How's work? How have the last three years been for you? Do you feel more fulfilled, more appreciated, more committed? After all, you've spent so many hours working. If you work 40 hours a week, that's 6,240 hours of labor since 2022. How many hours do you remember, and were they good? Were they what you might call... your life? If you could forget them, would you? Are you expendable? If you resigned, and your employer replaced you within two weeks, how much of a difference would it make? Have you even met your employer? Not the shift manager or your supervisor, but the person who owns the company. Do they know who you are? Are you expendable? What do you do?
Severance premiered on Apple TV+ at the beginning of 2022, just after the post-COVID world had been reckoning with the meaning and worth of labor. More people were working at home and coming to terms with the fact that so much of their previous working lives was superfluous bullsh*t, and they could instead accomplish so much more from the comfort of their own homes. People were realizing they were 'essential' for perhaps the first time in their lives. They figured out that the owning class needed them more than they needed the owners. People were 'quiet quitting,' and workers around the world were questioning the weighted scales of their work-life balance.
Severance depicted people who had a neurological procedure to cut out their work life from their actual conscious experience. They would go to work, clock in, and in their minds, eight hours would pass by in less than a minute. They quite literally left their work lives at the office. As such, Severance seemed like the perfect show for the time, a dystopic bit of sci-fi that we could all actually relate to. Now, though, three years have passed since that first season's guttural cliffhanger left us breathless. While the second season picks up right after that finale, our world feels very different. It's been a while. Everything and nothing has changed, each in different ways. Does Severance still matter?
The Outies Get Their Time to Shine
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4 /5 Severance - Season 2 TV-MA Drama Sci-FiComedyThriller
Mark leads a team of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives; when a mysterious colleague appears outside of work, it begins a journey to discover the truth about their jobs.
Release Date January 17, 2025 Cast Adam Scott , Britt Lower , Zach Cherry , John Turturro , Tramell Tillman , Michael Chernus , Jen Tullock , Christopher Walken , Gwendoline Christie Creator Dan Erickson Streaming Service(s) AppleTV+ Directors Ben Stiller , Sam Donovan , Uta Briesewitz Pros Still an extremely stylish and thoughtful series that wonderfully blends different genres. The performances are better than ever, especially Britt Lower and Tramell Tillman. You stay hooked throughout thanks to an expanded scope, clever twists, and a kooky mystery. Cons The surfeit of mysteries without many answers can be frustrating and alienating.
The long and short of it is... sure, kinda. We may have lost the class war, but labor and the way it defines us (and vice versa) will always be an issue for society. At this point, Severance is less about the practically clandestine plot and more about the characters (and the absurdist, comically unsettling reality they exist in). It continues to be an issue for the quartet of Lumon employees we grew to love in 2022 -- Mark (Adam Scott), Dylan (Zach Cherry), Irving (John Turturro), and Helly (Britt Lower, who owns this season with her incredible work).
We last saw these Lumon 'Innies' (the part of their human experience that's only conscious during work hours) as they triggered a company failsafe after hours, which let them inhabit the consciousness of their 'Outies' (who they are outside work, with no memory of work). There's apparently a huge difference between Innie and Outie, raising some interesting neurological and philosophical questions. The show never gets into the weeds about this, but there's still a lot of fun in speculating about the logical and psychological consequences of the severance procedure.
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Mark discovered that his dead wife was actually alive and working at Lumon for some reason. Irving learned that he's a depressed veteran and painter, and makes contact with his Innie lover, Burt (Christopher Walken). Arguably the most disturbing reveal, though, was seeing Helly's Outie -- Helena Eagan, daughter of Lumon CEO Jame Eagan, who underwent the severance procedure as a PR stunt for the company. That obviously backfired horribly, and Season 2 is all about the ramifications of this, from the side of the employees (the Innies) and their employers (Lumon and, to some extent, the Outies).
One of the best parts of Season 2 is seeing more of these characters' Outies. We were really only used to seeing Mark on the outside in Season 1, but now we see Helly running damage control as her cold, efficient, and possibly psychopathic Outie. We see Dylan's Outie as a slightly irresponsible and flaky man who nonetheless cares deeply for his children and wife (an excellent Merritt Wever). We spend time with Irving's Outie as well, mainly through his attempts to get closer to Burt. It's truly fascinating -- we're essentially following the same characters we already know, and yet they're very different. It's almost like being introduced to a new cast in some ways, which contributes to the intended dissonance of it all. Their Innie and Outie stories intersect in very cool ways.
