This article contains spoilers through Season 1 of Severance.
If you can remember all the way back to the very first episode of Severance, released a truly brain-wearying three years ago, it opens with a question, delivered through a tinny speaker to a woman splayed out on a conference table: “Who are you?” The question repeats, as the woman’s legs start to wiggle gently. She is, in essence, being born, albeit fully grown, dressed in neat blue separates with a practical nude heel. She doesn’t know her own name. She suspects that she might be dead and that her new reality is hell. “Am I livestock?” she asks her interviewer, when he enters the room to greet her. “Like, did you grow me as food and that’s why I have no memories?” He’s bemused by the question. “You think we grew a full human and gave you consciousness, did your nails?” The idea is so palpably absurd that he smiles.
The rest of Severance was a chilly riot, an alienating collage of surreal imagery (goats!), puzzle-box mysteries, buffoonish characters, and tensely familiar workplace dynamics. The premise of the series was that a nefarious, behemoth corporation named Lumon Industries had pioneered a way to protect its most valuable proprietary data—by placing a chip in certain employees’ brains that severed their work selves from their real identities. At the office, severed “innies” toiled away on “macrodata refinement”; at home, their “outies” enjoyed the fruits of that labor without being troubled by the work itself. For some, the bargain seemed to make sense. Mark (played by Adam Scott) chose the procedure after the death of his wife, allotting his innie eight hours a day during which he wasn’t upended by grief. But Helly (Britt Lower), the woman on the table, found her severed life to be intolerable, a monstrous form of penury. Over the course of the first season, she tried again and again to leave, to quit, even to end her own life. Each time, her outie refused. “I am a person,” her outie told her, icily, in a recorded video message. “You are not … Your resignation request is denied.”
I enjoyed the first season of Severance without quite loving it. Unlike, say, The Leftovers or The OA—thrillingly unfathomable shows awash in details that were picked apart on Reddit—Severance didn’t reward its viewers with emotional catharsis, that big swooshy mess of pure feeling. It was too cool for that, too wry. Part of the problem was the enigma of Lumon, a cultlike organization with endless parallels to something like Scientology—the obsessive reverence for its founder, Kier Eagan; the brutal rituals (the word break in break room refers to psychological violence rather than coffee and snacks); the separation of adherents from their lives and families. The show’s bizarre, almost nonsensical mythology and imagery felt at odds with the more rational questions it teased: Are innies wholly separate people? If they never leave the office and can’t choose to stop working, are they enslaved? If they never get to do the things that all humans do—sleep, laze around, lose themselves in leisure, love their families—are they still fully human?
Season 2, which had a protracted path to fruition, digs into all of these questions, making the show feel richer and less confounding, without sacrificing any of the bounteous strangeness. The Season 1 finale ended on a cliffhanger, with the innies managing to seize control of their outie selves for a moment to blow the whistle on Lumon, only to make their own tumultuous discoveries. Helly learned that she’s actually Helena Eagan, an heir to the company and, as a publicly severed employee, its most valuable asset. Mark realized that his workplace wellness counselor, Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), is actually his outie’s dead wife, Gemma. The revelations propelled the story forward while emphasizing the sinister truth of severance—when employees have no conscious memory of their workday, there’s no end to the ways in which their bosses can abuse them.
The new episodes deal immediately and gratifyingly with the fallout. They bring new characters, new revelations, and a substantial subplot based on a character whom my nonsevered brain had completely forgotten. We’re introduced to strange and novel worlds within Lumon, which Mark and Helly encounter by crawling, Alice in Wonderland–style, through too-tight tunnels. An episode that takes the innies outside, to an offsite adventure that’s rendered explicitly like a horror film, offers other mind-bendingly bizarre dimensions to the cult of Kier Eagan. There are more goats, more melon parties, more allusions to the awful things happening down on the ominously named “testing floor,” more hints about what the innies are actually doing all day at their desks.
But the show is also more preoccupied than it has previously been with what it means to separate human consciousness into different pieces. Severance drops cultural references about clones, doppelgӓngers, twins. We start to understand what “retirement” means for an innie, and the costs of being forcibly separated from their lovers, partners, and children on the outside. One character explains midway through the season how theologians are starting to think about severance—as a process that essentially divides a person into two souls. No one embodies the idea better this season than Helly, bifurcated into her ferociously brave workplace self and her repellently uncaring outie, even as the two occasionally share the same impulses. Of the other severed employees, Dylan (Zach Cherry) gets a storyline that’s deeply moving, following the twist in Season 1 that saw his innie introduced to his outie’s child, while Irving (John Turturro) continues his explorations of Lumon’s secret corridors.
These developments amount to a series that remains fascinatingly enigmatic but that accords a mite more heart and humanity to its characters. Severance is still one of the most well-crafted shows on television, painterly in aspect and intricately detailed. Every frame feels intentional. And the show is particularly adept in its cinematography this season, using lighting to profound effect: In one scene, set inside Mark’s outie’s apartment, he stands in the window, partially lit through the shades, with only part of the couch and a glowing fish tank visible to his left. The goldfish, swimming around carelessly in an artificially bright environment, kept fed and suspended and oblivious, seems almost too on the nose.
