to take snowmobiles and trucks with tracks to get to the location. “We built a quarter-mile of scaffolding elevated over all of the dead, small trees so no one walked on the ground,” Hindle says. “That’s how the desk got in. That’s how all the gear got in.”
The whole sequence was shot in the forest with John Turturro on a day that just happened to be extremely foggy. “All that fog, that’s all real,” says Stiller. “It really worked out for us in terms of the eeriness of it.”
The coverage of Christopher Walken as Burt and Faith Vaughn as Woe (her appearance was tweaked later by visual effects) was filmed later on a small, interior stage in the Catskills. “She was in full hair, makeup, that wedding dress, but we alter her quite a lot in post too,” says Hindle. His team also built the desk and keyboard oversize so that the woman playing Woe would seem much tinier.
Severance fans will undoubtedly wonder about the imagery that appears on Irving’s computer screen. It starts out looking like the list of numbers the refiners usually sort, then scrambles and, at one point, appears to take the shape of an eyeball. All of that was created by the VFX team in post-production. Stiller won’t explain the meaning of any of it other than to say there are things on that screen that are worth examining. He knows plenty of viewers will be doing just that.
Mission Terminated
Convinced that Helly is actually her Outie, Irving attempts to drown her to blackmail Milchick into summoning the real Helly. Irving knows this could lead to his termination from the severed floor — and his own death.
“At Burt’s retirement party, Irving specifically said, ‘You’re going to let him die,’ not, ‘You’re going to let him retire,’” says Erickson, pointing to a crucial season-one scene. “Part of his development is that he has come to see himself as a person with a life and that if he’s being fired, that is not a retirement, that’s death. I think he accepts it as the end in that moment.”
Mr. Milchick’s comments to Irving in those last moments — “It will be as if you, Irving B., never even existed nor drew a single breath upon this earth” — support this idea. As does the final image in the episode, in which Irving appears to be pulled toward the waterfall and cliffs of Woe’s Hollow, becoming one with the earth like Dieter Egan before him.
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