Ricken Got Lumon-ed

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Spoilers follow for Severance season-two episode “Trojan’s Horse,” which debuted on Apple TV+ on February 14.

If you told a season-one Severance viewer that midway through the second season, Lumon true believer Harmony Cobel had abandoned the company created by her beloved Kier Eagan, and sarcastic naysayer Ricken Hale had willingly joined Lumon’s expanding web of collaborators, they probably wouldn’t have believed you. (Also probably unfeasible at the time: that Severance wouldn’t return for another three years.) But the series has been especially quick-footed so far this season in rearranging alliances and revealing hidden motivations, especially in how those maneuvers relate to Lumon’s desire to control all aspects of its external and internal image. We saw some of that with the season premiere, in which Lumon spun the MDR team’s use of the overtime contingency into faux headlines and the myth-making “Lumon Is Listening” video. And it’s underlined again in this week’s “Trojan’s Horse,” when self-help author, husband, father, neti-pot user, and turtleneck devotee Ricken adds another entry to his list of identities: complicit cog in Lumon’s brainwashing machine.

We may not know exactly what Lumon manufactures or crafts, engineers or designs, imports or exports. But we do know Lumon is all about hierarchy, one that was reaffirmed internally via “Lumon Is Listening” and now externally as “Trojan’s Horse” expands past the walls of Branch 501 and into the Outie world. Lumon recruiting Ricken into its propagandistic mission and commissioning him to write an Innie-specific version of The You You Are is a sinister, unsettling business. It’s also a revealing one: What Lumon produces is less important than how it persuades.

Lumon’s sense of mystery has been integral to Severance from the beginning, a way for the show to lean into stylish aesthetics and bizarre divergences like rooms full of goats and waffle parties with dancing Tempers, while remaining vague and opaque about what “industries” the company is actually involved in. (Remember from season one: “What don’t they make?”) Every so often, we learn a new Lumon fact, like that it operates in 206 countries (nine more than our world’s combination of 195 recognized countries, plus Palestine and Vatican City), seemingly has far more severed employees than we’ve met (think about all those names in Outie Irv’s research), and has a hidden “exports hall.”

Countering those puzzle-box tidbits, though, is a fair amount of Outie skepticism toward Lumon — a reminder of how severed employees face not just subjugation at work, but ostracization once they leave — and Ricken has been one of the series’ most reliable naysayers toward the company his brother-in-law Mark works for. In season one, he calls Mark a “captive” and chastises him for keeping his Innie version “trapped” at Lumon; early in season two, he adds a little derisive emphasis when he refers to Mark’s Innie as his “workie.” That dislike for Lumon is part of what made the Innies’ unlikely embrace of Ricken’s self-help book, The You You Are, so unexpected and so amusing. Outie Mark can’t bear to open a book full of Ricken’s blowhard diatribes toward corporations like Lumon and complaints about not feeling valued in his time, but Innie Mark and the rest of the MDR team swarmed to resistance-y statements like “Your job needs you, not the other way around” and “They cannot crucify you if your hand is in a fist” like they had stumbled upon an oasis in a desert of endless white hallways.

Maybe some of Ricken’s revolutionary talk was Tyler Durden–esque posturing from a man who seemingly lives in pleasant, wood-paneled comfort. But there was an ideological consistency to The You You Are that unintentionally, but effectively, connected with the Innies’ own struggles to define themselves in relation to both their Outies and their Lumon employers. When Irv decides they should “burn this place to the ground” and Innie Mark tells Ricken that his book “opened up the world for me,” both of them are influenced by The You You Are’s observation that “what separates man from machine is that machines cannot think for themselves.” (And maybe also by the rudimentary next line: “Also, they are made of metal, whereas man is made of skin.” A typical Ricken paragraph is one brilliant observation followed by a puerile one.) Finally, Ricken’s words have had their intended effect and connected with an audience that’s trying to “better” itself — and his yearning for more recognition is exactly what Lumon knows to play off of.

When Natalie arrives unannounced in Ricken and Devon’s home in the third episode, “Who Is Alive?,” flatters him with praise for his “profound” book, and persuades him to write a version of The You You Are with “certain verbiage to which Innies respond more favorably,” she’s giving him the acclaim he’s always wanted. Ricken — once such a hater! — should know better than to trust this company that does all the things he warns against. But bestowing specialness from within its shadowy depths is a tried-and-true Lumon technique to get people on its side, and it works on Ricken just as well as it has worked on everyone else.

Of course, “Trojan’s Horse” confirms his new writing is awful, bootlicking nonsense, and Devon can’t keep the contempt out of her voice when she reads lines like “The workers were diligent, focused on the task at hand” and “Your sovereign boss may own the clock that greets you from the wall, but you get to enjoy its ticking, and thus should be happy.” (Contrast that with the wonder in Innie Mark’s voice when he read the original book and realized how it tapped into his feelings of isolation and anger.) And, of course, the new passage centers Ricken as someone observing the severed workers, as if he’s somehow part of Lumon and in on their secrets. In reality, he would never be allowed on the severed floor, and never given face time with actual employees to hear their thoughts on being “just hands and numbers and cogs and purpose.” For a sizable paycheck, Ricken has done exactly what he once accused Mark of doing: using the severed procedure for his own benefit, no matter how much that bifurcation process hurts the created Innies. Just as Lumon refashioned the Innies’ use of the overtime contingency into self-serving mythology through “Lumon Is Listening,” so too did it reforge The You You Are into a text that speaks, as Devon notes, “Lumon’s language.”

The title “Trojan’s Horse” comes from how Ricken describes the new The You You Are to Devon; he’s hoping that his words “might beget a revolution.” But the trickery of Oydsseus’s Trojan Horse didn’t spark an uprising; it was a tool of war and an instrument of slaughter, and in that same fashion, The You You Are is no longer an inspiration for mutiny. It’s become a defanged piece of corporate jargon just as sanitized and soulless as the Compliance Handbook that was the only text severed employees were supposed to know existed. “Should you find yourself contorting to fit a system, dear reader, stop and ask if it’s truly you that must change or the system,” Ricken once wrote. “Trojan’s Horse” bends him, and his words, into shape for Lumon, whose intentions have never been hidden.