Let’s Call That Severance “Love Triangle” What It Was

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Spoilers for this week’s episode of Severance lie ahead.

Innie sexual liberation is here! Severance has never been a particularly sexy show — the offices of Lumon Industries aren’t so conducive to seduction, what with the ubiquitous fluorescent lights and surveillance. But as of this week’s “Attila,” the severed floor has been christened. For Helly R. (Britt Lower), an innie with no memories of her own outside of work, this basically means she isn’t a virgin anymore. Ditto Mark S. (Adam Scott), except he experienced this milestone himself just the other day during a team-building retreat.

Of course, Mark’s experience in that tent with Helena Eagan became deeply complicated at the end of “Woe’s Hollow” when he retroactively learned the woman he’d slept with wasn’t actually the same woman he’d developed feelings for in season one. The “vessel” might have been the same, sure, but it belonged to a different woman entirely, another consciousness experiencing the intense physical and emotional intimacy Mark thought he was sharing with someone else. It’s not just that Helly and Helena’s personalities differ; innies are distinct identities, same as all the other severed employees, no matter how many similarities they may share with their outies.

This type of scenario, while obviously nonexistent in real life, fits the criteria of rape by deception. “Tricking a victim into a sexual act” may sound a bit vague, and indeed, the term is inconsistently applied in rape law. But it’s a helpful umbrella phrase for forms of assault that people don’t always consider, including “stealthing,” or removing a condom during sex without consent. And in rarer cases, it can mean lying about one’s identity — not just pretending to be rich to impress a date but actually convincing a person they’re having sex with someone they aren’t. The classic example would be a man impersonating an identical twin to sleep with his wife or, as in the infamous Revenge of the Nerds scene, stealing a jock’s mask during a costume party and sleeping with his girlfriend.

The trope has many, many examples in fiction — stretching back to Arthurian legend with Merlin disguising Uther Pendragon as Gorlois in order to rape Igraine and sire the once and future king — particularly in science fiction and fantasy, genres in which identities can be made malleable through technology or magic. Humans are fascinated with doppelgängers, thus doubles crop up all over the place in genre fiction, often in a horror context. The idea of being replaced by an identical version of oneself, and then being forced to watch the deception succeed without the ability to warn friends and family, is a kind of nightmare logic playing on core fears of losing control and bodily autonomy.

The first case of doppelgänger sexual assault I remember noticing was in season three of Fringe, in which an alternate-universe version of Olivia, nicknamed “Fauxlivia,” seamlessly slips into the protagonist’s life just after she officially begins a relationship with Peter. But instances crop up everywhere once you start thinking about it. Faith has sex with Buffy’s boyfriend Riley during a body swap. Barry Allen spends almost half of one season of The Flash unknowingly married to a version of Iris from the Mirrorverse, and it’s implied that their sex life does not go on hold. In the most recent season of The Boys, a shape-shifter imprisons Annie in order to take her place — and not only proposes marriage to her boyfriend, Hughie, but apparently has wild sex with him more than a dozen times. Similar assaults play out in Once Upon a Time, Pretty Little Liars, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., to name just a few.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with depicting this form of sexual assault, especially because rape by deception isn’t usually as viscerally disturbing to watch in the moment as something like the rape scenes in 13 Reasons Why. (“Woe’s Hollow” didn’t require a trigger warning at the beginning of the episode, for one.) But none of these shows takes the time to really explore the psychological fallout from the perspective of the assault victim or even uses the words rape or assault. It’s also not a coincidence that almost every recent example I can think of features a female doppelgänger and a male victim; perhaps screenwriters think the deception would appear more obviously nefarious if the genders were swapped, as is the case in Revenge of the Nerds. Sex crimes against men are still taken less seriously than crimes against women, and media continue to reflect that.

