When “Severance” premiered almost three years ago, its willingness to marry the tedium of corporate culture with heady sci-fi felt novel. It took “Office Space” and filtered it through an almost Gilliam-esque view of the world. A story that literalized the split between our office and home selves worked not only as an in-your-face metaphor about the drudgery of giving half of yourself to a capitalistic enterprise, but also because of an ever-evolving mystery of what exactly Mark (Adam Scott), Helly (Britt Lower), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and Irving (John Turturro) were actually doing in macrodata refinement. What those numbers meant and why it was necessary that they be ‘severed’ to perform such work propelled ‘Severance’s’ mystery-box approach.
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For anyone that finished season one, they’ll remember the back-half of the season took on the plotting and tone of an escape movie, as the ‘innies’ (in the parlance of the show) hatched a plan to override their ‘outies’ consciousness to let someone, anyone, know about the abuses and overall weirdness that took place on Lumon’s severed floor. For a while, too, it worked. Mark confronted his sister Dylan (Jen Tullock) and realized that Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) was pretending to be his sister’s lactation consultant, Irving discovered that was alone and consumed with painting a black hallway with a single red light at the end, and Helly figured out she was heir apparent to Lumon.
Season two picks up five months after that cliffhanger, where in the closing moments Mark S. realized that Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman) was actually Mark Scout’s believed-dead wife Gemma.The mystery of how Gemma ended up severed and her relationship to the goings-on at Lumon propels much of this new season, even if it takes a while to get there.
Instead, for at least the first four episodes, writer/creator Dan Erickson and series director Ben Stiller are content to reshuffle the deck, placing them back in the status quo of severed life.The immediate beginning of the first episode sees a disoriented Mark S. wake up on the severed floor, only to realize that his entire team has been replaced. Instead of Healy, Dylan, and Irving, he is forced to work with a new group (including Alia Shawkat and Bob Balaban in what amount to cameos). Unhappy to have lost his team, and that his budding romance with Helly has been cut short, Mark S. revolts, unable to figure out why his outie would force him back onto the floor knowing what he’s gone through, and curious what happened to Irving and Helly after they woke up outside.
Very quickly, however, the innies are reunited, with promises from Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) of reforms for the severed workers. Are those reforms actually true? It’s impossible for the innies to know, considering that they are still trapped on their single floor and forced to work on a project named Cold Harbor.
The race to finish the project and its implications for Lumon, and our quartet of workers, powers much of the narrative here, even if Erickson finds time to give various backstories to more supporting roles, including Arquette’s Corbel and Christopher Walken’s Burt. While the cast has expanded to include many more recognizable faces (which won’t be spoiled here), Erickson and Stiller are still wise to continue centralizing the core-four characters.
Further, the mystery at the heart of season two is compelling in the ways that it builds on the previous season while also taking the show in different, absurdist directions. Those who bought in to the slightly askew, almost menacing, whimsy that Lumon deployed for its workers will find plenty of weirdness here, even if nothing matches season one’s oddball ‘waffle party’ celebration. However, one does wonder if there is a legibility behind all the weirdness that is thrown out there or, instead, if Lumon’s strange goings-on are there just for window dressing.
It also takes way too long to reach these moments. While season one took its time in its first few episodes to lay out the rules of its universe before becoming more propulsive in its back half, the decision to repeat that structure in the second season feels like a slight miscalculation. The season then is almost bifurcated, with the first four or so episodes spinning their wheels before actually figuring out what the end goal is and how they want to get there. This leads to an elongated season finale (75 minutes in total whereas every other episode runs less than 50) that might be the best episode of the show but only because it feels like a half season’s worth of material crammed together.
Still, for such a long delay, “Severance” shows little signs of a true sophomore slump. Its storytelling suggests a long-term plan for where the show is going, and a willingness to grapple with the knotty questions about how all of these characters and personalities can interact and sustain.
Further, Scott, Lower, Cherry, and Turturro have settled into these roles and showcase here a complexity in differentiating between their innie and outie. While Helly’s personalities might be the most dissimilar, allowing Lower to play both menacing and bright, Scott is also able to mine the subtle differences between Mark Scout and Mark S., a difference that comes further to narrative forefront as the season progresses. A subplot about Dylan and the overlap between his two lives also allows Cherry to oscillate between sarcastic confidence and uncertainty.
Also, It’s also the best thing that Stiller has done as a director. Always an under-appreciated comedic filmmaker (outside of “Tropic Thunder”), here he helms half of the season and showcases a willingness to dig into the darker aspects of the show, especially when more is revealed about the higher-ups at Lumon. So, while season two might not reach the same absurdist heights of its first season, it is nevertheless a confident return to the ‘Severance’ world. [B+]
“Severance” Season 2 debuts on Apple TV+ on January 17.
