Severance Creator Opens Up About ‘Troubling' Consent Issues Raised in Episode 4, ‘Really Devastating' Aftermath of Retreat

Yahoo

07-02-2025

The following contains copious, luxury spoilers from Season 2, Episode 4 of , now streaming on Apple TV+.
This week's episode of Apple TV+'s Severance not only featured the dramatic unmasking of a mole, followed by the termination of an MDR vet. (Read recap/John Turturro interview.) It also raised some really knotty issues of sexual consent, given that Mark S. (played by Adam Scott) had sex with who he thought to be Helly R., but was actually his co-worker's outie, Helena Eagan (Britt Lower).
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Even for a show as sci-fi as Severance, the issue of bodily autonomy will resonate.
'It is something that we wanted to get into, and we talked about it quite extensively when we wrote that into Episode 4,' Severance creator Dan Erickson tells TVLine in the video above.
'It's a strange thing, because in a way both characters have been used,' Erickson points out. 'Mark thought he was with one person when he was actually sort of with a different person. And then for Helly, it's a very troubling thing to know that something like that happened without you mentally being there.'
Without spoiling much of anything, TVLine can say that an upcoming episode will deal with at least one of the characters' feelings about the quasi-consensual assignation.
'On the show, we talk a lot about autonomy,' Erickson says, 'and in the realty of this world, if people's bodies can sort of be off doing things without their minds being there, present, what are all of the implications of that? It wasn't something that we wanted to shy away from.'
Above and beyond the issues raised above, Severance's instantly iconic 'Woe's Hollow' episode casts all kinds of doubt on the MDR quartet's future. For one, everyone will feel deeply betrayed by Helena, yet sympathetic to Helly R.'s unwitting abetting. Two, Irving B. was 'terminated' for his threat of 'collegial murder,' when he drowned 'Helly' in the titular pond until she or Milchick confessed to the deception.
'It definitely is going to change the dynamic,' Erickson affirms. 'For the innie characters, they felt like they were sort of starting to move back towards a more peaceful status quo. Mark was pursuing this relationship, as was Dylan on his side [with outie wife Gretchen]… and all of a sudden now everything that we thought was true from the last four episodes was sort of based on a lie. So, it's really pretty devastating to all the characters.'Best of TVLine
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