Beef and Broccoli

S2 E6: Attila

Severance, 2022.

There is a Chinese restaurant called Zufu, where a man with a hole in his head shovels beef and broccoli into his mouth with the urgency of someone trying to anchor himself to the laws of digestion.

Mark S., who has known grief and paperwork, grief through paperwork, and paperwork about grief, sits across from Helena Eagan, a woman who once hung herself in a stairwell to prove a point and is now—charmingly, disturbingly—on a first-name basis with his pain. She smiles at him like a predator with a press team.

He orders beef and broccoli. We presume. The camera does not linger on the plate, but we know what beef and broccoli looks like: glossy, brown, strangely floral, nestled in Styrofoam or sorrow. It’s the dish you get when you don’t want to be brave, just full. That Mark eats it in the presence of Helena—while barely responding, with a nosebleed forming like a tiny crimson ellipsis—is, frankly, a marvel of restraint.

Helena sits like she’s there to pitch something, which she is: closure, absolution, and a little off-menu psychological torture. Her affect is brittle-polished, all brittle no polish. When she brings up his dead wife and calls her “Hanna,” it’s not a mistake. It’s a pressure point. The real name is Gemma. “Hanna” is what happens when your father invents a corporate religion and forgets to teach you how to grieve.

Helena doesn’t seem to eat. She dines on implication. Her presence is more haunting than the haunted, more uncanny than valley. She’s come not to break bread but to insert her manicured finger into the open seam between Mark’s inner and outer selves and swirl. That she looks like Helly—the woman Mark just awkwardly, sweetly, hungrily shared a plastic-draped consummation tent with—is a cruel trick of casting, or God, or Kier.

Meanwhile, Mark’s brain—filled with chip fluid and fog—can no longer tell whether it’s at home, at work, in the woods, or in the foggy slipstream between dimensions. The beef and broccoli is possibly the only thing keeping his soul from unraveling into data points and Gregorian chants. It is a ballast. A sauce-covered tether to the known.

Helena smiles. He coughs. Reality trembles.

This episode is called Attila, and there’s a debate in Burt’s household over whether the nickname originated ten or twenty years ago. But the name might as well belong to Helena. She, too, is charming, manipulative, and fueled by empire. Her warhorse is severance. Her battlefield is beef and broccoli. She rides roughshod over Mark’s tentative steps toward emotional coherence.

Mark runs. Not out of rage, but out of necessity. He’s had his fill of simulacra. The food was real. The conversation wasn’t.

And in the background: the blood, the flickering, the grief, the chip, the dinner that never quite satisfies. The sense that maybe you, too, are being served the wrong life, and someone is watching to see if you’ll finish it anyway.

Make it! Beef and Broccoli from Serious Eats.