Severance’s Ominous Opening Song Could Be A Huge Hint For The Show’s Next Twist
A pink slip won’t stop Irv’s mission.
Last week, Severance changed everything by revealing Helly has been Helena Eagan, her Lumon executive outie, since the beginning of Season 2. It confirmed what fans have been suspecting all along, but came at a dire cost: the immediate termination of Irving’s Lumon employment, meaning his innie would never be active again, essentially murdering the only part of him his coworkers know.
In Episode 5, we see how this loss rocks the MDR floor, necessitating a funeral and a new MDR desk setup. But on the outside, Irving is still alive. We only got a glimpse of him in Episode 5, but that little scene may have confirmed something huge about Irving’s mission.
Spoilers ahead for Severance Season 2 Episode 5, “Trojan’s Horse”!
In “Trojan’s Horse,” we see Irving’s outie calling someone on a payphone. “It's me again,” he says. “So, they fired me. I think they knew what my innie was up to.” Who is he talking to? We’re led to believe it’s Burt, but Irving’s call is interrupted by Burt, so clearly, someone else was on the other end of that call.
Irving’s outie calls someone and warns Lumon is onto his innie’s plans.
But the more pressing question is how outie Irving knows what his innie was up to in the first place. This line may confirm the theory that Irving was using his sketchbook to communicate with his outie. He clearly knows something about Lumon, as he keeps painting the Testing Floor elevator, and this episode revealed him using his sketches to communicate with someone else: Dylan, who found instructions to the highway behind the “Hang In There” poster after Irving gave him a clue in Episode 4.
Unfortunately, another theory suggests Irving’s outie won’t be able to leave Lumon behind. When the other innies ask where Irving went, Mr. Milchick says he is on an “elongated cruise voyage,” so all the other innies think he’s somewhere on a boat.
That’s a perfectly innocuous cover story, but the first seconds of Episode 5 cast it in an entirely different light. In the opening scene, we see a Lumon employee walking through the severed floor and picking up what looked like dentistry tools from O&D. We never see this mystery man, but we do hear what he’s whistling: Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
The mystery man in the opening scene whistles an ominous warning.
The song is the tragic tale of a ship that sank in Lake Superior incredibly quickly in 1975, claiming the lives of all 29 people on board. Could this be a clue about Irving’s future fate involving a nautical misadventure?
Co-creator Ben Stiller was asked by The New York Times about this song choice. Stiller claimed he was just a big Gordon Lightfoot fan, but when asked specifically about what it could mean for the show’s central mystery, he cryptically said “I’m not going to say anything.”
Could this song hint that Lumon is onto whatever communication Irving has established between his two selves? Perhaps Lumon will resort to some drastic measures to keep him from speaking out about what is really going on on the severed floor? We’re now at the halfway point of the season, so now would be the perfect time to start teasing an epic season finale.
