As someone who watches television for a living, I approached Severance season 2 with low expectations. What were the odds that such an inventive puzz
As someone who watches television for a living, I approached Severance season 2 with low expectations. What were the odds that such an inventive puzzlebox of a series could keep all of its (odd) balls in the air? But praise Kier! After a nearly three-year wait, our existential office drones have returned to Lumon Industries—and to AppleTV+, as of this Friday—with a modern sense of purpose, and all of the show’s strangeness and serendipity intact.
“Welcome back, Mark S, it’s been a minute,” Lumon’s Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) greets Mark S (Adam Scott) in the Severance season 2 premiere, presenting him with a bouquet of balloons imprinted with Mark’s face. As a severed employee, “Innie” Mark has not experienced the passage of time at all—his consciousness only awakens when the office elevator doors open at his work floor. But for viewers, it may feel like a lifetime since last season’s cliffhanger, when Mark and his fellow “innies” snuck into the world of their “Outies” and made some discomforting discoveries. Don’t feel bad if you can’t recall all the plot nuances; I highly recommend watching the final few episodes of season one to get yourself Lumon-ready.
After the uprising of Mark and his fellow Macrodata Refinement office-mates Helly (Brit Lower), Dylan (Zach Cherry) and Irv (John Turturro), the four have become “the face of severance reform” in the outside world, according to Milchick. “I locked you in a room like an animal,” he says, performing a pantomime of corporate contrition. In this modern era, he promises them perks like better vending machine treats and hall passes so they can wander more freely. Freedom is a relative term for the Macrodata Four, of course; their whole world is confined within the fluorescent-blasted office walls. But somehow they’ve managed to forge relationships that continue to unfurl in complicated ways this season.
How could they not be complicated? When the four Innies briefly transported themselves into the world of their Outies, Mark discovered that Lumon’s “wellness counselor” Miss Casey (Dichen Lachman) is in fact his Outie’s (supposedly dead) wife, Gemma; and Helly realized that in the Outie world, she is Helena Eagan, daughter of Lumon’s CEO. All of this is bound to mess with their heads, since they each have to decide how much of this modern information they want to share with their fellow Innies. They’re also forced to contemplate how much they are defined by their alter egos’ choices, and whether they bear any responsibility for them. “Speaking for myself, I don’t think we owe them shit,” Helly declares at one point. She deeply resents her Outie, whom she believes treats her like a slave or a plaything. “She controls me and all of us and this company —it’s disgusting.”
These are the kind of threads that Severance keeps pulling all season, like whether you can be a good person on one side of the looking glass and a shitty person on the other—and how the two versions of each person have turned out so differently. “It’s not our world up there. That’s what I saw,” says Irv, brimming with grief after spotting his Innie beloved Burt (Christopher Walken) in his Outie house with another man. Then there’s the question of what would happen to the Innie rebels if they really uncovered and exposed the company’s misdeeds, since their consciousnesses only exist inside Lumon. Yet it’s Mark’s search for his wife that propels much of the season, providing a kind of spine from which all the other mysteries radiate.
Very few series operate on this many levels. Severance fuses together existential thriller, dystopian science fiction, corporate critique, romantic drama, buddy comedy and visual poem, with dollops of body horror mixed in for good measure. I’ve been rewatching the original Twin Peaks alongside Severance, and though the imaginative team of Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller play in a totally different aesthetic sandbox than David Lynch, they also plumb some of the same psychological quandaries and share a fondness for injecting the moody and bizarre into everyday life. (Instead of owls, think goats.) The list of plot details reviewers have been forbidden to reveal is almost as long as the teachings of Lumon’s founders, but I can tell you that the show dives down disorienting rabbit holes this season. There’s an outing to the world’s creepiest corporate retreat and a number of modern characters, including wonderful ones played by Merritt Wever and Gwendolyn Christie.
It’s the core four that get under our skin, though. Each grows more defined over the course of the season, with the narrative flipping between their Innie and Outie lives. Lower’s performance is especially nuanced as the two Hellys, and Cherry is a pleasure to watch as Dylan. Once mostly a font of smartass commentary, Dylan is now caught between his two worlds, and he increasingly brings a poignant sweetness to his quandary. Another standout this season is Tillman as gleefully smarmy middle-manager Milchick. He seems aware that he may have to stomp out his own humanity in order to successfully do his bosses’ bidding—whatever that might be.
Not every plot path works, and it feels like every time one mystery is solved (or solved-ish), the writers drop another in its place. But the Severance team has come back to work with an engrossing, thoughtful season about exploitative billionaires, corporate trickery and the desire to escape real world misery. I can’t think of a more appropriate way to start off 2025.
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