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There are so many details we can't reveal here (seriously, the spoiler sheet for reviewing the season is pretty meticulous), so it's difficult to explicate the plot in any cohesive way. Suffice it to say, Severance continues to throw more narrative curveballs than Sandy Koufax. You're hooked by great new developments from the very first minute. Dan Erickson and his writing team do a great job at pacing out the twists, too, so that you never exactly feel overwhelmed by all the mystery. Along the way, the direction by Ben Stiller, Sam Donovan, and Uta Briesewitz is consistently stylish, often like Wes Anderson making a sci-fi thriller, and the score and cinematography are top-notch.
Severance has always been a mysterious show with myriad small but important details. So after that three-year absence, it's strongly advised to binge the first season before diving into the second, which premieres on Jan. 17, 2025, with episodes airing weekly on Apple TV+ through March 21. The series doesn't spoon-feed the audience narrative clues and character details, and it doesn't do much in the way of a refresher course, so if you've forgotten some of the first season (even minor characters) or, God forbid, haven't watched it, just go back and do that. Season 2 will be a frustrating and unhappy experience without an understanding of Season 1.
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Unfortunately, though, Season 2 of Severance is still somewhat frustrating even with a strong memory of the first season. Not many mysteries are answered; instead, colorful questions are refracted and transformed into many more enigmatic shades, creating a weirder, richer tapestry of lore and history that is sometimes simply impenetrable. Characters experience the most patently absurd things, and then continue with their lives after a "Well, that happened" style shrug, which the audience is suggested to do as well. It's annoying, but hopefully creator Dan Erickson is setting up a bigger world with satisfying payoffs and not haphazardly leading us into some Lost-type dead end.
Do We Learn Anything New About 'Severance?' Close
There are even more goats, strange hallways and doors, doppelgängers, confounding clues, lengthy lore, and open-ended scenes than in Season 1. After the six episodes of Season 2 screened for review, we still don't know what Lumon is and what Macrodata Refinement actually does. We don't have any more information about Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette, ferociously great but underused) and her strange, cult-like history with Lumon and the Eagans.
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Likewise, we don't learn much about Mark's wife. No light is shed on the strange, constantly snowing, possibly contained town in which the show is set. We don't find out what's behind the door in Irving's disturbing black paintings. No luck with the goats, either. Yet there's a feeling that things are building and coalescing, if we only have the patience to stick with it.
What does it all mean? It's impossible to tell, which may annoy some viewers. For the most part, though, Severance successfully strings us along and leaves us wanting more. (I will go on the record, however, even if there's no actual discussion or direct evidence of this, and thus nothing to spoil -- I believe the secret of the show and Lumon is all about cloning.)
Everything Is Working All the Time Close
This is a much less Mark-centric season of Severance, as well, thanks to the increased focus on the Outies and the whole ensemble (along with much more time with the delightful Tramell Tillman as Seth Milchick, who is a standout this season). Nonetheless, Season 2 makes it clear just how important Mark is to this whole story, and Adam Scott remains truly excellent here, essentially playing two roles. On the outside, Mark was about as broken as a person can get. After all, like Freud wrote, "Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness." Mark, on the other hand, lost his love and severed himself from his work.
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The second season, though, finds him more invested in life through a different kind of work -- the labor of learning about Lumon and just what exactly is going on there, and if his wife is somehow trapped in its confines. It's like Mark is learning to find fulfillment and excitement in working towards something, all of which sounds like the ideal version of labor. It's ironic that Mark, who was severed in order to not be conscious of working at Lumon, is now spending his 'unsevered' hours trying to understand or penetrate Lumon.
So where does 'work' end and 'life' begin? To sever them implies that they're separate, but what if they're the same? When we see the Outies in this show, they're often sadder or less zealous than the Innies at Lumon. They're not on the clock, so they're technically not working -- but they kind of are. It's the work of raising children or maintaining a relationship, the work of finding a friend and sharing yourself, the work of organizing a business that's bigger than yourself, the work of being a brother or a husband. Season 2 of Severance is exquisite at showing us how just being a human is laborious. Everything is work (and if everything is work, then the severance procedure is a kind of suicide for the soul). So how's your job?
Season 2 of Severance begins streaming on Jan. 17, 2025, with episodes released each Friday on Apple TV+ until March 21. You can stream Severance through the link below:
Watch Severance