In most doppelgänger assault scenarios, the impersonated female characters are centered as victims in the aftermath, with the drama mainly deriving from their anger at the supposed betrayal of their partners’ not recognizing the doppelgänger deception. The man, therefore, is left to assuage his partner’s feelings about what happened, assuring her that she’s the one he intended to sleep with instead of this trickster seductress. Rather than being able to engage what happened to him as trauma, the male victim is put in a position of apologizing for something he never chose to experience.

The shape-shifter story line in The Boys offers a particularly egregious example of this when Annie immediately attacks Hughie after she learns what happened. Even after he reminds her that he thought the woman was she, Annie fires back, “Yeah, and as long as you were getting laid, you didn’t look too close. That’s the Annie you want: down to go down whenever. The perfect girl — not someone who is depressed or fucked-up or comes with any complications.” The story line is primarily a way to explore Annie’s insecurities, with Hughie made to feel guilty and regretful about his dalliance with the doppelgänger instead of ever getting to process his own reaction to the revelation. But it’s no real surprise that showrunner Eric Kripke wouldn’t acknowledge Hughie’s trauma; just a week before the doppelgänger showed up, he called Hughie’s sex-dungeon assault at the hands of Tek Knight “hilarious.”

Let’s pause here to acknowledge that plenty of the examples I’ve named so far take place in well-executed, narratively satisfying stories; season three is probably Fringe’s best, and the Fauxlivia deception is a huge part of that, including Peter’s confused feelings for both women in the episodes after the truth comes out. I even gave four stars to that Boys finale in my recap despite my issues with the doppelgänger fallout. And Severance is far from the worst in this regard: “Attila” is still a very good episode all around, including the Mark-and-Helly subplot.

But the show still suffers from that same sense of misplaced priorities, lingering on Helly’s response to being impersonated without letting Mark work through his pain in the same way. (In last week’s “Trojan’s Horse,” he initially didn’t know whether to trust the real Helly but basically moved on within the day.) It’s not that her perspective isn’t worth showing; it’s actually pretty satisfying to see her move past her jealousy and ultimately take agency over her body, reclaiming her sexuality and sleeping with Mark for real. She’s right to feel deeply creeped out by Helena’s “dressing her in the morning like she’s a baby.” But she isn’t the only victim here, even if she’s right to be upset that her body was used against her will. On some level, that happens with all innie-outie pairings: Outie-Dylan (Zach Cherry) sleeps with his wife all the time, and the show doesn’t exactly frame his innie as a victim.

Of course, all the innies are routinely dehumanized, being forced to work endlessly while their outies get to experience and theoretically enjoy the freedom of the outside world. That’s a central idea of the show. In season one, Helena records a video for Helly specifically telling her she isn’t a person, a wording Miss Huang (Sarah Bock) uses with Milchick (Tramell Tillman) in “Trojan’s Horse.” And in the latter episode, Helena refers to the innies as “fucking animals,” presumably only a day after sexually assaulting one of them. Helena hijacking Helly’s body and assaulting Mark S. is akin to a slave master preying on slaves; even without the deception, there’s already built-in exploitation.

The scenario raises all sorts of rich questions about innie-outie power dynamics and could present a fascinating wrinkle as Mark completes his reintegration and unearths more repressed memories. But science fiction and fantasy are still often allergic to acknowledging sexual assault, treating the potentially thorny ramifications as a distraction from more important plot-related concerns. It’s a shame because, even setting aside the importance of spotlighting male sexual-assault victims in a media landscape that rarely does, there’s real potential to comment on the nature of innie trauma and abuse by getting into how Mark feels about all of this.

“Was it different with me?” Helly asks Mark in the hallway after they’ve done the deed. It’s a fair question: Back in “Woe’s Hollow,” Mark thinks he is sleeping with the real Helly, just like he thinks he’s flirting with her in the first few episodes of the season. It stands to reason that sex with Helena might have felt just as good as sex with Helly in the moment and that the tent memory became twisted and corrupted only after the fact, when he learned the truth. But that’s just speculation; we don’t really know because Mark just smiles and kisses Helly against the wall instead of responding. I suppose Severance has always been better at asking questions than answering them.