‘Severance’ Season 2 Is Surreal, Stylish and Worth the Wait: TV Review
The characters on “Severance” — at least, the “innie” versions of them — don’t experience time like the rest of us. Innies exist only on a subterranean floor in the headquarters of Lumon Industries, a company that splits some employees’ consciousness into a work self and a not-work self. While their “outies” can socialize and sleep and live full lives, to innies, the world begins and ends with the office elevator. Once its doors open, it’s like they never even left.
That strange sensation is also what it’s like to watch “Severance” Season 2. The Apple TV+ hit has taken nearly three years to produce a follow-up, among the longest-ever gaps between chapters of a recurring series. (Though with “Squid Game” and “Stranger Things” taking similar pauses, “Severance” is hardly alone.) As the delay dragged on, exacerbated by Hollywood’s dual strikes, fans’ agita only increased. Season 1 ended with a dual reveal: Lumon “wellness counselor” Miss Casey (Dichen Lachtman) was actually Gemma, the supposedly dead wife of protagonist Mark S. (Adam Scott), who had severed himself to ease the pain of his loss; and Mark’s work crush, Helly R. (Britt Lower), was the innie of Helena Eagan, heir to the dynasty that’s controlled Lumon since its founding in 1865. That’s quite the cliffhanger to close on, and quite the span of time for the series’ spellbinding atmosphere to lose its hold on the audience. Let’s not even talk about those viewers’ ability to remember the mystery-laden plot, or any potential clues.
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But once that telltale chime rings and Mark steps into that instantly iconic, fluorescent-lit hall, those concerns quickly fade away. Despite the infinite Reddit threads outlining theories and hunting for breadcrumbs, “Severance” has always been a vibe-forward experience. The world that creator Dan Erickson and executive producer Ben Stiller, who directs half of the new season, have crafted is borne from an act of pure fantasy. (Erickson came up with the namesake concept while wishing he could simply erase the drudgery of his day job.) Whatever answers there are to the central questions of “Severance,” like what Mark and Helly’s work of “macrodata refinement” even is, they’re not going to follow basic rules of logic or reason. “Severance” lives or dies not by an airtight, detail-dense story, but by sustaining an eerie sense of unreality. Season 2 fulfills this sine qua non with deceptive ease. Real-time viewers have had their patience strained; future binge-watchers will barely notice a blip.
Critics were shown all 10 episodes of Season 2 in advance, though we’re forbidden from revealing much of what happens in them. The spoiler list approaches “Mad Men” levels of obfuscation; for example, I can’t even say how much time has elapsed between the innies’ infiltration of the real world, giving them a peek into their outies’ lives, and their return to their natural habitat. (Their supervisor, Tramell Tillman’s sinisterly suave Mr. Milchick, tells Mark it’s been five months, but the information asymmetry between severed and unsevered is all too easy to exploit.) I can promise that there’s real movement toward clarifying what Lumon’s true intentions are, and that “Severance” neither treads water nor indicates there’s no real master plan in place. We hear a lot, and eventually learn a bit, about an initiative known as “Cold Harbor” that apparently requires Mark and Gemma’s joint participation.
These developments are, however, heavily concentrated in the home stretch of the season. Until then, Season 2 is more concerned with mood, expanding on the first season’s evocative imagery, and emotion. “Severance” is as interested in the ethics of two souls — if innies have souls, an issue that comes up! — sharing a body as it is in the explanation behind it. Helly, the most instinctively skeptical and rebellious of the MDR department, is antagonistic toward her outie; her colleague Dylan (Zach Cherry), who now knows his outie is married with children, feels something closer to envy. Lower, a breakout in a cast that’s otherwise stacked with established stars, does even more excellent work playing Helly’s unease that her love interest has another woman in his life he might feel some obligation to, even though he has no memory of being with her.
That cast has only upped its wattage this time around, with everyone from Bob Balaban to Alia Shawkat to Gwendoline Christie joining the party — or rather, the Music Dance Experience. Most jarringly, the latest manager on the severed floor, Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), is a literal child; when asked why, she replies, “Because of when I was born.” The new faces are welcome, but it’s the core characters who gain added depth. At first, only Scott had the chance to deliver two distinct, sustained performances. This time, we see more of Helena Eagan at the peak of her malevolent powers, and the outie version of Irving (John Turturro) sort through the aftermath of a star-crossed affair (between his innie and Christopher Walken’s once-severed, now-retired Burt) he can’t recall.
Such grounded emotions make for a pleasantly disorienting contrast with the ever-more-outlandish world of Lumon, a quasi-cult built around religious adherence to the teachings of founder Kier Eagan. (In one of many cues that “Severance” takes place in a slightly alternate reality, Lumon’s headquarters are located in “Kier, PE.” Whatever “PE” stands for, it’s not a state we know about.) Erickson, Stiller and production designer Jeremy Hindle have a knack for building setups that riff on corporations’ uncanny, infantilizing methods of control, yet feel more oblique and mysterious than straight satire. Training videos, offsite meetings and performance reviews are the latest tropes to be reflected through Lumon’s funhouse mirror. So are broader concepts like tokenization and the whitewashing of attempted revolution into sanitized propaganda.
As long as “Severance” can deliver these bits of sublime strangeness, it’s easy to suspend one’s disbelief, as well as one’s thirst for concrete information. Whatever the destination “Severance” is aiming for, the journey dramatizes the arbitrary rules and compartmentalized nature of modern work better than anything else on air. Besides, the most pressing matter is addressed: after watching Season 2, I finally get what the deal is with the goats.
The first episode of “Severance” Season 2 will premiere on Apple TV+ on Jan. 17 at 12 a.m. PT, with remaining episodes streaming weekly on Fridays.
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